Unapologetic and Never Underdressed: Black Women's Power on and Off the Runways at NYFW

In the last few years, we've witnessed a renewed urgency and energy around the pursuit of racial equity. And as a racial justice educator and culture writer, I've been curious if these commitments to a more just future have manifested as visceral investments — shaping new conversations, elevating new voices, and empowering new agency to shape culture. Three years removed from the impetus of this cultural reckoning (namely, the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd), I've questioned whether the headlines, tweets, black boxes on Instagram, and financial pledges were just performative action, and if America's short attention span would once again undermine the pursuit of a more inclusive and equitable future.

Throughout American history, some of the most effective barometers of our political posture have been spaces of cultural consequences, and the world of fashion serves as one of those cultural spaces. Indeed, at the intersection of fashion, politics, and culture has always been the Black experience.

So my curiosity led me to my first New York Fashion Week experience. In conversation with Black scholars, artists, writers, and designers, I attempted to survey the runways and walkways of New York for signs of a new dress code to propel our ongoing protests for our humanity, stories, and style to matter.

My New York Fashion Week started a week early in the galleries of some of New York's most inspired museums. After an interview with the founder of The Race and Fashion Database, Kimberly Jenkins, I was invited to a private tour she was hosting of the "Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party" exhibit at the Poster House museum. And I was able to experience one of the most brilliant capturings of the power of design, storytelling, and aesthetics to transform culture.

This beautifully curated exhibit by Es-pranza Humphrey surveys the incredible archives of posters and collateral materials of the Black Panther Party and its decades-long political revolution through design. The combination of a black beret, a black leather jacket, pants, boots, and exposed weapons formed the military-style uniform for the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, and that look has become an enduring symbol that still articulates political dissonance and cultural determination today. The posters, meanwhile, were used to rally community around education programs, instigate political foes, and energize support for prison-release campaigns. The exhibit was a reminder of the many ways Black people, and particularly Black women, including Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, and Afeni Shakur (yes, mother of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur), had stylized their revolution.

It was here in conversation with Humphrey and the images immortalized in the posters on display that the idea of rootedness offered the perfect prism to experience and explore New York Fashion Week. This was further confirmed during my awe-inspiring afternoon at the "Africa Fashion" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. I was surprised, yet grateful, for the exhibit's entry point — a map documenting each African country's year of independence from its European or Western colonizer. It was as if the curators had invited us to unapologetically bask in the evolution of African fashion, textiles, and aesthetic choices, and smirk at the Western world's eventual adaptation and at times appropriation of Black brilliance and beauty.

What lead curator Christine Checinska prioritized in the exhibit was in essence what Black designers, stylists, and taste-makers have known and practiced for decades in America. There is an innate awareness that the adornment of Black bodies — the act of asserting the agency to dress oneself as an expression of mood, personality, cultural practices — is political. And it is this knowledge that reinforces Black fashion as a tool for political articulation and, when appropriate, political dissonance and resistance.

What was so thoughtfully curated at the Brooklyn Museum exhibit (which is up through Oct. 22) was also on display across the Brooklyn Bridge in several showrooms and runways at NYFW. I witnessed a reclamation of roots, ancestry, and origins with unabashed reverence and eloquence. To be clear, this wasn't a thematic homage to be appreciated for just this season's collection; this marked the origins of many designers' stories and motivation for their work.

This was evident in my last (and, with fear of retribution from others, favorite) show of NYFW. A friend of a friend, the talented stylist and editorial director Ronald Burton III, had passed along an invitation to attend the Diotima presentation. Rachel Scott, the brand's founder, is a Jamaican designer who launched the line just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her love and appreciation for the varied stories of the Black diaspora is vividly present in the literal and figurative fabric of her clothes. The Caribbean serves as her clear inspiration, but just like Africa's revolution of fashion, it is the reference to the origins of Black presence in the Caribbean that offers a disruptive layer to the story. Her work is intricate and provocative — with seductive cutouts, backless silhouettes, and breathtaking draping of what most Americans would consider nontraditional textiles. By nature, the Diotima designs are a rebuttal and refusal of the Eurocentric gaze and the continued presence and occupation of colonization throughout the Caribbean and the Black diaspora.

