There’s a growing crop of Black fashion historians who are dedicated to unearthing Black fashion history.
Black Fashion Is Fashion History: Meet Three Women Preserving Style Innovators’ Stories
In many ways, preserving the true breadth of Black fashion history is a race against time. For too long, Black designers, models, agencies, innovators, muses, and trends have been sidelined and swept under the rug in favor of maintaining a skewed version of our shared sartorial record—one that relegates Black contributions to footnotes and asides. While recent exhibits like the Cooper Hewitt’s “Willi Smith: Street Couture” and Red Bull Arts’ “Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test” highlight Black fashion innovation both on and off the runway, there are infinitely more stories to be told.
Thankfully, there’s a growing crop of Black fashion historians who are dedicated to unearthing these stories before they’re gone. Hobbyists and academics alike, they’re sharing images, writing books, recording podcasts, and shining a long-overdue spotlight on unsung style stories around the world. Below, in their own words, three of these historians on the crucial work they do.
Teleica Kirkland
Teleica Kirkland is the founder, creative director, and principal researcher at the Costume Institute of the African Diaspora, a resource hub that houses information on costume and fashion history, textiles, and more.
I was playing mas for Carnival [an annual London event celebrating the British West Indian community], which made me want to know more about its history. There’s a bit written here about Notting Hill Carnival, but of course Notting Hill is not where it all started in terms of the Caribbean traditions. I wanted to find out about that, so I took myself off to the Caribbean. My dad lives in Jamaica. It was kind of two birds with one stone, seeing him and asking some questions.
I realized I needed to do some kind of postgraduate course to understand the depths of the questions I should be asking, because this is the thing: There isn’t a grounding within African diaspora knowledge on dress history. Quite frankly, we’ve been on survival mode for quite a few centuries, which means we’re just trying to stay alive, for God’s sake. Questions about how we’ve chosen to represent ourselves and why we’ve chosen to represent ourselves like that—we haven’t necessarily understood that they’re also a part of our own survival. Going into this course, I just wanted to talk about the theory of dress history so I could apply that to an African diaspora context. I don’t care what bloody crinoline you want to talk about. I don’t care about bloody corsets, a jerkin, or a jockstrap; I don’t want to know none of that. Give me the theory so that I can apply that to Black people.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Roxanne Fequiere
