RESEARCH - EVENT OR WORK

One cannot talk about beauty or fashion without discussing the body. Lately it appears that black identity cannot be discussed without analyzing a black aesthetic. Bringing the two together (the black body as explored through beauty and fashion) is what Tisch School of the Arts and Institute of African-American Affairs presented at the two day symposium, Beauty and Fashion: The Black Portrait Symposium.  I saw this symposium as an ontology of blackness, a philosphical exploration,  with fashion as the lens to explore black existence and the categories that this existence lies in. Fashion (past, present, future) is a category to understand the systematics of how black identity, and racial idenitity generally, is thought through and subversed.

The symposium was made up of lectures and panels by scholars and artists from diverse fields. Two panel discussions that cohesively exemplified the main concept behind the symposium where Body & Image and Fashioning Beauty. The first to speak was photographer, Xaviera Simmons who discussed her recent trip to Jamaica. Her focus was on the ‘black body’ as a philosphical lens. Simmons took ‘portraits’ of the landscapes and dancehalls of Jamaica in order to explore “how the collective is formed, where does memory lie?” By placing landscape adjacent to bodies, Simmons created a powerful point in visualizing culture and idenitity through a physical and imaginary body.

Mimi Plange is a fashion designer whose inspiration for her Winter 2011 collection of women’s clothing drew on the ritual of scarrification that members of her own family have experienced. Her lens on the body was through a literal form in a way in comparison to Xaviera Simmons. Her artistic vision dresses the female body based on scars that have dressed the African female body. Plange used pictures of scars that depicted mostly geometric shapes. Her use of lining and ruffles was to resemble the  scarring lines on the body and the ruffles represent the repeatitive action that makes up the process of scarring, in a spiritual and literal form.

Lauren Kelley is a film maker and she started her presentation by showing short clips of her video work, all using barbies and clay figures for her narrative. She described her work scope by the term ‘dystopic space’. By using barbie dolls that play with race and class, Kelley is cleverly working on how images and interactions can infiltrate views on race and class to children at a young age.

Panel two, Fashioning Beauty, had a larger panelist set of 6, but had a more cohesive lecture discussion than the previous three artists. Leslie King-Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims where the first two to speak and they did so on their collaborative exhibition at Museum of Art and Design, Global Africa Project. Through this massive global endeavour, over 200 objects from 30+ countries where attained by artists of all viens. King-Hammond titled her presentation “Fashioning a diasporic aesthetic” in which she discussed patterning and merchandizing of black fashion. She found it striking that patterning and the mixing of patterns was suprisingly common wherever she went in the black diaspora. As she described it, there is a “psychic place of Africa”. This borderless connection can be traced through fashion, which in some ways acts as a means to create out of necessity to unite.

Sims went on a systematic approach to how designers materialize their garments and the recent surge in the fashion community to include the African body on the runway. Her most striking point was when she positioned two pictures of the same garment, one with a white mannequin and one with a black model. Obviously the picture with a real person made the dress look better and it helped to show how movement, even when captured in a still photography, is still felt. She explains that fashion plays with identity, by parodying the construction of identity, it deconstructs it as well.

The next four panelists to talk were from the fashion world. Maya Lake, a young fashion designer, followed the talk on The Global Africa Project. She started her own clothing line, Boxing Kitten, that houses clothes which echo that of what King-Hammond discussed, patterning. Lake combines common African fabrics that were fashioned in the 1960s and 1970s black power movement with conservative styles of the 1950s during the civil rights movement. The concept of mixing two historical moments through the fashions of both is quite striking because Lake creates clothes that are loaded with two points of black identification (claims to black legitimacy vs. claims to black revolt) and transforms it to a hybrid aesthetic that is very trendy.

Anthony Barboza is a seasoned photographer who has worked for Essence magazine. He also was the photographer of the cover photo for this symposium. His photographic experience was an interesting one to hear as he was never concerned with the fashion he shot, but the individual within the clothes. Michaela Angela Davis followed and gave a fiery lecture on the fashion world’s ignorance of the black body. Davis’s background working in the styling industry, mostly for celebrities, was particularly outraged that Essence magazine hired a white fashion director, and discussed the implications that this has with a large black female audience. The last panelist to speak was Nigerian-born, London-based fashion designer Duro Olowu, whose work was shown in The Global Africa Project. Olowu explains that his pieces aim to provide women with the strength to move freely and be in touch with their sensuality. For Olowu, all his designs reference Blackness, whether this is conscious or not he did not say. 

This symposium pulled black artists, thinkers from all over to reclaim a black universality, but at the same time to critically understand why this can be so. What connects black experience? Why can there be a shared black body from people all over the world-whose communities move from country to country? Systems of oppression have united (and created) ‘the black body’. It is interesting to see how fashion can work to subversely reclaim ones identity, or to reclaim who can’t.

Contributed by MoCADA Curatorial Fellows

Return to MoCADA home