The result of her Caribbean-inspired audacity is a disruption of the fashion industry's traditions, and the creation of a collection that can only be described as poetic, angelic, and elegant. As Jenkins, who is also a fashion scholar and professor and the former host of podcast "The Invisible Seam," told me, designs like Diotima's offer a necessary agency and artistic expression for melanated bodies. "Fashion is in no way frivolous. Fashion is gendered, it's classed, it's racialized," Jenkins told me over a cup of coffee. "In fact, we have some moral and political stigmas that are attached to our clothing. What is often posed to us as Black people, and specifically as Black women, is how well can you work not to disrupt people's ideology and the hierarchy. [Fashion] is far from being a neutral practice."

The Diotima NYFW presentation was a departure from traditional collection debuts. Instead of a seated show, the Diotima team invited everyone to a downtown art gallery where models adorned by Diotima's latest designs sauntered around the room, sometimes posed along the white walls as if they were 4D art. The models brought to life the interplay of the fabrics — crochet and beads, cotton and linens — reflecting the conflict of the story that is a part of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and most of the Black American experience: the legacy of both slavery and pain, and our collective resilience and beauty. Scott's artistry is an acknowledgement of that multilayered story, as well as a reclamation of the beauty and boldness of Black identity, power, and cultural autonomy.

A few days later, after wrapping up my nearly three weeks on the East Coast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Paola Mathé, founder and creative director of the popular e-commerce brand Fanm Djanm. Originally based in Harlem, the head wrap brand continues to source its fabrics from Haiti and across the Black diaspora, but it now calls Austin, TX, home. A few minutes into our conversation, I asked the New Jersey native about her experience at NYFW as a designer. She responded emphatically, "I'm really careful not to call myself a designer. When people ask me what I do in fashion, I say I am a storyteller."

I found this admission to be indicative of how her line of head wraps came to be and continue to evolve. A Haitian-born creative, Mathé birthed her line out of necessity and responsibility — a necessity to make her life and hair routine more efficient and easygoing as a server at a fast-paced New York City restaurant some years after graduating college, and a responsibility to young Paola and the many Black girls with textured, coiled hair whose locks and tresses had been policed, politicized, and permed their whole life.

"I saw there was a problem that needed to be solved — so many people who look like me in New York who want to wear head wraps for convenience and as part of their cultural expression — but never thought it was appropriate or OK in certain settings," she told me. That resistance of the status quo, the refusal to abide by the social politics that have governed the styling of Black hair and bodies, is innate to the meaning behind Fanm Djanm, which translates to "strong woman," and articulates a decisive posture to be unapologetic, undeterred, and, if you follow Mathé on Instagram then you know, never underdressed.

Both Diotima and Fanm Djanm articulate references of and reverence for culture, context, and history, while remaining committed to an ever-evolving expression of Blackness both in its multifacetedness and collectiveness. Mathé said it like this: "What I realize this New York Fashion Week is that fashion is storytelling. And fashion for me has been a vehicle to tell my story. For so long, fashion has been about luxury, steeped in elitism and classism. But I think of luxury as accessible, tangible, and beautiful. I think I am giving Black girls, women of color, luxury, because I've offered them something that is true to them, true to their story." Diotima offers a similar design lens, one that rejects European style and whiteness as the standard. As Scott offers on her website, "I advocate for a more expansive definition of luxury, one that is not exclusively centered in Europe."

In response to my inquiry about the reception of Fanm Djanm by the fashion industry — especially in the aftermath of corporate promises and pledges from leaders in fashion to diversify the runways and their shelves — Mathé had this to say: "I think the fashion industry is unconcerned with my company. And that's OK. Fashion is such a gatekeeping industry. People with the right connections, with the right story, get granted access. So, I'd rather focus on what I do and who I do it for than spend all this energy trying to fit in and sucking up to the right people."

The design ethos of Fanm Djanm and Diotima — alongside initiatives like Aurora James's 15 Percent Pledge and the Black in Fashion Council, the brain child of Sandrine Charles and The Cut's Lindsay Peoples Wagner — are indications of how Black women are walking into the future, whether on the runways of Fashion Week or walkways throughout this country. Perhaps it is this approach, this stylistic attitude that sums up the current dress code for Black women — unbothered, unapologetic, and undeterred. And as consistent seamstresses of political, cultural, and stylistic revolutions from the runways of New York to the sidewalks of Jamaica and Austin, never underdressed.

Virginia Cumberbatch is a racial justice educator, writer, and creative activist and the CEO and cofounder of Rosa Rebellion, a production company for creative activism by and for women of color.