COMME des ESCLAVES A catalogue from a pop-up exhibition curated by students in “Fashion and Slavery”
November 28, 2017 2:00-4:00pm
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Table of Contents Curatorial Statement
“Sebastian Errazuriz’s Portrait of US” by Christopher Chow “Clothing as Language: Visual and Sartorial Racial Hierarchies in Slavery” by
3
4-10
11-16
Cahleb E. Derry “Let Freedom Ring From a Macbook: Yeezy Season 3, TIDAL, The Life of
17-23
Pablo, and Dominating the Capital” by Jack Goldfisher “Esclavitud perpetua: Perpetual Slavery in the Lives of Colombian
24-30
Palenqueras” by Julissa Higgins “Charleston Slave Badges: A Primary Source Analysis" by Matthew
31-35
Murphy “The American Struggle of Ann Lowe: Power, Powerlessness, and Female
36-41
Portraiture” by Reade Rossman “Saggin’ or Swaggin’?: Criminalizing Black Autonomy from Sumptuary Laws
42-46
to the Carceral State” by Reade Rossman “The Feminized Golliwog: Identifying the Line Between Exploitation and
47-53
Reclamation in the Work of Patrick Kelly” by Skylar-Bree Takyi “Weaponizing the Mammy: How Betye Saar Gives Power to the Mammy” by
54-58
Gabriela Thorne “Costuming in Django Unchained” by Amanda Zhang
59-66
Exhibition Day photos
67-68
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Curatorial Statement Over the course of the semester in “Fashion and Slavery,” we explored various facets of the intersection of fashion with the institution of slavery and other coercive labor systems. For our final project, we curated Comme des esclaves, a pop-up exhibition of visual artifacts that illuminates connections between fashion and slavery. The exhibition title is a play on Comme des Garçons—avant-garde Japanese label founded by Rei Kawakubo—and esclaves —French for “slaves.” The exhibit pieces were sourced from diverse geographical regions, authors, and eras. While many histories of slavery privilege written documentation as primary sources, sartorial expression offers an under-explored perspective on the experiences of enslaved peoples. Christopher Chow Cahleb Derry Jack Goldfisher Julissa Higgins Matthew Murphy Reade Rossman Dr. Jonathan Michael Square Skylar-Bree Takyi Gabriela Thorne Lauren Nicole Williams Amanda Zhang
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“Sebastian Errazuriz’s Portrait of US” by Christopher Chow On the walls of Storefront for Art and Architecture, a bloodied hoodie and sweatshirt hung framed during the lower Manhattan gallery’s February 2014 exhibition. The clothes appeared as part of artist Sebastian Errazuriz’s installation piece Portrait of US, and they resemble those that Trayvon Martin wore on the night of his shooting death. Errazuriz’s reproduction and display of the hoodie here echo protest tactics created by and employed in resistance movements like the Million Hoodie March.” These movements protest Martin’s death and his murderer’s acquittal by emphasizing the hoodie as a familiar, yet racially encoded article of clothing item. In using clothing as protest, Errazuriz’s Portrait of US and other movements sparked by the death of Trayvon Martin relate to histories of slave resistance through fashion. However, while black slaves used fashion to express their individuality by appropriating and creating styles of dress, protesters commonly donned the standard hoodie as a gesture of unification and relatability to Martin. How do these disparate uses of fashion connect to enable clothing as such a powerful and recurring tool of political resistance against oppression? In comparing first, the different histories of black oppression and secondly, different methods of using fashion as tactics of protest, I argue that sartorial expression for African-Americans effectively destabilizes their oppression because it publically demonstrates self-autonomy over their black bodies. It is in this sense that one’s own body becomes a basic and radical political resource, no matter how it might be exploited, constrained, or read by others along racial lines. Within this framework of fashion as resistance, this essay will explore Errazuriz’s 2014 Portrait of Us as artwork that responds to and helps us understand the complex social relationships embedded within contemporary African-American oppression. In Portrait of Us, Errazuriz reproduces Trayvon Martin’s plain black hoodie and plain grey sweatshirt in acrylic paint, ink, and natural dyes on cotton. He presents them flattened between two panes of glass and in front of a white background. The upper right corner of the hoodie frame reads “Hooded Sweatshirt worn by Trayvon Martin.” Bloodied and bullet-holed, sleeves spread out with the hood up, the two garments appear side-by-side as material legacy and evidence of Martin’s shooting death. Errazuriz complements these framed replicas with an unpictured series of even more reproduced hoodies that are available for purchase. With all proceeds of sales donated to the Trayvon Martin Foundation, Errazuriz encourages viewers to not only view the garments, but also wear them as a public recognition of Martin’s death. Sebastian Errazuriz’s work directly responds to the controversial shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the unbalanced social power dynamics that it exposed. On the night of February 26, 2012, two years before Errazuriz’s exhibition, George Zimmerman shot and
F5 killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Martin, a black teenage male, was walking home from a convenience store in Sanford, Florida when Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch guard, noticed him from his vehicle. In his call to the Sanford police, Zimmerman explained that Martin looked “like he’s up to no good,” or that “he’s on drugs or something”; he identified Martin’s hoodie as a distinguishing feature marking him with suspicion. Against orders from the police, Zimmerman followed him on foot. Then, shortly after Martin pulled up his hoodie – likely because it was raining that night, likely because he feared the strange man following him then – Zimmerman fatally shot him twice in the chest.
