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Tag: in our own right

  • An Ode to the Jersey Dress, the 2000s Hip-Hop Trend That Changed Everything

    An Ode to the Jersey Dress, the 2000s Hip-Hop Trend That Changed Everything

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    YouTube users Victoria Monét, Dmitry Fedkiv; Getty | Mark Mainz, Theo Wargo
    YouTube users Victoria Monét, Dmitry Fedkiv; Getty | Mark Mainz, Theo Wargo

    A full embrace of impracticality is one of the hallmarks of 2000s fashion. Jeans were cut low past the pubic bone with no regard or support for the stomachs above them. Men’s shorts were oversize and worn in the most inconvenient location: just underneath the butt, secured with a belt desperately clinging to thighs with every swaggered stride. They stopped just above the ankles — pants with an identity crisis. Baby T-shirt sleeves burrowed deep into your armpit, greedy, apparently, for sweat stains. Not a drop of functionality was to be found in these garments. But they weren’t meant to make sense — the aesthetic is what folks were after. And this rang true for one of the decade’s most recognizable looks: the jersey dress.

    The trend, as a 2003 New York Times article tells it, was birthed from a place of necessity. For capitalists, that is. At the time, Mitchell & Ness, a sports goods brand, was enjoying a surge in popularity from a new market comprising Black and Latine city dwellers. Since the mid-’80s, the brand had been creating replicas of vintage jerseys, aka throwbacks. As the brand’s owner at the time, Peter Capolino, told Fortune in 2003, “I figured my market was 35-to-75-year-old conservative, college-educated, suburban white men.” But in 1998, after Outkast’s Big Boi was styled in a throwback Dale Murphy (Atlanta Braves) jersey for the duo’s “Skew It on the Bar-B” music video, it quickly became clear that his target market was far Blacker and swaggier.

    The most powerful thing about the jersey dress is that it celebrated a very particular brand of femininity: one that appropriated parts of a male-dominated culture and remixed it in its own image.

    But remember, it was the 2000s, a time when an oversize silhouette was the preferred look. The only fitted thing you were wearing was a baseball cap. These new customers were buying jerseys in the largest sizes available. The mad grab for size-XL-and-up jerseys left Mitchell & Ness with a bunch of smaller styles sitting in the warehouse. So, as the brand reps tell it, they decided to turn the extra stock into dresses, at the behest of the company’s then-President Reuben Harley. Harley gave one of the dresses to R&B singer Faith Evans, who wore the piece on an episode of BET’s “106 & Park” at the top of the aughts. The rest is history.

    It seemed as if jersey dresses were everywhere. Mariah Carey took the stage at the 2003 NBA All Stars game in two jersey dresses. The first was a throwback Chicago Bulls piece with Michael Jordan’s number 23. It stopped well above her knees, the sides boasting a lace-up detail to make it even more alluring. The other look, a Michael Jordan Washington Wizards jersey, had a low neckline and reached the floor, grasping every curve on the way down. That same weekend, rapper Eve was spied out and about wearing another Michael Jordan throwback dress — this one for the Chicago Bulls — paired with the It shoe of the time: high-heeled Timbs.

    Styled by June Ambrose, R&B singer Mya starred in the 2000s “Best of Me (Remix)” music video matching JAY-Z in a powder-blue North Carolina Tar Heels Jersey, arguably the most memorable of the decade. It bore the number 23, the one Jordan wore when he played for the team in college. She recently wore a blinged-out re-creation of it in a photo shoot with Alexis Photography in June 2023, 23 years after it made hip-hop history.

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    The jersey dress is at once tomboyish and unapologetically feminine. It was made to be accessorized, preferably with large gold hoops, rimless sunglasses with colored lenses, stacks of necklaces, and sneakers you wouldn’t dream of playing any sport in. Apropos, since the dresses, despite their obvious link to athletic teams, were decidedly impractical for any strenuous physical activity other than dancing in the club. The frivolity was the main appeal. That’s what made them so cute. They were cut to the feminine figure: pinched at the waistline, fitted enough to hug the curves, almost always stopping at a length that would allow for a generous view of the wearer’s thigh.

