Long before street style, long before the ‘Gram and long before athleisure, there was Mr Ricky Powell. A photographer by trade and a hustler by reputation, Mr Powell was the sort of born-and-bred New Yorker who walked the streets by day and party-crashed his way into the demi-monde by night, always brandishing a Minolta point-and-shoot camera.

Sadly, Mr Powell was found dead in his apartment on 1 February this year. He was 59. He left behind a treasure trove of images from the 1980s – pictures of early rap royalty including LL Cool J, Run-DMC as well as era-defining artists such as Messrs Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. His pictures feel incredibly relevant for how we dress now, the sort of thing one expects to find on a fashion designer’s mood board – tracksuits, bucket hats and graphic tees. The difference being that Mr Powell’s subjects were style pioneers, laying down sartorial tracks for future generations. They were hip-hop’s answer to the Rat Pack.

Born Ricky Abraham Cordero on 20 November 1961, in Brooklyn, Mr Powell was raised by a single mother in Greenwich Village who worked as a schoolteacher. She often took her son along to Max’s Kansas City, where The Velvet Underground and The New York Dolls were frequently in residence. In an upcoming documentary Ricky Powell: The Individualist, the late photographer describes these nocturnal forays with his mother: “She would sit me by the jukebox as she hung out with all these kooks. I grew up quick, dude.”

He was an early chronicler of the Beastie Boys and other emerging artists on the Def Jam record label, prompting the rapper Fab Five Freddy to dub him “the Weegee of hip-hop”. In the mid-1980s he bought himself a plane ticket to join the Beasties on tour and never looked backed, appearing in the band’s breakthrough music video “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)”, taking the famous fisheye portrait of the trio that appears on the inside of their Paul’s Boutique album and being immortalised on the song “Car Thief” in the lyric “Homeboy, throw in the towel/Your girl got dicked by Ricky Powell”.

Rather than throw in the towel, we’d rather take a flip through some of his greatest hits (what he once dubbed “The Rickford Files”) and revel in this masterclass in style.

In a world where wearing a Gucci or Rick Owens tracksuit to Sunday brunch is chic, it’s hard to remember that, in the early 1980s, gym clothes stayed in the gym and tailoring was worn on the street. In the mid-1980s, though, the influential fashion stylings of Jam Master Jay, Mr Darryl McDaniels and Mr Joseph Simmons – aka Run-DMC – instigated a reinterpretation of tracksuits from athletic apparel to prestige streetwear. Right now, everything about the group responsible for the seminal ode to box-fresh kick, “My Adidas”, feels, well, box-fresh. The clean monochromatic look of a retro adidas tracksuit, the black and white adidas Superstars favoured by Mr Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and their assortment of next-level headgear – Stetsons, bucket hats, Kangols, fedoras and porkpies.

Just as the cover of Abbey Road provides a glimpse of Mr Tommy Nutter’s tailoring at its best, this image of the Beastie Boys, shot near the Charles Street playground in the West Village, is a moment when the elements that would give birth to the Supreme/Off-White/Aimé Leon Dore/Noah industrial complex are coming together. There’s a lot going on here style-wise. There’s punk, skate, hip-hop and even some normcore happening. Line leader “King Ad Rock” (Mr Adam Horovitz) is wearing a madras shirt, turned up selvedge denim and adidas kicks presaging a generation of suburban normcore dressing. But it is “Mike D” (Mr Mike Diamond) who steals the show in his clean, white Fila logo T-shirt. For 1986, this was a bold statement as the only fashion tees one could purchase in New York City back then were a series of bootleg Chanels that street peddlers sold alongside “I Love New York” and Ghostbusters swag. Fila also pops here because it is not your typical basketball brand, rather one favoured by iconic 1970s tennis star Mr Björn Borg. The take-away here is: keep it simple; one piece of logo-wear goes a long way.

One regrettable side effect of the shift from an analogue to a digital world is that there are less parties. In the 1980s, there was no performance marketing or paid social or SEM of LinkedIn, so if you wanted to promote your latest art exhibition, novel, movie or fashion collection, you needed to throw a party or an opening or a premiere. The result is people had more invitations and more opportunities to dress up. Mr Keith Haring, who started his career as a kind of Banksy painting graffiti-inspired images of break dancers and glowing babies on blank subway ad spaces, essentially had two lanes of dressing – T-shirt or creative black-tie. Here, Mr Haring effortlessly pairs a classic bow tie with a shimmering shawl-collared dinner jacket that wouldn’t look out of place in an Etro lookbook. Mr Warhol, who like Mr Haring came from a small town in Pennsylvania to find fame and fortune in the big city, takes a more low-key approach with a rollneck and dark suit.

It’s 1990, and Mr Laurence Fishburne has yet to become Morpheus or any of the other career-defining bad asses that we dig him for today. At this point in time, he’s working a steady gig as Cowboy Curtis in Pee-wee’s Playhouse and hanging out on St Mark’s Place in the East Village, where Mr Powell took this picture. Here, he’s wearing a chambray shirt which has the markings of a local union on the back. Chambray is always a good idea because its origins as a workwear fabric bestow a rugged yet humble handsomeness of its wearer.

Like his label mates Run-DMC, Mr James Todd Smith, better known by his rap sobriquet of LL Cool J, was also an early pioneer of the tracksuit as eveningwear. But what really pops in the picture is the louche insouciance of that chunky gold chain around his neck. Not everyone can handle the stylistic high dive of red bucket hat, red tracksuit and gold chain, but Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga and Tom Wood offer some au courant options for those wanting to add some vintage hip-hop glamour to their look. (Fun fact: LL Cool J stands for Ladies Love Cool James.)

Mr Powell is probably best known for photographing East Coast rappers, but here he captures one of the seminal figures of the West Coast sound, Eazy-E, a founding member of NWA. There’s something very on-point about the bold stripes of his long-sleeved polo, reminiscent of some recent pieces we’ve seen from Maison Margiela and LOEWE. The Chicago White Sox ballcap is interesting, too. Even though he is supposedly a LA Dodgers fan, Eazy-E, along with several other West Coast rappers, favoured the retro gothic script of the Sox cap. Some students of the period have suggested that “gangster rappers” liked the black, white and silver colourway of the Sox logo because it allowed them to stay neutral and not wear the blue of the Crips or the red of the Bloods.

The concept of T-shirt as a work of art, let alone a fashion item, might have seemed far-fetched when Mr Powell took this photo of artist Mr Basquiat wearing a tee featuring a graphic by his fellow artist Mr Haring. Prior to this moment, T-shirts were a rock concert souvenir or a commodity, sold in three-packs. Mr Basquiat was a person with a bravura and unique personal style both on and off the canvas. Seeing him in Mr Haring’s graphics is the beginning of a path that leads to Mr Riccardo Tisci’s Rottweiler tees of the last decade as well as fashion designers and artists collaborating on tees. All of this contributes to the fetishisation of this base layer into a three-figure collectable, but everyone needs a conversation starter, so it might as well be their T-shirt. If ever there was a reminder of how fleeting this moment in time was, it is this image taken back when West Broadway in Soho was gallery street not a shopping street. Two years after this photo was taken, Mr Basquiat died of a drug overdose. Mr Haring died from Aids complications in 1990.