In the political aftermath of Martin’s death, the hoodie stands out as an object of investigation. What role did the hoodie play in Zimmerman’s hunt and Martin’s death? Would the hoodie have been suspect if the body to which it was attached were white? Zimmerman’s suspicion and violence were undoubtedly motivated by his anti-blackness towards Martin, but the hoodie provided an object to direct his racially motivated suspicion, and thus it became the background for his attack. Here, it is necessary to note that the hoodie does not warrant suspicion by nature. It exists instead as a staple clothing item for any consumer today, popular for its convenience, inexpensiveness, and comfort. In a 2012 press release, for example, clothing manufacturer American Apparel supported the ubiquity of the hoodie by claiming that they sell the “classic garment” to “everyone”: toddlers, entrepreneurs, college students, even dogs. And yet on young black male bodies, the hoodie specifically
F6 indicates a criminality that unsettled Zimmerman into shooting and killing the innocent teenager. In her semiotic analysis of Martin’s hoodie, Mimi Nguyen argues that Zimmerman located suspicion on the garment because it animated the wearer’s body along the preexisting social dynamics that associate his blackness with criminality. She claims that the garment first indexes the body to which it is attached, and secondly, it resembles that body and the qualities associated with it. In this process, the hoodie adopts the perceived characteristics of Martin’s black male body: criminal, threatening, “up to no good,” “on drugs or something.” This conflation of clothing item and human renders the hoodie as a visible, potential threat for Zimmerman, thus warranting initial suspicion on the object and later violence upon the wearer. Following Nguyen’s analysis, one might understand Trayvon Martin’s hoodie as an example of how clothing and other material objects act as visual signs in the construction of racial profiles. Beyond clothing, Nguyen indicates that tattoos and hairstyles similarly constitute the visual cues that profiles organize and associate with a certain race. She also claims that racial profiling is predicated not only on visualizing race through such cues, but also on the structuring of race prior to sight. Zimmerman’s profiling of Trayvon Martin, for example, followed pre-existing racist structures and stereotypes such that the hoodie signified criminality and danger when attached to a black body, specifically. It is in this way that visuals of racial profiles are “fully schematized by racism.” And for African-Americans, the scheme categorizes and renders the black, young male as “de facto criminal”: their bodies read as inherently delinquent and visibly threatening in the racial profile, regardless of whether they committed a crime or not.
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The contingency of racial profiles on both the visual sign and the body becomes apparent in Errazuriz’s Portrait of US, because the installation confronts the viewer with the sign exclusively. In the absence of Martin’s black body, that sign remains passive in form. The black hoodie rests flat against the wall as a harmless thing, never invoking suspicion even as the hood is up. Though the hoodie here has been reproduced and has already been acted upon by violence, it still retains the same physical presence and qualities of objecthood as when Zuckerman observed it on Martin’s body. Yet the viewer’s interpretation of the garment here contrasts directly with that of Zimmerman on the night of the shooting death. When Zimmerman saw it attached to Martin’s moving body, the hoodie animated the racial tensions and forces associated with his male blackness. It then embodied a criminal threat, compelling Zimmerman to shoot Martin. But for the viewer, the distinctions between object and human in Portrait of US are clear: we are the humans, walking around the gallery, inspecting the hoodie as a displayed item and objective symbol of Martin’s death. By both removing us from Zimmerman’s psychology and showing us the material results of it, Errazuriz’s installation highlights the dangerous ways that an object like the hoodie can transform into a sign of suspicion when physically attached to the black body today. But the categorization black Americans into fixed stereotypes based on racial power dynamics is not new: just as racial profiles imbued Trayvon Martin’s body with criminality, so the white colonial gaze inscribed African bodies with inferiority, inhumanity, and enslavement beginning in the sixteenth century. Jasmine Nichole Cobb thus analyzes slavery as a “peculiarly ‘ocular’ institution.” By ocularity, Cobb refers to ways that slavery’s execution predicated on first, constructing a connection between visuality and raciality and secondly, naturalizing that connection in everyday culture. This connection was first established through descriptions and monetary assessments of Africans’ skin color, hair texture, and physicality, which fundamentally positioned black raciality as an “observable phenomenon.” To be seen, then, became a matter of the black object; to see was an experience exclusive to the white subject. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the understanding of sight through this racialized dichotomy rationalized the institution of slavery. The correlation between vision and race then naturalized in slave society when it manifested in hegemonic practices maintaining the white gaze. The institution of slavery itself began with the growing dependence on the white eye to assess black bodies for subjugation, for example. Inspecting African people’s naked bodies to estimate their labor value and chances of survival across the Middle Passage privileged white slavers with the power of sight and decision while simultaneously rendering the Africans into objects to be scrutinized. Slaveholders continued to exercise those powers through their constant surveillance of black slaves once they arrived in New World plantations. Stephanie Camp explains how overseers supervised slaves even outside of work. Overseers would periodically host festivities for slaves, but they would also attend and observe them to enforce their “legitimating presence” and thus control their slaves’ pleasure and enjoyment. In this outline of white surveillance in slave history, it becomes clear that enslavement necessitated a process of white objectification, containment, and then control