    You didn’t need to know the team or the player in order to wear them. If you did, it was a bonus. You were never questioned about the player’s stats or abilities. You were never shamed for not knowing any of those things. In the 2000s, wearing a T-shirt with a band whose songs you couldn’t name was a faux pas. But wearing a jersey with the name of a player you couldn’t identify in a lineup? Acceptable. Celebrated, even. Because the look was the point — not the actual engagement with sports culture.

    And with this, every girl with an ear for hip-hop from the Bronx, NY, to Inglewood, CA, embraced the piece. We were all running around in Jordan 1s, looking like Fabolous’s love interest in the music video for “Trade It All.” Whether clueless about sports or not, girls across the States were embracing the aesthetic, and soon, other clothiers like South Pole and FUBU were creating versions of the piece with their own branding.

    The impact of the jersey dress on 2000s style is generation-defining. It’s now a favorite of Gen Zers at parties honoring the decade. R&B singer Victoria Monét’s music video for “On My Mama” is an ode to early-aughts hip-hop culture and could not be complete without the fashion staple. In one scene, she wears a baby-blue jersey dress with lace-up sides, recalling Mya’s iconic “Best of Me (Remix)” look.

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    The most powerful thing about the jersey dress is that it celebrated a very particular brand of femininity: one that appropriated parts of a male-dominated culture and remixed it in its own image. It wasn’t just sports culture; hip-hop as well was decidedly male. And the prominent fashion trends centered on menswear. Men still make up the majority in the space today, but we are enjoying a dominance of female emcees like Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, City Girls, and Nicki Minaj. But in the early 2000s, there was a mere handful of highly visible women rappers, and the jersey dress allowed them to participate in the culture at an entry point that was more suited to feminine sensibilities.

    It allowed girls who didn’t give a damn about a ball or the men wielding them to indulge in a fantasy far more accessible and, depending on who you ask, fun.

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    Jihan Forbes

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  • “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” Is an Enduring Love Letter to Hip-Hop and Black Women

    “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” Is an Enduring Love Letter to Hip-Hop and Black Women

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    In the beginning, there was Ms. Lauryn Hill.

    In 1992, she emerged as a phenom as the first lady of The Fugees. Composed of Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Pras Michel, the group solidified themselves as a hip-hop powerhouse before their controversial split in 1997. Instead of crumbling, though, Hill rose even higher with her debut solo album, 1998’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” The album — which she’s primarily credited with writing, producing, and arranging — quickly cemented Hill’s lasting impact in hip-hop.

    “Miseducation” not only provided a distinct onset of timeless lessons taken from the informal school of Ms. Hill, but it also was her audible love letter to hip-hop, Black women, and the communal Black experience.

    “Yo hip-hop, started out in the heart / Now everybody tryin’ to chart,” Hill rapped on “Superstar.” As she spoke to the need of maintaining one’s self amid fame to govern true artistic integrity, Hill cleverly used her past experience in the industry to discuss issues she’s faced as a Black woman in hip-hop, both as a praised superstar and a potential target.

    Now, as the album marks its 25th anniversary alongside hip-hop turning 50, we’re revisiting what makes it such a fundamental part of hip-hop history — and its enduring life lessons straight from Hill herself. In spite of the backlash she’s received for her crowning glory over the years (including accusations of musical theft and improper accreditation), the New Jersey native persevered nonetheless — declaring in her 2018 Medium essay that she is “the [sole] architect of [her] creative expression.”

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    “With ‘The Miseducation,’ there was no precedent. I was, for the most part, free to explore, experiment and express,” Hill, now 48 and a mother of six, explained to Rolling Stone in January 2021. “After ‘The Miseducation,’ there were scores of tentacled obstructionists, politics, repressing agendas, unrealistic expectations, and saboteurs EVERYWHERE. People had included me in their own narratives of THEIR successes as it pertained to my album, and if this contradicted my experience, I was considered an enemy.” In the age of cancel culture, it’s something that she and fellow women rappers continue to deal with.

    Then and now, “Miseducation” was about addressing community as a testament of relatability. On “Doo Wop (That Thing),” she states, “Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem / Baby girl, respect is just a minimum / N****s f*cked up and you still defending ’em / Now, Lauryn is only human / Don’t think I haven’t been through the same predicament.” The breakout single garnered commercial success with two Grammy wins for best R&B song and best female R&B vocal performance as Hill sermonized why we need to be cautious about how we approach internal and external relationships with the famous proverb, “How you gon’ win when you ain’t right within?”

