.... An heiress with exquisitely decorated homes and chauffeured cars and hostess of music-filled soirees, she personified the spirit and flamboyance of the era. Always stylish, her blend of regal, statuesque African beauty and haute couture served as an inspiration to poets, painters, and novelists. Among those...

..., Ramouna Saunders, Jennifer Brice, Barbara Jackson, and China Machado. The rest is well-heeled history. Copyright © 2015 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2015 Versailles runway models fashion show black beauty American designers haute couture VERSAILLES ’73 AMERICAN RUNWAY...

... appeal of Africanness. African models and local fashion designers were Kente’s transcendence of the spatial and economic shifting the power dynamic within the realm of constraints placed upon nonwhites under apartheid haute couture by reclaiming local textiles and modes undoubtedly inspired Drum...

... Sy's designs, made for film and haute couture, to a popular audience. Since 1997, the annual fashion show brings together designers from across Africa...

... of its own claims to thoughtlessly swept into the shadow of some supposedly authentic machismo, and thus presented with an opportunity to look itself in the haute-couture of which the earlier is only a tragic mimicry. Osorio mirror, laugh at itself, and perhaps chance upon...

... the with his “Africa collection” of revealing latticed shift shade of a straw parasol with a monkey perched on dresses made from raffia, shells, and wooden beads. her shoulder. In 1997 John Galliano’s debut haute Born in Algeria, he developed a great affinity for couture collection for Christian Dior...

... an excellent tor of Corridor 8, and a freelance writer tions on haute couture that elevate choice by exhibiting Gaba’s Museum of and has published and presented papers the everyday into art. Contemporary African Art, which was relevant to the work of the Greek Arte In the last...

... in the exhibition is an haute couture wool jacket from Christian Dior’s fall/winter 1964 season. Ensembles from the show’s first years are no longer extant. 2 John Johnson and Lerone Bennet Jr., Succeeding against the Odds: The Autobiography of a Great American Businessman (New York: Amistad, 1992...

... and assistance. The fabric of these kinship organizations creates communal bonds and companionship in the face of systemic deprivation such as low access to education, employment, ownership, and credit.19 Often nicknamed after haute-couture brands, the raison de vivre of houses is to win trophies at the much...

... basketball tinction—and was photographed in haute couture talent Lew Alcindor (who would later go on to clothing by such legendary fashion photographers greater heights in professional sports under the as Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Guy Bordin, name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and the eighteen-year- Frank...

... Colomba’s black subject perfectly adapts to this and musings. narrative of portraiture with her haute couture, To conclude this examination, I want to briefly powerful posing, and steely gaze; however, she sketch out a more contemporary expression of this evokes...