F8 over black bodies. The somatic oppression of slaves here connects with the contemporary racial profiling of black teenagers because they both involve what Camp describes as the first of black Americans’ three bodies: the “site of domination.” Camp explains that this first body is fundamentally subjected to larger social forces in ways that preserve institutions of white domination and black subjugation. For slaves, the first body was acted upon by slaveholders’ violence and constant policing, which controlled the black body entirely to maintain systems of enslavement. But for black Americans today, I would argue that the first body is now dominated by the organization and operations of the racial profile. Mapping suspicion, criminality, and threat onto the black male’s first body at once, the profile directs racial stereotypes about African-Americans in order to keep them subjugated in subordinate social positions. But by exhibiting a reproduction of Trayvon Martin’s clothes, Sebastian Errazuriz represents what Camp indicates as African-Americans’ second body: “the body as vehicle of feelings of terror, humiliation, and pain.” This body constituted the subjective experience of black oppression, the constant state of fear and anxiety that it entailed. With a bullet-hole and blood stains, the hoodie and sweatshirt manage to document physical trauma without explicitly referring to flesh and without forgoing its aforementioned formal qualities of object-hood. And importantly, the caption reading “Hooded Sweatshirt Worn by Trayvon Martin,” then assigns ownership of that pain to Martin, and contextualizes the hoodie within his narrative. Errazuriz’s sartorial reproductions thus create and Martin’s second body, effectively preserving his subjective experience as a black teenage male who has been racially profiled. As ghosts and relics of the moment of Martin’s death, the damaged garments symbolize Trayvon Martin’s vulnerabilities to not only Zimmerman’s gun, but also the structural anti-blackness that motivated and manifested in the attack. In addition, Errazuriz exhibits and shares the reproductions as a material evidence of this injustice to which Martin fell victim. Set against a white background on white walls, labeled and displayed objectively between panes of glass, the articles of clothing resemble criminal evidence to be presented at a court case. In this form, Errazuriz’s piece invites the viewer to closely inspect the garments and then evaluate them as proof of not only Trayvon’s unjust death, but also the structural anti-blackness that motivated it. Further supporting this invitation is the fact that Storefront, the gallery where Portrait of US is displayed, readily encourages visitors to enter by architecturally blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior and allowing free admission. It is through this open access and evidential form that the installation distributes the power of gaze, which has historically been used by institutional forces to control black Americans’ first bodies. Errazuriz cannot restructure the ocular power of those forces, but by publically presenting Martin’s clothes as evidence of injustice, he democratizes the privilege of sight and decision for viewers and thus allows them to intellectually engage with the social implications of Martin’s shooting. Having established how corporeal constraints similarly ground the histories of black oppression, one should now investigate the ways in which African-Americans resisted through fashion. When provided the rare opportunity, black slaves chose to self-style their clothing to activate what Camp describes as their third and final body: “a thing to be claimed and enjoyed.” Standard poor-quality slave attire reified slaves’ status as
F9 commodified units of labor, so many slaves sought to create and wear their own clothes to articulate their tastes and dignify themselves. To this end, some female slaves performed additional labor of growing cotton, gathering berries for dyes, and weaving cloth to sew personally stylized garments. And according to Sophie White, male slaves, too, fashioned themselves, often by stealing and appropriating European styles of clothing to outwardly signal codes of masculinity. In these ways, sartorial expression allowed African Americans to enjoy and take pride in their own bodies even as those same bodies were owned and abused under the institution of slavery. To continue, protests against Trayvon Martin’s death surfaced in the form of sartorial expression, too, but fashion served to unify different people rather than express one’s individuality. In New York City, Philadelphia, and other cities nationwide, activists organized “Million Hoodie Marches” and encouraged attending protesters to wear the classic hoodie. Online as well, citizens circulated selfies of themselves wearing hoodies with the caption “#WeAreTrayvonMartin” and “#HoodiesUp.” In these gestures of relating to an innocent Trayvon Martin, the hoodie becomes a uniform, a passive garment shared by thousands of people of different races, genders, and ages. This sartorial tactic unifies a diverse human collective in order to critique the injustice of the racial profile that insists on organizing the hoodie as a sign of black criminality. In confusing and disturbing that sign by wearing it all together, the protesters fight for the freedom of black Americans to fashion themselves in certain clothing without the oppressive fear of being institutionally targeted and profiled as Trayvon Martin was. Though African slaves and “Million Hoodie March” protesters practiced fashion as resistance in these opposite ways during their respective histories, the mutual goal driving their sartorial choices was to reclaim ownership over the black body. If structures of race located enslavement and criminality onto black bodies through visual signifiers, then they attempted to reestablish agency over their own bodies and destabilize such oppressive constraints through fashion. The human body, after all, is the “most basic political resource” according to Dorinda Outram, because it is simultaneously one’s most private and most public experience. Great quote!! Thus does fashion provide an especially ripe opportunity for black Americans to radically reclaim their bodies. Through personal clothing choice (whether individualized or standard) black Americans regain the agency to share their private tastes or shape their public image. And, in doing so, they disrupt the similarly oppressive ways in which the colonial white gaze and the racial profile attempt to control and constrain their black bodies into racial stereotypes. Returning again to Portrait of US, Errazuriz borrows the resistance strategies popularized by Trayvon Martin protests by also inviting his viewers to buy and wear massproduced replicas of the hoodie he displayed. However, Errazuriz’s specific attempt at building solidarity through this sartorial tactic falls short of recognizing the social nuances embedded in the hoodie as a sign of the racial profile. Errazuriz invites people to wear reproductions of Martin’s shot and bloodied garment whereas the “Million Hoodies March” encouraged people to don one of their own hoodies. Here, the artist overlooks the fact that the hoodie warrants suspicion and violence specifically when it is attached to the black body. For that reason, it would be problematic for non-black consumers to wear Errazuriz’s
