Elizabeth Way - Black Designers in American Fashion

Black Designers in American Fashion

Black Designers in American Fashion

Edited by
Elizabeth Way

Contents

Elizabeth Way (MA, New York University; BS, BA, University of Delaware) is Assistant Curator of Costume at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, USA. Her co-curated and curated exhibitions include Global Fashion Capitals (2015), Black Fashion Designers (2016), and Fabric In Fashion (2018). Her personal research focuses on the intersection of Black culture and fashion, and published works include, Strands of the Diaspora: Black Hair in the Americas 18001920 in A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Empire (2018) and Elizabeth Keckly and Ann Lowe: Recovering an African American Fashion Legacy That Clothed the American Elite (2015).

Contributors

Joy Davis is an independent scholar of fashion history and the director of Waller Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. She created Waller Gallery in 2018. She also co-hosts and produces for Unravel Podcast, a fashion history and culture podcast. Her scholarly projects include subject matter that is underdeveloped in academia and transcends many fields of study: fashion, history, art, media, and performance among people of color throughout history. She holds two BA degrees, one in history and one in media studies from the University of Maryland, and her MA in Fashion and Museum Studies is from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Nancy Deihl is Director of the Costume Studies graduate program at New York University, USA. Her research interests focus on twentieth-century fashion, in particular on the American fashion industry. She lectures and publishes on fashion history topics and is the editor of The Hidden History of American Fashion: Rediscovering 20th-Century Women Designers (2018) and co-author of The History of Modern Fashion (2015).

Ariele Elia (MSL, Fordham University School of Law; MA, Fashion Institute of Technology; BA, Saint Marys College, California, USA) is Assistant Director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law, USA. She previously served for seven years as the Assistant Curator of Costume and Textiles at The Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology, where she curated, Faking It: Originals, Copies, and Counterfeits (2014) and co-curated Black Fashion Designers. She has lectured at the United Nations, Oxford University, and Columbia Law School, and developed the course Cultural Awareness, Design Responsibility, and the Law. Recent publications include, Fashions Destruction of Unsold Goods: Responsible Solutions for an Environmentally Conscious Future.

Katie Knowles is Curator of the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising and an assistant professor in the Department of Design and Merchandising at Colorado State University, USA. She holds a PhD in history from Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, and is currently completing a book manuscript from her dissertation on enslaved peoples clothing in the antebellum US South. Knowles has worked in museums for more than a decade, including at the Avenir Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Darnell-Jamal Lisby is a fashion historian and curator. His projects include curatorial contribution to the Willi Smith: Street Couture exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, USA (2020). His research delves into contextualizing the impact of Blackness within the history of fashion during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to contributing curatorial efforts at The Museum at FIT and Metropolitan Museum of Art, he has published works related to his research on various platforms, including The Fashion and Race Database, Teen Vogue, and for the Smithsonian Institution.

Kristen J. Owens is an arts administrator, curator, and researcher with interests in visual culture, fashion, and African American studies. She has co-created exhibitions, including Performing Fashion: New York City at New York Universitys 80WSE Gallery (2017) and Dressed at Rutgers University-Newarks Paul Robeson Galleries (2018). Owens holds an MA in Visual Culture: Costume Studies and an MS in Library and Information Science from New York Universitys dual degree program with Long Island University Palmer, USA. She holds a BA in fashion studies from Montclair State University, USA.

Eric Darnell Pritchard is the endowed Brown Chair in English Literacy and Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, USA. Pritchard is the author of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy (2016), which received three book awards, and editor of Sartorial Politics, Intersectionality, and Queer Worldmaking, a special issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2017). Currently, he is completing the book, Abundant Black Joy: The Life and Work of Patrick Kelly, a biography of the 1980s international fashion design superstar.

Jonathan Michael Square teaches in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University, USA, and has taught at University of Pennsylvania, Fashion Institute of Technology, and Parsons School of Design. He has a PhD in history from New York University, MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and BA from Cornell University. His teaching and book projects focus on the fashion and visual culture of the African Diaspora. A proponent of the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.

Kristen E. Stewart is the Nathalie L. Klaus Curator of Costume and Textiles at the Valentine, the museum of the history of Richmond, Virginia, USA. Her research interests focus on the intersection of established gender identity norms within dress and the fashion industry. She has explored these themes in recent exhibitions at the Valentine, including The Virginia Man: Respect, Responsibility, Rebellion (20162017) and Pretty Powerful: Fashion and Virginia Women (20182019).

Tanya Danielle Wilson Myers is the Cultural Arts Portfolio Manager for the Washington, DC Department of Parks and Recreation, USA. She holds a BS in Retail Management and Marketing from Syracuse University and a MA in Visual Communication: Costume Studies from New York University, USA. Her academic research focuses on the power of artifacts and the way in which citizens of the world connect art and culture as it relates to socio-cultural aspects of dress. Her most recent publication is Imprint (NYC): The Evolution of Motifs in Fashion (2012) in which she contributed a chapter on Animal Print.

This book represents a wealth of original scholarship on a subject that is unfortunately rare in fashion studies. As editor, I am extremely proud, grateful, and humbled by the dedication and determination of the authors in this book. They are professionals, curators, independent scholars, professors, partners, and parents, and yet they devoted countless hours to help fill in a vital space on the fashion history bookshelf. Thank you. A special thanks to Nancy Deihl who encouraged me to propose this volume.

On behalf of all the authors, thank you to the institutions and individuals that opened their archives, shared their memories, and permitted their images to be used in this book. A special thank you to Robbie and Stephen Marks and to Valerie Steele and The Museum at FIT.