Wear it loud, and wear it proud!
That’s the message the creator of the iconic 8-ball jacket has for Jorge Peña, the straphanger who hit back after he was attacked on the subway for wearing the retro duds.
“He was proud to wear it, and he should have the right to,” Michael Hoban told The Post. “I’m glad he stood up for himself.”
Hoban, 79, introduced the colorful design in 1990 and saw it become a phenomenon — immortalized in rap lyrics, worn by the future French First Lady Carla Bruni, mocked on “Seinfeld,” and most recently, setting off a late-night fracas on the F train.
On Nov. 9, pals Danay Howard and Shanique Campbell laced into Peña on the train for wearing the sartorial equivalent of a floppy disk.
“You got a wack 8-ball jacket that came out in 1990,” Howard yells in a video of the clash that is nearing 8 million views on YouTube. “Get your money game up.”
The video shows Howard yanking off her stiletto boot and cracking Peña, 25, in the noggin, prompting him to uncork the slap heard round the Internet.
After being cleared of charges, Peña lamented he would have to retire his technicolor dream coat.
“I love this jacket,” he said. “But I don’t think I can wear it anymore. People will just know me because of it and what happened.”
Nonsense, said Hoban.
Hoban knows a thing or two about fisticuffs — it’s part of what inspired the 8-ball jacket.
The son of a trucker, he grew up in hardscrabble South Boston and Roxbury, Mass., where he was in a street gang called the Warriors.
“I had to learn how to fight,” Hoban said, noting the gang wore denim jackets with colorful patches. “It absolutely influenced my design. The idea of showing your colors.”
After stints in the Marines and studying aeronautical engineering, he opened a San Francisco leather shop in 1966 that catered to the likes of Elvis Presley and The Who
Two decades later, Hoban was out bowling and noticed the shoes — with the sizes on the back.
“I said, ‘That would be great on a jacket,’ ” Hoban recalled.
So he began adorning jackets with their sizes. Sales took off, and he cooked up the 8-ball concept.
“To me, it really was just an 8-ball — from pool,” he said.
But the 8-ball made headlines for all the wrong reasons. People were beaten up and even killed for the $775 jacket in the early ’90s.
“It had a connotation in the dope world . . . cocaine. But that was not my intention,” Hoban said.
Now in Santa Monica, Calif., Hoban said Peña’s attackers could learn a thing or two about fashion.
“For someone to say that something is out of style — there’s no such thing. That’s like saying chicken soup is out of style.”
WARNING: Graphic language