F10 reproduced version of Martin’s real hoodie, of whose violation by Zimmerman was contingent on Martin’s blackness. If non-black consumers were to do so, they would be wrongfully victimizing themselves as targets of a racial profile that does not actually constrain their bodies. That is, in wearing Martin’s reproduced hoodie, they are not reclaiming their bodies from anything; instead, they distract from the somatic oppression of those who are in fact deemed criminal when attached to the hoodie. While Errazuriz attempts to participate in sartorial methods of resistance here, his mass replication and distribution of Martin’s hoodie fails to effectively use clothing as a means to destabilize the oppressive racial profile. To close, an analysis into the title of Errazuriz’s installation seems fitting in that Portrait of US suggests a critical evaluation of contemporary American society. Errazuriz uses the word “portrait” to cite a representation of one’s body that is traditionally called upon to depict one’s personal characteristics. However, his piece does not actually depict human flesh, exhibiting a bloodied, bullet-proofed hoodie instead. When contextualized as a reproduction of the hoodie that Trayvon Martin wore on his death, the hoodie suddenly signifies the subjective experience of Martin’s trauma as a black male, and the racial profile that confers his blackness with criminality all at once. So, when he refers to this hoodie as a “portrait” of something, Errazuriz indexes it as first, a symbol that characterizes the complex social relationships in American society and secondly, the site wherein those relationships manifest. And finally, the full title Portrait of US implies a semantic ambiguity that prompts one to consider Errazuriz’s message. Errazuriz might be referring to the acronym for “United States” to establish his installation as a documentation of current social climate in the nation. Or, Errazuriz might be using the personal pronoun “us” instead, thus interpellating the viewers and himself as participants and observers within the social inequalities to which his piece responds. The intentionality behind Eurazzuriz’s word choice remains unclear. In either case, however, the artist encourages the viewer to question the role of fashion objects such as the hoodie in constructing, mediating, and resisting power relationships based on race.
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Clothing as Language: Visual and Sartorial Racial Hierarchies in Slavery by Cahleb E. Derry Clothing exists for numerous ostensible purposes, ranging from utilitarian reasons and protection of the body to expression of one’s identity and beliefs. Clothing is also typically used to denote status and hierarchies in ordinary settings as well; CEOs and Vice Presidents of companies fashion themselves differently and more formally than entry-level employees, while people such as police officers, construction workers, and firefighters wear uniforms to denote their roles in society. However, at the nexus of each aspect of sartorial classification aforementioned, there is a certain agency in that sartorial label. Whether it be the uniform or the position itself, the subjects involved had a degree of agency in deciding what they would fashion their bodies with. However, when clothing was used to denote status and establish partitions between slave master and slave, those who were fashioned to be lower on the hierarchy had no agency in their position nor the clothing that communicated it. Fashion has long served as a lens through which racial hierarchies were materialized. Especially in the institution of slavery, clothing became a way to denote status within the white race in terms of property ownership and wealth. Much of this labeling and marking through fashion continues today as white-owned and Eurocentric fashion brands are constituted as high-class, and black-owned, urban-aligned brands are constituted as the opposite—“ghetto and ratchet.” Clothing and lack thereof on black bodies has long been a method of marking black people as inferior and establishing their inadequacy as citizens. The importance of fashion in how it constructs narratives was especially apparent to slaves in their transition to freedom post emancipation: "After the war started, I ran off and joined the army ... I was sent to Tullahoma for training. This was the biggest thing that ever happened in my life. I felt like a man, with a uniform on and a gun in my hand ..."Even as a soldier in a war for a country that actively oppressed him, this slave gained his own sense of personhood by being able to sport a uniform, that he more or less chose, which communicated status—he felt like a “man” for the first time. This testimony is one of many that reiterates why fashion served as such a visual language and illustration of racial hierarchies. This power of fashion is especially significant because fashion’s ubiquity as a language not only equips its implications with ample gravitas, but also weaponizes that language when those implications lean negative. The unique relationship that fashion has with racial narratives renders counter narratives and rupture all the more necessary when discussing the connection between fashion, slavery, representation, and citizenship. Many of these counter-narratives are inspired by depictions of black people during slavery, and without the modern-day tools that our society wields today, visual art was ultimately the only viable way of depicting these sartorial hierarchies. Dutch Golden Age painter, Frans Hals, is a prime example of these depictions. His circa 1648 painting, Family Portrait, is pictured below and depicts a “family” portrait of four white people in the foreground and one black child lurking in the shadows of the background. The piece depicts five people all with very different emotions, however one of
F12 the most striking aspects of the portrait is the sartorial aspects—fashion plays a primary role in the othering of the black figure in the background of the ground. The use of dress in this portrait is particularly representative of how dress was constantly utilized as a weapon to designate and other during slavery. This is further reemphasized by various appropriations of the image, such as Titus Kaphar’s 2017 mimesis of the image entitled Shifting the Gaze. The explicit and implicit ways in which Hals isolates the black figure in an effort to diminish his significance can be clearly seen through fashion, and act as larger embodiments of how fashion serves as a visual language for racial hierarchies during slavery.
