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  • Unapologetic and Never Underdressed: Black Women’s Power on and Off the Runways at NYFW

    Unapologetic and Never Underdressed: Black Women’s Power on and Off the Runways at NYFW

    Courtesy of Virginia Cumberbatch
    Courtesy of Virginia Cumberbatch

    In the last few years, we’ve witnessed a renewed urgency and energy around the pursuit of racial equity. And as a racial justice educator and culture writer, I’ve been curious if these commitments to a more just future have manifested as visceral investments — shaping new conversations, elevating new voices, and empowering new agency to shape culture. Three years removed from the impetus of this cultural reckoning (namely, the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd), I’ve questioned whether the headlines, tweets, black boxes on Instagram, and financial pledges were just performative action, and if America’s short attention span would once again undermine the pursuit of a more inclusive and equitable future.

    Throughout American history, some of the most effective barometers of our political posture have been spaces of cultural consequences, and the world of fashion serves as one of those cultural spaces. Indeed, at the intersection of fashion, politics, and culture has always been the Black experience.

    So my curiosity led me to my first New York Fashion Week experience. In conversation with Black scholars, artists, writers, and designers, I attempted to survey the runways and walkways of New York for signs of a new dress code to propel our ongoing protests for our humanity, stories, and style to matter.

    My New York Fashion Week started a week early in the galleries of some of New York’s most inspired museums. After an interview with the founder of The Race and Fashion Database, Kimberly Jenkins, I was invited to a private tour she was hosting of the “Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party” exhibit at the Poster House museum. And I was able to experience one of the most brilliant capturings of the power of design, storytelling, and aesthetics to transform culture.

    “I witnessed a reclamation of roots, ancestry, and origins.”

    This beautifully curated exhibit by Es-pranza Humphrey surveys the incredible archives of posters and collateral materials of the Black Panther Party and its decades-long political revolution through design. The combination of a black beret, a black leather jacket, pants, boots, and exposed weapons formed the military-style uniform for the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, and that look has become an enduring symbol that still articulates political dissonance and cultural determination today. The posters, meanwhile, were used to rally community around education programs, instigate political foes, and energize support for prison-release campaigns. The exhibit was a reminder of the many ways Black people, and particularly Black women, including Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, and Afeni Shakur (yes, mother of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur), had stylized their revolution.

    It was here in conversation with Humphrey and the images immortalized in the posters on display that the idea of rootedness offered the perfect prism to experience and explore New York Fashion Week. This was further confirmed during my awe-inspiring afternoon at the “Africa Fashion” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. I was surprised, yet grateful, for the exhibit’s entry point — a map documenting each African country’s year of independence from its European or Western colonizer. It was as if the curators had invited us to unapologetically bask in the evolution of African fashion, textiles, and aesthetic choices, and smirk at the Western world’s eventual adaptation and at times appropriation of Black brilliance and beauty.

    What lead curator Christine Checinska prioritized in the exhibit was in essence what Black designers, stylists, and taste-makers have known and practiced for decades in America. There is an innate awareness that the adornment of Black bodies — the act of asserting the agency to dress oneself as an expression of mood, personality, cultural practices — is political. And it is this knowledge that reinforces Black fashion as a tool for political articulation and, when appropriate, political dissonance and resistance.

    What was so thoughtfully curated at the Brooklyn Museum exhibit (which is up through Oct. 22) was also on display across the Brooklyn Bridge in several showrooms and runways at NYFW. I witnessed a reclamation of roots, ancestry, and origins with unabashed reverence and eloquence. To be clear, this wasn’t a thematic homage to be appreciated for just this season’s collection; this marked the origins of many designers’ stories and motivation for their work.

    “The Diotima designs are a rebuttal and refusal of the Euro-centric gaze.”

    This was evident in my last (and, with fear of retribution from others, favorite) show of NYFW. A friend of a friend, the talented stylist and editorial director Ronald Burton III, had passed along an invitation to attend the Diotima presentation. Rachel Scott, the brand’s founder, is a Jamaican designer who launched the line just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Her love and appreciation for the varied stories of the Black diaspora is vividly present in the literal and figurative fabric of her clothes. The Caribbean serves as her clear inspiration, but just like Africa’s revolution of fashion, it is the reference to the origins of Black presence in the Caribbean that offers a disruptive layer to the story. Her work is intricate and provocative — with seductive cutouts, backless silhouettes, and breathtaking draping of what most Americans would consider nontraditional textiles. By nature, the Diotima designs are a rebuttal and refusal of the Eurocentric gaze and the continued presence and occupation of colonization throughout the Caribbean and the Black diaspora.

