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The arrival of Evisu jeans and Kangol hats at London's Victoria and Albert Museum this month could have been a familiar salute to hip-hop's evolution from New York City backstreet culture to global high-street ubiquity. But "Black British Style" at the V&A is much more than that, because black culture in the U.K. didn't merely borrow from across the Atlantic; it lent a few story lines to the U.S. along the way.

The show, which runs until Jan. 16, is an exploration of the impact of homegrown black fashion on British culture over the past 50 years. Designers like Walé Adeyemi and Joe Casely-Hayford, who have succeeded on the catwalk in recent years, do receive a nod, but many of the most evocative styles on display here have no famous labels to speak of, but only a time, a place and a need to be recognized. Homemade, remade, mixed-and-matched clothes; haircuts, hats and colors that hark to hotter climes, other roots and faraway gods. They share an aesthetic that Carol Tulloch, co-curator of the exhibition, describes in the companion book, Black Style, as being formed by "Western culture; urban prowess; affinity with a particular group identity; innate pleasure in one's femininity, masculinity or sexuality; and the unrestrained desire for the ingenuity of designer clothes."

"Black British Style" celebrates immigrant populations from the Caribbean and Africa who dressed to please themselves, but provided regular vitamin shots in the backside of Britain's lackluster postwar popular culture — a progression that the V&A has opted to display thematically rather than chronologically. The first of seven areas, "England, Is the Place for Me," displays 1950s film footage of the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrant men in natty, tailored, broad-lapelled suits, women in delicately colored print frocks — and all wearing optimistic smiles. The effect of these "arrival" outfits was quickly dulled by having to bury them under winter coats and raincoats to keep out the cold and damp British weather, a chilly reception that was echoed in rampant discrimination for housing and employment. By the late 1960s, taking its lead from the black power struggle in the U.S., a mood of defiance and self-assertion was beginning to show in the clothing that black — particularly Caribbean — youth were wearing. At first, it was a "Free Angela Davis" T shirt and an afro hairstyle, but by the mid-'70s it was as likely to be a Kenyan freedom fighter's camouflage jacket, or the Lion of Judah and dreadlocks of Rastafarianism — a spiritual creed of awakening and racial pride that gloried in its African roots and was influential in urban Britain like nowhere else outside Jamaica.

Other areas of the show dwell on religion and dressing up; the final one, "New Order," examines how black British youth and designers are now borrowing from white styles like Goth or punk. Fashion's essential glue, music, gets its own corner, recalling the sharp two-tone style and political impulse of bands like the Specials, and showcasing the outfits of breakthrough artists like Soul II Soul's Jazzy B. and Mis-Teeq. Here too are 48 of the 1,000 pairs of classic trainers collected in the 1990s by Goldie, the first star of drum and bass — though they are far less revealing than the proto-bling rings on his fingers.

The most noteworthy outfits today though are the scanty and sexually provocative women's outfits from the Jamaican dance hall which arrived in British clubs in the 1980s, long before the dancehall sound hip-hopped into bed with U.S. dance music. Hip-hop's road out of the Bronx is an oft-told tale, but "Black British Style" has something to say about how it got there in the first place.

• MICHAEL BRUNTON
• A retrospective in London shows how 50 years of black style changed Britain for good