Consider Ann Lowe, who designed dresses for America’s mid-20th century socialite elite and was described as “society’s best-kept secret,” according to the Saturday Evening Post. In 1953, a fan asked Lowe’s most famous client, Jacqueline Kennedy, who had designed her beautiful wedding dress, to which Kennedy replied, “A Negro woman dressmaker.” Similarly, The New York Times ran a lengthy, detailed report on the gorgeous dress, its bodice tucks, circular design, and 50 yards of ivory silk taffeta. The only detail the Times left out was Lowe’s name.
With Grace Wales Bonner receiving the coveted €300,000 LVMH Prize in June and Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing overseeing the company’s recent sale for $500 million, one might conclude that after decades of exclusion, the fashion world is finally ready to welcome black talent into prominent positions as designers and executives.
There are certainly more black celebrities in positions of power in fashion than there were a decade ago, with stalwarts like Edward Enningful at W magazine and the recent elevation of Elaine Welteroth to the top of Teen Vogue, but to stop there is to oversimplify and distort a complex situation that demands a more nuanced understanding.
Let’s start with the numbers. The numbers tell a very different story: Of the roughly 1,300 brands featured on Vogue.com, only 16 are Black-owned brands, just over 1 percent. Just 1 percent.
Moreover, speaking of black designers as a group is problematic in itself. Blackness is not a monolith. Designers of color come from a variety of experiences and backgrounds. Grace Wales Bonner has little in common with Olivier Rousteing except for the color of her skin. She is a British intellectual weaving a quiet, romantic, complicated story around black male identity. He is a French social media star with a penchant for glitz, celebrity, tassels, and gold braids. To identify with their blackness is to belittle it as much as to ignore it. Yet, ironically, there is often strength in numbers. Or, more accurately, common ground. As scholar bell hooks puts it in Where We Stand: Class Matters:
“In many cases, racial solidarity forged bonds between people with dark skin, even if they did not belong to the same caste or class. They were bound together by the knowledge that at any time, whether free or slave, they could suffer the same fate.”
“That fate? The invisible man.”
We’ve come a long way since Ann Lowe was completely written off. Designers like Stephen Burrows, Patrick Kelly and Tracy Rees have popped up like fireworks in an otherwise empty night sky.
But visibility remains an issue.
“It’s not just design that we’re not looked at very much,” says Edward Buchanan, former design director at Bottega Veneta and now creative director and founder of Milan-based luxury knitwear brand Sansovino 6. “We’re not seen as head buyers, head merchandisers, directors of anything. At the end of the day, if these people aren’t an integral part of the team, you can’t see diversity on the outside. It’s just not possible.”
Buchanan, 46, launched Sansovino 6 in 2009 after applying for multiple creative director jobs but ultimately failing. “I was always opening doors, lots of people were looking at me and the collections I was working on. [were] It was going really well, but nobody was giving me that opportunity. I realized nobody was giving me anything, so I had to make it myself. I had to make my own space.”
What we’re really talking about is value. Buchanan and Rowe, like so many others, have fallen into obscurity not because of a lack of talent or productivity, but because blackness is so devalued in a Eurocentric, postcolonial world. Blackness rarely adds value, but rather maintains it, and more often than not, it devalues it. Out of fear or false ignorance, industry power brokers still cling to the long-held and totally unfounded myth that black faces don’t sell or are not “expensive.” That myth justifies everything from all-white runways to the mostly white faces on magazine covers to the lack of diversity in leading Hollywood roles.
“Not really,” Brandis Daniel said when asked about her initial reaction to Harlem’s Fashion Row, the organization she founded a decade ago with the dual mission of raising awareness of multicultural designers and supporting their businesses as well. “People associated it with African Americans, so there was an automatic perception that it wasn’t as valuable as what was going on at New York Fashion Week.”