    The result of her Caribbean-inspired audacity is a disruption of the fashion industry’s traditions, and the creation of a collection that can only be described as poetic, angelic, and elegant. As Jenkins, who is also a fashion scholar and professor and the former host of podcast “The Invisible Seam,” told me, designs like Diotima’s offer a necessary agency and artistic expression for melanated bodies. “Fashion is in no way frivolous. Fashion is gendered, it’s classed, it’s racialized,” Jenkins told me over a cup of coffee. “In fact, we have some moral and political stigmas that are attached to our clothing. What is often posed to us as Black people, and specifically as Black women, is how well can you work not to disrupt people’s ideology and the hierarchy. [Fashion] is far from being a neutral practice.”

    The Diotima NYFW presentation was a departure from traditional collection debuts. Instead of a seated show, the Diotima team invited everyone to a downtown art gallery where models adorned by Diotima’s latest designs sauntered around the room, sometimes posed along the white walls as if they were 4D art. The models brought to life the interplay of the fabrics — crochet and beads, cotton and linens — reflecting the conflict of the story that is a part of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and most of the Black American experience: the legacy of both slavery and pain, and our collective resilience and beauty. Scott’s artistry is an acknowledgement of that multilayered story, as well as a reclamation of the beauty and boldness of Black identity, power, and cultural autonomy.

    A few days later, after wrapping up my nearly three weeks on the East Coast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Paola Mathé, founder and creative director of the popular e-commerce brand Fanm Djanm. Originally based in Harlem, the head wrap brand continues to source its fabrics from Haiti and across the Black diaspora, but it now calls Austin, TX, home. A few minutes into our conversation, I asked the New Jersey native about her experience at NYFW as a designer. She responded emphatically, “I’m really careful not to call myself a designer. When people ask me what I do in fashion, I say I am a storyteller.”

    I found this admission to be indicative of how her line of head wraps came to be and continue to evolve. A Haitian-born creative, Mathé birthed her line out of necessity and responsibility — a necessity to make her life and hair routine more efficient and easygoing as a server at a fast-paced New York City restaurant some years after graduating college, and a responsibility to young Paola and the many Black girls with textured, coiled hair whose locks and tresses had been policed, politicized, and permed their whole life.

    “I saw there was a problem that needed to be solved — so many people who look like me in New York who want to wear head wraps for convenience and as part of their cultural expression — but never thought it was appropriate or OK in certain settings,” she told me. That resistance of the status quo, the refusal to abide by the social politics that have governed the styling of Black hair and bodies, is innate to the meaning behind Fanm Djanm, which translates to “strong woman,” and articulates a decisive posture to be unapologetic, undeterred, and, if you follow Mathé on Instagram then you know, never underdressed.

    “I think I am giving Black girls, women of color, luxury, because I’ve offered them something that is true to them, true to their story.”

    Both Diotima and Fanm Djanm articulate references of and reverence for culture, context, and history, while remaining committed to an ever-evolving expression of Blackness both in its multifacetedness and collectiveness. Mathé said it like this: “What I realize this New York Fashion Week is that fashion is storytelling. And fashion for me has been a vehicle to tell my story. For so long, fashion has been about luxury, steeped in elitism and classism. But I think of luxury as accessible, tangible, and beautiful. I think I am giving Black girls, women of color, luxury, because I’ve offered them something that is true to them, true to their story.” Diotima offers a similar design lens, one that rejects European style and whiteness as the standard. As Scott offers on her website, “I advocate for a more expansive definition of luxury, one that is not exclusively centered in Europe.”

    In response to my inquiry about the reception of Fanm Djanm by the fashion industry — especially in the aftermath of corporate promises and pledges from leaders in fashion to diversify the runways and their shelves — Mathé had this to say: “I think the fashion industry is unconcerned with my company. And that’s OK. Fashion is such a gatekeeping industry. People with the right connections, with the right story, get granted access. So, I’d rather focus on what I do and who I do it for than spend all this energy trying to fit in and sucking up to the right people.”

    The design ethos of Fanm Djanm and Diotima — alongside initiatives like Aurora James’s 15 Percent Pledge and the Black in Fashion Council, the brain child of Sandrine Charles and The Cut’s Lindsay Peoples Wagner — are indications of how Black women are walking into the future, whether on the runways of Fashion Week or walkways throughout this country. Perhaps it is this approach, this stylistic attitude that sums up the current dress code for Black women — unbothered, unapologetic, and undeterred. And as consistent seamstresses of political, cultural, and stylistic revolutions from the runways of New York to the sidewalks of Jamaica and Austin, never underdressed.

    Virginia Cumberbatch is a racial justice educator, writer, and creative activist and the CEO and cofounder of Rosa Rebellion, a production company for creative activism by and for women of color.

    Virginia Cumberbatch

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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

    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.”

    Virginia Cumberbatch

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