The overall composition of the piece utilizes a uniformity in the color white that distinctly includes and excludes the young boy, reinforcing his lower place in society. The four white figures—a mother, a father, a son and a daughter—sport very similar outfits. They all wear white laced collars of some sort, even the young boy, that of the mother being the most elaborate. There is an emphasis on accents of white lace on each of their attire, signaling a sense of purity and opulence—it is present on each of their collars, and on the knees and ankles of the father and the son. This presence of white is consistent with the gloves of the wife, again a clear signal of opulence. Although the black boy is fashioned with the white lace color, presumably in an effort to relate him to the family in some way, none of his other body parts are showcased thus the viewer does not know if he sports the white lace in any other form. The presence of white in the family’s dress echoes their distinctly pale
F13 features as well. Drawing black figures in the Netherlands in 1636 was quite difficult considering the lack of representation of black faces in everyday society, and this is evident in how unclear the black boy’s facial features are. The distinct white that is present in the lace evokes not only purity and opulence, but also the clarity with which white faces were drawn in 1636 due to their position in society. The consistency in composition is evident in the coloring and composition of the full ensembles of the family as well, which more clearly exclude the black boy in the painting. The father dons a tall black hat, a black velvet costume, wristhands, and high riding-boots lined on the inside. His tall hat communicates his wealth and stature while also increasing his height in the image, clearly rendering him as the tallest one in the image. The decision on Hals to fashion the white paternal figure as the tallest point of the image through the use of the hat directly juxtaposes him with the shortest person in the image, the black boy. The man’s youthful son stands to his left, also sporting a similar black hat to his father, a black velvet jacket with a collar and wristbands, breeches, and shoes. Hals placement of the same tall black hat on the youth in the painting further positions this young child as higher in stature than the black boy. Interestingly, although the young black boy appears youthful in size, his facial construction renders him slightly older than one would glean. If he is indeed the age his facial features imply, his lower social positioning despite his age only further reinforces the hierarchy being presented. By likening the white youth to his father, Hals successfully isolates the black boy as different and uninvolved. The viewer knows how crucial the black boy’s labor is to the success of the family, but he is excluded regardless. The women in the portrait also sport similar attire as the father and son—they both wear greenish grey and brown ensembles that match the color scheme of the father and son. The maternal figure wears fully lace-trimmed ensemble, consisting of a greenish-grey dress with a black bodice and over-skirt with yellow bows, and a white cap, collar, and wristbands. The presence of a bodice, a piece of attire that indicated a certain type of wealth in European during the 16th and 17th century, further emphasizes the discrepancies in social status between the white family and black boy. The daughter gazes off towards the left foreground and she holds a closed fan, wears a dark dress, a white headdress with red ornaments, a thin white collar, and wristbands. Her dress completely mirrors that of the mother, and the dull and indiscriminate green and grey color scheme of the family’s clothing is consistent in her dress. Her white gloves also connote regality, as well as the presence of her fan. Beside her to the right crouches a poodle, which is one of the most poignant parts of the image—the poodle’s color is the only color that is reminiscent of the color of the young black boy’s garb which perhaps likens them to one another. However, the poodle is still granted more positional citizenship and humanity than the black child—the black child lurks behind the family and does not stand in line with them. The poodle, although difficult to spot in the similarly colored landscape, stands further into the foreground of the portrait than the young black boy. This positioning and isolation vis-à-vis attire and coloring places the black boy at the bottom of the hierarchy in this painting, and acts as a larger depiction of his place in society. The first figure on the far left, a young boy, is situated in conversation with the young black boy who looms in the shadows, further evidence of how his dress is utilized to typify the young black boy and reinforce his own place in society. The son has a smirk on his face,
F14 communicating that he is so acutely aware that he belongs in this piece and in this space. His eyes are the only eyes within the family that make direct contact with the viewer, breaking a wall that the mother, father, and daughter do not as they converse and lock eyes with one another. However, the only other figure in the piece who also breaks that wall is the young black slave—his eyes lock with the viewer and communicate pure despair. The only two figures communicating with the viewer are the two young boys, however the young black boy’s inferiority is reified in numerous ways. As previously stated, the young white boy is positioned to belong in the portrait while the black boy is not, both physically and sartorially. However, the facial expressions that the two make communicate even more precisely how much they belong. The difference in expression is even more eerie considering any and all rendering of black bodies came from the little that they saw of them during that time, implying that the black bodies who they saw often had this type of dejected facial expression. As the two young boys lock eyes with the viewer, not only do their faces contrast but their attire does. They share the same white lace collar, and both hold bows or sticks of some sort in their hands. However, one can glean that the young boy utilizes his bow for sport or an activity, while the young black boy utilizes his for labor. The young white boy’s bow is down on the ground, extending him even further into the foreground, while the black boy’s arrow is sticking upright and pointed behind him, pushing him further into the background. This accessory is an act of fashioning that likens the two figures, then starkly demonstrates their difference. Furthermore, the coloring of the clothing of the black boy both isolates him as other while also blending him into the general landscape behind him. His orange-brown shirt and poorly detailed brown skin render him as almost a silhouette, while the detailed pale white skin and elaborate, neutrally colored attire of the white family and the son accentuate their features and discern them from the naturistic background around them. There is a distinct power in the autonomy needed to demonstrate one’s full ensemble and hold full control over the movements of your body, and the black boy is denied that as he lurks in the shadows. Each family members’ limbs, torso and garb are completely free to operate, function