From Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday to Aretha Franklin and Eartha Kitt, the wave of films and books about iconic Black women singers shows their sartorial response to the antiblackness and misogynoir they faced
Style With Soul: How the World’s Most Iconic Black Women Singers Expressed Themselves Through Fashion
As a child, one book in our Afrocentric family library cast a particular magnetism upon me. It was A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walker; the 1979 Feminist Press edition with the wraparound cover. On the front stood Hurston, rocking a severe dark coat, a pink beret upon which a floating feather was mysteriously pinned, and a broad smile underneath the first half of the title, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing.
Flip the book over, and there was Hurston working the same look, but without a trace of a smile, just an arched brow and some serious side-eye under the second half of the title, And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. I gagged. Even before I grew up and read her essays, novels and ethnographies devoted to her unparalleled study of expressive Blackness, I had a sense of where Hurston was coming from. She was stuntin’ in those portraits, giving to the camera, but holding something back for herself. Self-love as a radical act is a common thing to claim today. But to understand how radical it has been for Black women over the decades to perform self-care through dress requires that we attend to the bone-deep collective wisdom conveyed in Hurston’s impish declaration.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Tavia Nyong’o