    One walked so the other could run.

    Meanwhile, Hill’s revered ballad “To Zion” offered a conscious ode to impending motherhood. “Unsure of what the balance held / I touched my belly overwhelmed / By what I had been chosen to perform . . . But everybody told me to be smart / ‘Look at your career,’ they said / ‘Lauryn, baby use your head’ / But instead I chose to use my heart,” she sang to her then-unborn son Zion.

    Cardi B faced similar condemnation in 2018 when she revealed she was pregnant with her daughter, Kulture. But instead of folding under pressure, the Bronx-bred emcee tweeted, “I started winning when the whole world was doubting on me! think imma lose with my little baby counting on me?” It seemed to piggyback off Hill’s explanation of “To Zion.”

    As Hill put it in her own Medium essay: “The song To Zion gave encouragement to women during challenging pregnancies. There are children who were given a chance at life because their Mothers experienced moral and emotional support through this song.”

    It’s no coincidence that after Hill first won best rap album with The Fugees at the 1997 Grammys and swept at the 1999 ceremony — taking home five of 10 nominations, which included album of the year, best R&B album, and best new artist — Cardi became the first woman emcee to win best rap album as a solo artist in 2019 with her debut LP, “Invasion of Privacy.” One walked so the other could run.

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    Hill not only paved a way for women rappers to be all-encompassing, but she also created what is controversially one of the best diss tracks in hip-hop history. With “Lost Ones,” she apparently addressed the affair and severed personal relationship she had with Fugees band member Jean. She chose violence straight out of the gate, rapping on her LP’s second track, “It’s funny how money change a situation / Miscommunication lead to complication / My emancipation don’t fit your equation . . . Some wan’ play young Lauryn like she dumb / But remember not a game new under the sun / Everything you did has already been done.”

    Danyel Smith, former editor in chief of Vibe and host of the podcast “Black Girl Songbook,” noted on her “The Diss-Education of Lauryn Hill” episode from March 2021, “While there’s so much going on on ‘Lost Ones,’ it’s exquisitely focused and refined. Diss records are called diss records because one rapper is being disrespectful of another. ‘Lost Ones’ wins because Lauryn is being respectfully disrespectful.” Smith also broke down the track bar for bar, unpacking everything from Hill’s subtle confrontation of her ex’s insecurities, manipulation, and hypocrisy to gaslighting, the self-awareness of her infancy in the game, and the threat of karma.

    After the hostile outpouring of emotions on “Lost Ones,” the track “I Used to Love Him” featuring Mary J. Blige welcomed that communal embrace of sisterhood and pain. On the track, Hill and Blige both analyze their transgressions from the toxic aftermath of relationships as they seek and accept spiritual repentance. “But my heart is gold, see, I took back my soul / And totally let my creator control / The life which was his, the life which was his to begin with,” they conjointly sing. The collaboration remains underrated in the grander conversation of hip-hop and R&B duets, even though this is one of the more R&B-leaning records on the album. But in true Hill fashion, she has no problem being an outlier among the crowd.

    Hill truly offered Black women a belief in self.

    During a time when the “sexualization of the Black female body was the standard,” as Hill wrote for Medium, she stood for something different. As a dark-skinned, innately talented, beautiful, cognizant woman with swag who could masterfully articulate the complexities of being such, Hill combated the boys’ club rhetoric by being “a breath of fresh air, a hope and — unrealistically — a solution to what was wrong with hip-hop and its representation of women at the time,” author Joan Morgan wrote in “She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” Hill truly offered Black women a belief in self and intimate sensuality without the ascendant hypersexualization.

    And she allowed that complexity to shine through in a combination of sound and lyricism. My favorite aspect about “Miseducation” is that it’s a perfect marriage of hip-hop and R&B. It makes sense for fans of either genre to be torn about how to categorize the album. Hill’s bars are poetic and intentional, but she also showcases her softer side with romantic hymns.