and solicit visual attention, while the black boy is forced into a single spot, his specificities barely discernable. The composition of the piece inherently subjugates the black boy in how most of his body and ensemble are concealed. The piece is also in conversation with present day erasure, and this is communicated through an appropriation by artist Titus Kaphar which highlights how the young black boy is othered and erased. The 2016 piece below, entitled Shifting the Gaze, is what Kaphar envisioned as an amendment of history. Kaphar explains that oppressive history must not be erased, but instead amended in order to force people to consider the narratives erased by this history. He covers each member of the family in a transparent white paint-oil mixture in order to draw attention to the black figure but still reveal the figures behind the white paint. Kaphar also repaints the image, in order to draw more attention to the detail that was compromised in the construction of the young black boy. He highlights his discontented facial expression, and notably brightens his clothing in order to individualize and characterize the figure. Kaphar’s decision to grant his face the visual youth that was denied in the original piece further speaks to how black narratives are skewed and mangled in an effort to erase. As a result of Kaphar’s reimagining of the young black boy, one is forced to
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ask what his story is. The viewer begs the question of—to what extent does this figure lack autonomy and agency? What narrative is being erased with his placement in the image as a member of the foreground, othered by his ensemble and de-individualized by his sartorial rapport with the landscape and the poodle? Kaphar further highlights how fashion plays a role in the young black boy’s involuntary seclusion by subverting the implications of the original image and ultimately providing a narrative to the young boy. Furthermore, by eliminating any pieces of attire or objects for the young slave to be compared to, Kaphar forces to viewer to stare at the figure in isolation. Kaphar allows his blackness, his attire, and his visage to exist not in terms of whiteness, but instead independently. As an ocular-institution and dictator of class and hierarchies, fashion has boundless implications. Hals 17th century work precisely highlights how the sartorial can instantiate racial hierarchies while consequently effacing the narratives of those at the bottom of those hierarchies. Appropriations such as Kaphar’s provide a voice and perspective to these erased narratives, returning agency to the subjects who lost it and complicating commonly accepted historical narratives. Clothing controls black bodies in a way that forces them to be scrutinized in terms of whiteness. Whether the conversation is discourse regarding the
F16 undressing and redressing of black bodies throughout slavery, or a dispute about the validity of J. Crew, Vineyard Vines or Adidas on a black body, black fashion is constantly politicized. The young boy in that portrait, othered by his attire and the composition of the piece, is representative of the ways in which fashion reified hierarchies throughout slavery, and continues to do in overt and covert ways in the present day.
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Let Freedom Ring From a Macbook: Yeezy Season 3, TIDAL, The Life of Pablo, and Dominating the Capital by Jack Goldfisher “Record contracts are just like...I’m gonna say the word, slavery.” - Prince “All members of the working classes must seize the means of production. This, naturally, includes black people. But as I said before, to do this we must become psychologically free so that we can be fully capable of meaningful self-determination.” - Huey Newton Attempting to untangle the interrelated histories of the music business and the racial history of the United States is a daunting, if not impossible, task. Not only does any modernday top 100 chart feature a preponderance of hip-hop and rap, a relatively new addition to the musical canon developed almost exclusively by black artists, but as far back as 1890, when former slave George W. Johnson became the first black vocalist to record songs commercially, black artists have been an integral part of the mass media music machine. As writers, producers, performers, and more recently agents and imprint founders, blacks have been hugely responsible for the creation and growth of the modern American record industry. Throughout the extended burn that was North American slavery, black communities maintained their expertise, rhythmic practices, and cultural traditions, afterwards blending them with those from Ireland, South America, and all across the world to develop unique—and, for the first time, truly American—musical forms. Famously, black artists have been credited with developing the sonic landscapes of blues, jazz, and rock and roll. All throughout this long history, black artists played crucial roles in catalyzing drastic economic, technological, and cultural shifts. Ultimately, though, for the vast majority of this deeply-rooted relationship, the reins of power have been exclusively held by record producers, label executives, and distribution attorneys. These positions of influence and personal economic uplift, as many others in the country, have belonged primarily to whites. Accordingly, financial returns from the entire music industry have accrued much more consistently, and on a much wider scale, to whites than to blacks. As exemplified by Prince’s now infamous quote, contracts sometimes the captivity of slavery in direct ways. Black artists, often trapped by relative inexperience with fine print and coming from a place of heightened economic desperation, have felt deprived of the opportunities to own what they so intensely labor for. In recent years, black artists have been handed the keys to many of their own music labels—J. Cole’s Dreamville Entertainment, Diddy’s Bad Boy Records, and Future’s Freebandz, among others. More often than not, though, these labels are merely imprints, subsidiaries of multinational entertainment monoliths like Sony, Universal, or
F18 Warner. Clearly, this represents progress towards an ideal profit sharing model, but the business as a whole remains a long way away from anything resembling parity. The industry’s unequal rewards structure has only worsened with the advent of streaming services, which further disenfranchise musical artists, still the section of the industry with the most visible black representation. However, a 56-million-dollar acquisition in January 2015 would change this entire landscape. Shawn Carter, better known as JAY-Z, bought TIDAL and threw a launch party promising a more even distribution of profits in the music industry. The streaming service, owned by artists themselves, would need bravery and buyin to move the mountainous infrastructure already in place, and the launch party demonstrated just that. Though the company was indeed owned by artists of every race, the launch event featured speeches and appearances from Alicia Keys, J. Cole, Beyoncé, and Usher, among others. At the time, the momentum of the project was undeniable. For the first time, perhaps, black artists were beginning to seize control of the industry they helped build.
