... the From the Editor ways in which Florida teenager Trayvon Martin’s choice to wear a hoodie, given some people’s under- BLACK FASHION standing of the relationship between that particular ART...

...Anne Anlin Cheng Can we think of racialized skin as dress, as a form of fashion-consciousness? Instead of seeing this question as trivializing the history of denigrating corporeality attached to the raced subject, through a reading of Josephine Baker this paper argues for the importance...

...Helen Jennings In the last decade, a new generation of designers in Africa and the wider diaspora has started to rise through the fashion industry’s ranks. These talents are riding the wider wave of global interest in Africa’s cultural, economic, and technological ascension and are also taking...

...Joy L. Bivins Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair was a costume exhibition that debuted at the Chicago History Museum in March 2013. The project explored and examined the history and impact of Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling fashion show produced by Chicago’s Johnson Publishing Company...

... and body types by skilled seamstresses and tailors, resulting in a secondary informal economy driven by the selling of used clothing. This article discusses a novel business model implemented by a Toronto-based fashion startup in 2010 in an effort to support Haiti’s apparel manufacturing sector and also...

...Hudita Nura Mustafa Copyright © 2001 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2001 Textile Market, Dakar, Senegal, 1993. Fashion A s with most world cities, it is impossible to walk in a Dakar...

...Lauri Firstenberg Copyright © 2000 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2000 in its approach to evade essentialist context of 1990's fashion being on par the concept of the veil to its most THE ART OF AFRICAN...

... center is explored in this article through the lens of portraiture and fashion. Examining the unique social presence of the Ethiopian royal family in the media, both at home and abroad, this article presents an analysis of the fashionably dressed bodies of Emperor Haile Selassie and his children within...

.... The dandy represents a complicated dance between race, gender, power, and style. Primarily, dandyism as a fashion trend was born in Europe during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. More specifically, the dandy is mostly a British construct who came into being in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...

..., these tensions fuel her creative work on the musical stage and also in the realm of fashion and style; they become a way of naturalizing the oddness and radicality of her liberating and liberatory rhetoric concerning racial stereotypes, gender norms, class assumptions, and perceptions of sexuality. Examining...

...Helen Jennings From March 30 to June 9, 2014, in the coastal town of Knokke-Heist, Belgium’s international photography festival hosted an outdoor exhibition that brought together world-renowned artists whose works examine contemporary African dress practices. The continent’s burgeoning fashion...

... and creole chat of the best-dressed chicken on the street. Saga bwoys and rude bwoys are constituents of the contemporary ragamuffin geneology of subcultural black masculine practices that have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural, and diaspora exchange and transfer. Yet...

...Tanisha Ford This essay examines the rise in popularity of “Afro look” fashions in the 1970s. The name Afro look was given by fashion industry insiders on both sides of the Atlantic to describe clothing that featured African and African-inspired prints, textiles, and embroidery techniques. Usually...

... with Earrings (1966), shot for twen magazine. March’s subject—the African American fashion model and actress Donyale Luna (1945–79)—is of great historical significance, not only because Luna was the first internationally acclaimed black fashion model, but also because she had an especially arresting, black...

...Anthony Barboza; Barry Maxwell The musician Miles Davis, subject of a group of portrait photographs by Anthony Barboza, presents himself in the photographs as an armature of fashion objects. With reference to the work of Walter Benjamin and Giacomo Leopardi, this introduction to Barboza’s...

... African American, Latin American, and African and Caribbean women and men were represented in fashion and advertising in the United States. In this interview, we discuss such topics as how race plays a part in the fashion industry, hair styling, and working with models. Copyright © 2015 Nka: Journal...

...Deborah Riley Draper Not many moments in time change the course of history and evolution of an industry at the same time. And even fewer of these moments can be attributed without exception to a group of black fashion models. In this essay I discuss my award-winning documentary Versailles ’73...

... and cultural production. This article focuses on the use of the term Afropolitan , which has made its way into African artistic and literary criticism as a crossover from the fashion and popular culture arenas. In thinking about the usefulness of “Afropolitanism,” the author revisits the notion of c...

... echoes voguers’ transgression of high fashion in dance competitions. Newsome stages a transnational and transhistorical dialogue between two distinct but interconnected systems of oppression, imperialism and global capitalism, thus sketching a collective history of Black pain and of creative resilience...

...A’Lelia Bundles This essay examines the role A’Lelia Walker played as a fashion and social trendsetter in Harlem during the 1920s. The only daughter of early-twentieth-century hair-care-industry pioneer Madam C. J. Walker, she carved her own niche as a patron of the arts and philanthropist...