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    “Tell Him,” a song of yearning, finds Hill reprising biblical references to express the depths of her love — “Let me be patient, let me be kind . . . ‘Cause love is not boastful / Oooh and love is not loud.” Then you have “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” one of those covers that feels so much like a precursor as Hill puts her artistic twang on the Frankie Valli original. Of course, there’s “Ex-Factor,” which taught the masses the word “reciprocity” and gave a succinct definition in the opening line: “It could all be so simple / But you’d rather make it hard.” “Miseducation” does an immediate 180 as a gentle Hill analyzes shattering heartbreak and questions shortcomings on the track: “Is this just a silly game / That forces you to act this way? / Forces you to scream my name / Then pretend that you can’t stay.” Despite Jean being the unnamed muse of a solid portion of the LP, the song emotes a much-needed catharsis on Hill’s part.

    And finally, the D’Angelo-assisted offering “Nothing Even Matters” is arguably one of the few perfect love songs to ever exist, alongside modern-day records like H.E.R. and Daniel Caesar’s “Best Part.” Sandwiched in between the raw storytelling on “Every Ghetto, Every City” and the blaring speaking-in-tongues philosophy on “Everything Is Everything,” this ballad put every other narrative on pause and transported listeners into another dimension. It was as though Hill needed a reminder of what healthy love was — personified, concrete, and tangible.

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    When Hill recorded her unofficial live sophomore album, “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” she shared, “I’m just retired from the fantasy part,” referring to the “public illusion” that “held [her] hostage” during the marvel of “Miseducation.” While the debut may be her freedom cry, we’re thankful the masterpiece exists.

    In February 2021, “Miseducation” earned its well-deserved diamond certification from the RIAA, and it remains a staple among music lovers. This goes to show that if you’re going to have one studio album quantify your entire musical legacy, let it be something like Hill’s debut.

    “Miseducation” is her alpha and omega — a body of work so impactful that it continues to inspire generations. Where would we be as a culture without the genius, vulnerability, and passion displayed on “Miseducation”? It’s a sonic work of innovation; a heartfelt tale of womanhood; a detailed, earnest journey of adulthood; and a clever outpouring so majestic that one album was just enough. And when it’s all said and done, it’ll forever stand the test of time. Amen.

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    Mya Abraham

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  • We Love Charity and Dotun’s “Bachelorette” Fairy Tale — and Got the Scoop on Their Nigerian Wedding

    We Love Charity and Dotun’s “Bachelorette” Fairy Tale — and Got the Scoop on Their Nigerian Wedding

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    It’s been a long, long time coming. But when Dotun Olubeko dropped on a knee to propose to Charity Lawson (adorably at her height level), I smiled. Then I cried. Then I texted my mom and friends I knew who were watching “The Bachelorette” (and those who stopped watching the franchise because they gave up on seeing a Black love story seasons ago). And then I rejoiced with Black Twitter, finding our way together to celebrate this historic moment in Bachelor history.

    I’ve been a Bachelor franchise viewer for about a decade, and although I have seen mixed-race women who look like me on the journey to find their partners, inclusive representation was lacking. The time for a beautiful, melanated Black couple — a gorgeous lead in Lawson and every bit the prince charming in Olubeko — has been way overdue. My joy stemmed from young people with skin as richly dark and lovely as my mother’s — and all the oft-ignored-by-the-mainstream incredible women who raised me — taking center stage. It’s needed, it’s welcome, and we must not wait another 25 years to see it again.

    Lawson and Olubeko spoke with POPSUGAR fresh off their engagement reveal, broadcasted to millions Monday night on ABC — and the love they’re feeling from fans is immense. “It’s been amazing to watch,” Olubeko shares. “We went into this leading with our hearts, just to find our person. And for this to end up being what it is, it’s an honor. And we respect the position so much, and we want to further that conversation and make sure that people understand what Black love can look like.”

    “We want to further that conversation.”

    For this Black love story, Black Twitter is already dialed in for the main event: a bustling, vibrant Nigerian wedding. “Whether I like it, there’s no avoiding it. My mom wants that to happen, like, yesterday,” Olubeko says, laughing; he comes from a vibrant, welcoming Nigerian American family. Although the couple have plans to simply do life together, they assure two weddings will take place when the timing is right. “We’re just going to take the next year or two to continue to enjoy each other’s company and live life, because it’s been so crazy for the past year. But we’re excited for the opportunity to have this Nigerian wedding, and likely that’s going to happen along with probably a more intimate one because we are meaningful people. So we want to have one that’s meaningful. But also a fun one, a fun one that’s vibrant and classic Nigerian fashion.”