While the economic structure of the industry has been unkind to perhaps its most necessary and public labor force, it has not stopped the unchecked explosion of American pop music on an unprecedented global scale in the past half-century. It is hard to argue that ties between music and other forms of mainstream American culture have done anything but strengthen greatly since end of World War II and the beginning of what Lizabeth Cohen has called the consumer’s republic. It was largely in this era when, even while haunted by phantom rocket whistles forbearing the end of days, people’s focus was continually drawn to
F19 pop music icons who began to be associated with profound cultural and historical movements, as well as the quotidian. Of course, many cultural scholars would argue that one could not tell a history of the 1960s without B-roll of hippies and Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” as a backing track. Ditto for the 1970s—footage from the frontlines of Vietnam and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”—or the 80s and Public Enemy’s anthemic “Fight the Power.” More than just the overtly political ballads, though, one would need to feature The Beatles, The Jackson 5, and Prince. Recently, though, the relationship between the artists and the cultures that birth and nurture them has been complicated even further. Since the dawn of the Internet Age, the artistic landscape has seen the rise of the multihyphenate in ways that would have been inconceivable a few decades prior. In the age of the immediate download—and as if not more importantly, upload—musicians are actors, designers, rappers, and bloggers. From Donald Glover’s Childish Gambino and Atlanta projects to Beyoncé resurrecting the music video form through Lemonade while also tending to multiple clothing brands, lines distinguishing discrete pieces of pop culture are fading rapidly. Singular icons, idols of the era, stand atop these massive and growing artistic business empires, stretching their tendrils into visual media, distribution platforms, film production companies, and even food brands, like Migos’s Rap Snacks Dab of Ranch chips. Consumers and critics alike, meanwhile, have appeared to embrace this trend, with Glover’s Atlanta taking home multiple Emmy awards for its first season and Rihanna’s Fenty clothing line selling out en masse. More than any other artist, though, Kanye West epitomizes the trend of singular artist-cum-cultural force. The man once called the Louis Vuitton Don has evolved greatly throughout his career, producing, curating, and performing well enough to earn his own record imprint and unrivaled creative freedom from Universal. For the mainstream audience, however, West arrived at true multi-faceted status with the wildly successful launch of his clothing brand YEEZY. Blurring the lines between homeless and haute, the brand has revolutionized the spaces of culture, fashion, celebrity, and perception in a matter of years. In many ways, the YEEZY season 3 launch was the apotheosis of all of the trends discussed so far. At the show, West not only debuted his third season wares, but also his longawaited seventh studio album The Life of Pablo. The event was live-streamed across the world on computers and even in movie theaters as the first major music release exclusive to TIDAL. The TIDAL X YEEZY x Pablo show represents a cultural artifact capable of informing discussions of race, politics, music, and globalized capitalism in a new era of socalled cultural hero worship. In its visual presentation, exaltation of Kanye as a god figure, subversion of traditional runway styles and etiquette, its complicated relationship with blackness and slavery, and of course its revolutionary teardown of the traditional workings of the music business, the show epitomizes the ways in which traditional power structures are being challenged by modern cultural actors. First and foremost among the subversive elements of the show are the garments themselves, which ranged from women’s bodysuits and headwraps to men’s sneakers and overcoats. Visually, the looks here upend any conception of what luxury is. Of course, West was not the first to introduce so-called “low” culture to high fashion, but the distinct aesthetic exemplified by YEEZY season three stands above all others as a prime example of this artistic device within the realm of clothing. If the standard European (and Euro-influenced
F20 American) dream has been, for some time, exceptional fabrics superbly tailored so as to look elegant, be understated, and project wealth, then YEEZY season three represents a nightmare. Liable to be mistaken for clothes worn by a vagrant, the garments feature drab colors, oversized and boxy fits, and largely utilitarian textiles. YEEZY garments demand sky-high prices for clothing worn by mostly non-white models with a color palette culled from a selection of mostly non-white skin tones, overtly challenging the visual and economic disenfranchisement used to hem in blacks throughout the history of fashion and of institutionalized racism. YEEZY season three garments exemplify this trend more than any similar brand, however, as their overtly brand-less nature and overwhelmingly simple construction and silhouette is ostensibly misaligned with their price point, which is equivalent to items in the casual catalog of fashion staples like Burberry, Hugo Boss, and Ermenegildo Zegna. Intentionally curating an aesthetic of disrepair and cast off-ness through a preponderance of rips, tears, fraying, and a generally derelict and dingy tonal palette, West’s designs would not appear to be slated for sustained cultural relevance. Moreover, given the hefty price tags, they would not appear to be destined for much economic success either. The reason that YEEZY is able to be successful is by trading not on traditional forms of cultural or historical cachet, but instead on the reputation of the man with the music files in the