This devaluation has crept into the fashion vocabulary, regardless of appearance or descent, as if skin color could obscure the viewer. The terms “streetwear” and “urban,” while innocent in nature, have evolved into vulgar labels associated with the wardrobe of inner-city (i.e. “black”) youth: T-shirts and sweatpants (similar to how “thug” became a socially acceptable, coded replacement for the “n-word”). Brett Johnson, a relative newcomer to the fashion world, showed the fourth collection of his eponymous, made-in-Italy menswear line at New York Fashion Week Men’s in February of this year. Classic garments like tailored suits, overcoats, and motorcycle jackets are the mainstays of his brand. “People were saying, ‘Oh, this is perfect for streetwear,'” says Johnson, the son of billionaire Robert L. Johnson. “But that’s not our style, that’s not our aesthetic.”
Kerby Jean-Raymond, founder of Pyer Moss, a line of tailored sportswear with athletic influences, famously asked, “I just want to know: is it the clothes that are called ‘street’ or is it me?”
But for some designers, a term like “streetwear” is perfectly fine. “I’m not interested in putting women in gowns,” womenswear designer Jerome Lamar says of his “street glam” line, 531 Jerome. “I’m actually from the boogie-down Bronx. This whole street world that I’ve experienced is who I really am.” After eight years with hip-hop brand Baby Phat, Lamar started working for American couturier Ralph Lucci, and later became a consultant for Armani. “As far as I know, I’m the only person who’s had success in hip-hop.” [world] And then I got to work for a real couturier. My world is the bridge between the two.”
Lamar isn’t entirely unique. His experience, like Wales Bonner’s LVMH prize, is a bellwether of a small but substantial shift in perception and acceptance. Where once designers like Public School member Maxwell Osborne were celebrated for breaking down the rigid barriers of the establishment, a whole new crop of designers are now entering the field with designs loaded with cross-cultural references and the pluralistic black experience. Before Wales Bonner, for example, there was Orange Culture, a Nigeria-based menswear line designed by Adebayo Okerawal, one of 30 finalists in the inaugural LVMH competition in 2014. Like Wales Bonner, Orange Culture treats black male identity as a narrative device, frequently referencing the brightly colored Dutch wax cloth often associated with West Africa.
“I’m really interested in the stories of Black people on the planet,” says Lecho Omondi of his eponymous label, Omondi. “It’s such a fascinating and integral part of world history, but it also feels like it’s one of the least talked about.” Despite only showing two seasons, Omondi has already garnered a large social media following (“that means everything to us”) and been hailed as a “designer to watch” by Harper’s Bazaar. Inspired by his own internal duality, navigating the cultural shifts of life in America and his native Kenya, Omondi weaves stories of tradition in the modern world using soft knits, oversized silhouettes, and muted hues.
“I think modern things have to be relevant for more than one season,” says Dexter Peart, one half of Want Les Essentials, an accessories brand he co-founded with his twin brother Byron. Using materials from all over the world, the duo draws inspiration from their experiences growing up with Jamaican parents who immigrated to Canada during the civil rights era. Growing up as one of the few people of color in their neighborhood influenced the concepts that drive them: inclusivity and exclusivity, and “democratic” essentials like handmade bags, shoes, and clothing. “The idea that great quality and craftsmanship can only come from one place also doesn’t feel very modern,” Dexter says of why they source materials from around the world, and not just Europe. “There are categories and boxes that are created to create value in one place, but they don’t necessarily indicate where it is. [that] This is where the value comes from.”
A new minority of designers working outside the establishment are reinterpreting fashion codes to tell more layered stories, eschewing the shock of the new and bringing tradition, craftsmanship and longevity to the forefront of their work: clean lines sculpted in nubuck leather give rise to the minimalist sneakers of Number 288 by Benyam Asafa; the postmodern sartorial mash-up of Harbison by Charles Harbison; the meticulously tailored bespoke atelier of Devon Scott; and the unashamedly sophisticated humour seen in the shoes of current CFDA incubator designer Aurora James’ brand, Brother Vales.
The list goes on, the origins, methodologies and executions are many. The adjective “Black” cannot define these designers, nor can it confine them. Following their own paths, these clothing designers unleash the cloak of invisibility and show that contemporary luxury is the ability to live in several worlds at once, to wear intersectionality effortlessly on your back.