    Although there will be no wedding bells in the near future, Lawson is already excited to immerse herself in the richness of Nigerian culture. “I’m teaching her Yoruba,” Olubeko shares. And of course, Lawson is here for all of the culture’s delicious food. Rice and jollof for the win, y’all.

    That authenticity from both Olubeko and Lawson made it such a fun ride watching the two find love in a hopeless place: reality TV. For Lawson, authenticity was essential, and she remained true to herself throughout the entire televised, highly scrutinized journey. “I knew for myself, if I was to be easily molded or swayed, I was going to leave or walk away from here probably not having the outcome that I truly wanted, and so it was an active thing for me,” Lawson says. “But also not something that I had to think about. I didn’t want to think about being a certain way. I just was.”

    To stay anchored in simply being Charity, faith and culture led the way. “I did bring my journals and devotions and my Bible,” Lawson shares. “Just being a woman of faith, that was helpful for me to be anchored in.”

    Her music, meanwhile, gave her the space to cut up. “The running joke for the season, the theme of the season, was ‘Wipe Me Down,’” she says, laughing, referencing the Boosie Badazz classic. “I always listened to that before a rose ceremony. Or just Beyoncé, things like that that really just allowed me to feel empowered in the moment or have a moment where I could just feel more at peace or at home and connected.”

    “After encountering something so powerful, now the approach and how we view things is totally different.”

    As Lawson starts this exciting chapter of her life — a new man and an upcoming run on “Dancing With the Stars” — she’s leaning on the works of one of our greatest late elders. “After filming, I started reading a book by bell hooks, which is ‘All About Love,’” Lawson says. “And that just allowed me to really have this overwhelming transformative outlook on what love is and how we come to know what love is. And so we often talk about it, too. After encountering something so powerful, now the approach and how we view things is totally different.”

    It’s a tale as old as the Bachelor franchise: Lawson and Olubeko can finally share their love off camera. I’m excited to see the fun shenanigans of “Bachelor in Paradise” ensue and for “The Golden Bachelor” Gerry Turner to find his golden match. (My boomer mom is especially interested in that one!) And I’m here for Lawson’s runner-up, Joey Graziadei, to search for his OTP on the next season of “The Bachelor.” It’ll be business as usual for my regular rotation of Bachelor Nation offerings. But the Charity and Dotun era will have my heart for years to come.

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    Jada Gomez

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  • In Our Shoes: How Women of Color Are Stylizing a More Liberated Future

    In Our Shoes: How Women of Color Are Stylizing a More Liberated Future

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    Women of color have long forged pathways of defiance and liberation through a legacy of serving lewks. Fashion — even at the highest and most superficial echelons — is inherently political and, when executed with the intention, culturally transformative.

    We witnessed this viscerally throughout the 20th century, with Black women dressing in their Sunday best to juxtapose the ignorant characterization of Black people as being unclean, impoverished, and uneducated. This paradox was on full display during moments of protest that turned violent. Civil rights strategists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Dr. Dorothy Height understood that the stark visuals of seeing well-dressed Black women in skirts and pantyhose brutally beaten with water hoses and police canines would be a powerful alarm for the American psyche. They were right. These deliberate sartorial choices laid the foundation for enticing white America’s attention, sympathy, and ultimately support to condemn the oppressive state of Jim Crow.

    “Then and now, women of color have used threads to fashion their resistance.”

    Nearly 60 years later, women of color have assumed these same tactics — creating intentional moments of discomfort and disruption to direct attention to the realities of ongoing injustice.

    There is a remarkable link between some of the most significant Black and Brown social justice movements, cultural shifts, and empowerment campaigns, and the aesthetic choices that were adopted. Fashion in itself is a tool of disruption — articulating taste, cultural agency, and, at times, political dissonance. Our style serves as a universal language. Then and now, women of color have used threads to fashion their resistance amidst invisibility, intolerability, and injustice.

    Back in 2019, we witnessed “The Squad” walk through the halls of Congress dressed in all white for President Trump’s State of the Union. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib deliberately chose stark white ensembles as a reference to the suffragist movement of the 1920s. But there was something acutely powerful seeing Black and Brown women stylized in all-white power suits and dresses, in a sea of mostly white men — it called out the lack of representation in Congress and referenced how women of color were not invited to participate in the suffragist movement or subsequent women’s movements. Even in the halls of Congress, women of color are forced to contend with America’s devaluing of their existence. But what AOC and her squad offered was a style guide for ongoing disruption.

    Now, a few years later — as we engage in discourse around bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and the lack of protection of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people — women across the country continue to make bold statements with their attire: confronting societal expectations, demanding acknowledgement of our existence, and challenging practices of systemic equity.

    This year, the stylization of cultural dissonance is taking place from the halls of Congress to the runways of New York Fashion Week to the streets of our hometowns. Back in May, in response to the questionable choice to honor Karl Lagerfeld (a known misogynist with harmful ideals of beauty) at the Met Gala, a few guests offered bold rebuttals. Actresses Viola Davis and Quannah Chasinghorse both chose to wear pink gowns. According to fashion writer Patrick Mauriès’s book “The World According to Karl,” Lagerfeld once said, “Think pink. But don’t wear it.” Davis’s extravagant, feathered, hot pink dress seemed to be a literal and figurative shading of the designer, and she called on a decades-long tradition of Black women asserting their power and refashioning ideas of beauty through the natural state of our hair.

    Chasinghorse sported a more subtle pink shade than Davis, choosing a subdued powder pink dress. But like Davis, she styled her hair and makeup with nods to her heritage, inspired by her Han and Lakota Indigenous traditions. The look challenged the often siloed and silenced visibility of Indigenous women that has instigated the Missing and Murdered and Indigenous Women movement, which seeks to elevate the staggering statistics of Indigenous women who are silently abused and killed. These stylized choices offered autonomy and agency in spaces that have been reluctant, if not refused, to offer such power to women of color. In a cultural arena historically unconcerned with our stories, Chasinghorse and Davis unapologetically took up space.

    If there is anything that the rise of the Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements have taught us in the past few years, it is that “fear of the other,” and protection of power predicated on dehumanization, is at the core of the American social fabric; woven together by policy, social politics, and language. Perhaps there is power in examining and renegotiating the ways in which we have literally and figuratively fashioned our national paradigms, cultural practices, and misguided policies to disenfranchise, disempower, and disregard the voices and humanity of women of color and the communities they represent.

    “I challenge us to assume a new aesthetic of equity, one that becomes a uniform we all try on this year.”

    We can all agree that the summer of 2023 hasn’t just been one of the hottest recorded in the Earth’s history, but one of the most politically and thus socially hellish. We watched the undermining of our humanity from all sides. The Supreme Court has voted to deconstruct and, in some cases, abolish abortion rights, affirmative action, and debt relief, transforming a generation and deepening the already painful wounds of entrenched racial oppression. It was particularly demoralizing to watch affirmative action get overturned a few days before we celebrated the most recent federal holiday, Juneteenth. While we prepared to honor a public declaration of freedom for Black America and thus, America, we witnessed the ongoing contradiction of the American dream.

    As I prepared for my weekend celebrations in Austin, TX, I found myself oscillating between jubilee, joy, and jadedness. I’d been invited to speak at a Juneteenth Summit at the Lyndon B. Johnson School at the University of Texas in partnership with the Emancipator to discuss what Black freedom means today. Aesthetics, like writing, has always been a way to express my emotional state and my current posture in the world, and I knew my outfit choice would need to reflect my state of anger. While the idea of Juneteenth evokes celebration, I was overcome with righteous indignation, and thus chose to select an all-black ensemble that articulated militancy and rage. I put on a somewhat risqué black blazer with peek-a-boo moments throughout and black cargo pants. The monochromatic look was interrupted only by the intentional color accents of a red lip (Mac’s “Feel So Good” matte, of course) and lace-up green heels — my not-so-subtle nod to Black liberation (or Pan African flag) colors. And adorning my blazer were lapel pins highlighting the faces of some of my inspirations: James Baldwin and Rosa Parks.

    Image source: Alyssa Vidales

    Of course, I stood out from the suits and Austin business casual attire that filled the auditorium. It called into question the politics of appropriateness in an academic institution and a grand hall named after Lyndon B. Johnson. There was a cyclical operation at play that day. My outfit articulated my emotional state and stylized my intellectual posture before I ever spoke a word on stage; simultaneously, I felt emboldened to speak unfiltered, unapologetic, and unabashed.

    With the help of the tasseled blazer and vintage lapel pins, I fashioned these words to the audience: “We are less than three years removed from the so-called racial reckoning of 2020, and yet companies and institutions are saying, ‘I thought we already did that work? We wrote that check, I did that one march, we did that workshop.’ But we are talking about 400 plus years of harm; 400 plus years of creating systems that were predicated on the understanding of who would be valued as human and who would not. So, I think it’s going to take a bit longer than three years, or even sixty years, and it’s going to take a bit more than policy. It’s going to take sustained investment and a pervasive shift in our cultural paradigm.”

    And, perhaps, it will take stylizing new tactics of resistance. So, my challenge to us all is to reflect on these and other stories of resistance to inspire, inform, and set intentions for the ways we can continue to disrupt spaces and agitate the system. I challenge us to assume a new aesthetic of equity, one that becomes a uniform we all try on this year.

    Virginia Cumberbatch is racial justice educator, writer, creative activist, and the CEO/Co-Founder of Rosa Rebellion, a production company for creative activism by and for women of color. She splits her time between her hometown of Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York. When she’s not elevating the voices of women of color, you can catch her styling outfits with her latest vintage finds and the designer shoes she found on sale at Nordstrom Rack. She’s a graduate of Williams College and The University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School and the author of “As We Saw It: The Story of Integration at UT.”

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    Virginia Cumberbatch

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  • How Plant Kween Combines Fashion With Her Love of Horticulture

    How Plant Kween Combines Fashion With Her Love of Horticulture

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    When it comes to the term “influencer,” first thoughts usually surround fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. You rarely hear of the success of other categories, but Christopher Griffin is changing that narrative. Griffin, AKA Plant Kween, is an Brooklyn-based Black, queer, non-binary influencer and the author of “You Grow, Gurl!”. She is taking over the fashion and holistic spaces, sharing her never-ending love for nature, self-care tips, and building community.

    “As I’ve dived into the world of horticulture and explored the rich diversity of lushness that exists [on the planet], it has definitely motivated me to be more playful and expansive with how I want to show up in the world.”

    While her popular Instagram account is only seven years old, her passion for plants runs deep. It all started when she was growing up, spending time with her grandmother, who she describes as the original plant queen. “When I was about six years old, my grandmother and I would take day trips out to her favorite nurseries in Philadelphia,” Griffin tells POPSUGAR. “I became fascinated by the idea that we could take a small piece of the jungle home with us, nourish it, and watch it grow. Whenever I was visiting her green oasis of a home, she’d remind me to water the green gurls I’d picked out. She was nurturing the nurturer she saw in me.”

    Nearly half a million followers later, Plant Kween is one of our generation’s most respected plant connoisseurs and continues to spread joy through a recent collaboration with distinguished hospitality brand Kimpton Hotels of IHG Hotels & Resorts’ luxury & lifestyle portfolio. For their new Kimpton Plant Pals program that allows guests to have a plant directly delivered to their rooms during stays, she’s carefully curated a unique selection of regionally sourced plants for all to enjoy. “Some of the options include a prickly pear cactus in San Francisco, English Ivy at European Kimpton locations and pothos in the Asia Pacific region,” Griffin says. “This program emphasizes plants native to each hotel’s region, with a subtle educational component. It allows folks a moment to dive into what eco-conscious gardening could look like for them, while enjoying the lushness in their hotel room.”

    Griffin also makes the connection between plants and fashion, sharing that Mother Nature is the best style muse. “Plants are wondrous, resilient, beautiful and inspiring green lil creatures,” she says. “As I’ve dived into the world of horticulture and explored the rich diversity of lushness that exists [on the planet], it has definitely motivated me to be more playful and expansive with how I want to show up in the world.”

    On her journey to being the next “Black queer non-binary David Attenborough” as she puts it, Griffin still manages to make time for what’s even more important than being a plant parent — herself. Below, she gives us a peek into her daily schedule, collaborating with Kimpton, and the future of Plant Kween.

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    Naomi Parris

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