laptop, West himself. Crucially, this speaks to the economic viability of the grandiose Pablo x YEEZY show, and its importance in upending the practical workings of the fashion industry’s power landscape, structurally very similar to the model of systemic racial oppression employed in the music business. Locked out of many positions of power in the fashion industry, black brand owners and designers have often been forced to leverage unorthodox forms of cultural cool in order to sell garments. Prime examples of this phenomenon exist in the creation and marketing of the Air Jordan sneaker brand and in FUBU, which stands for For Us, By Us—the “Us” here being black Americans. The reason that YEEZY garments can cost as much as they do becomes evident when one takes a step back. This listening party, fashion unveiling, or whatever exactly the event was, sold out Madison Square Garden. Millions of people watched the event online live or afterwards; many of these same fans caused West’s online store to sell out in minutes. Realistically, they were paying for the brilliance of Kanye West the rapper, producer, designer, cultural figure, and of course media firebrand. This much is clear by the visual presentation of the show, which saw West bathed in a divine fog and spotlight. When he picks up the microphone around the three minute mark after sauntering slowly into the packed arena with a gaggle of his colleagues and a two-pound laptop in hand, he says one syllable: “yeah.” This humble utterance garners applause that would likely drown out the ovation Moses received after communing with God on Mount Sinai. Even without West repeatedly thrusting himself into a divine canon lyrically on Pablo, this reaction alone could convince one of the intensity of West’s fans’ dedication to his every thought. Immediately, West presses a button and “Ultralight Beam,” a rapturous gospel anthem that only reinforces the perception of Kanye himself as holy, streams from West’s laptop throughout the stadium. Given that all of his models and clothes remain covered at this point in the performance, the focus is on West, who simply bobs his head, not even having to actually perform his music to explode the gathered biomass. Fans around the world looked at Kanye’s models, heard Kanye’s music, and paid Kanye their money in a relatively fluid continuum. West has clearly fashioned
F21 himself as the latest and most disruptive in a long line of unconventional black fashion moguls, but has also inverted the entire financial valuation of garment clothing, and with it the power dynamics of the clothing industry. Just as the sheer size of West’s audience served as the validation of—and would go on to provide a rabid market for—a theoretically overpriced garment, so too did it meaningfully validate JAY-Z’s TIDAL venture in ways both cultural and economic. That the Pablo x YEEZY spectacular was live-streamed exclusively on TIDAL, and that the album itself was released only on the artist-owned service, speak to another meaningful historical contribution of the YEEZY show. TIDAL, in a strict socialist framework, represents an attempt to reclaim the means of production (in this case, more literally distribution) from the owners of capital who are disconnected from the product of the industry in which they operate, and are reaping an undue amount of the profits. In much a similar way as the aforementioned FUBU—or, interestingly, Farrakhan’s 1985 POWER venture, which attempted to develop a line of black-produced, black-distributed, and blackcentric household necessities—TIDAL was a strike at entrenched white industry executives. Creatively, the Pablo project demonstrates the increased creative freedom that artists could expect with TIDAL. West changed the name of the album three times, continued to edit songs, and added and removed multiple tracks from the album after its release on the streaming service. He would claim that these changes were in pursuit of a continuously honed artistic vision. Even at the show, text message alerts and sharp speaker jolts from faulty connections to West’s laptop port displayed an aesthetic of unfinished excellence. At seemingly random points throughout the show, West passed his phone and computer to various collaborators, each of whom played snippets of his own work before control of the device was wrested from him by another of West’s famous friends. Meanwhile, the hundred dollar per head audience had effectively paid to watch Kanye and his friends rock out to some unfinished music. Still, though, they cheered. The casual nature of West’s presentation,
F22 and the fact that the multi-million dollar sound system in the arena was being fed by a single cable hooked up to a computer that many in the audience could themselves afford gave the godlike figure West an oxymoronic sense of relatability, too. Much in the same way the season three show inverted traditional systems of clothing valuation, so too did it revise what a creative musical experience could be. With TIDAL, the show seemed to say, albums could be living, breathing pieces of art that brought performers closer to their audiences and perhaps even to one another. In short, they could be culture, power, paradigm shifts, or something else entirely. All of these identities, though, are more complex than mere commercialism. The YEEZY season three show demonstrated this principle, and functioned as an endorsement of the new artist-friendly, streaming-happy musical medium that TIDAL represented. West himself would later proclaim that the show marked the end of the album as the dominant musical form. More important than this relatively abstract endorsement of TIDAL, though, was what a Kanye West cosign did economically for JAY-Z’s service. Paid subscriptions to TIDAL reportedly doubled after West released Pablo exclusively on the service, and later plummeted when he ported the album to Apple Music and Spotify after having a falling out with the company. Certainly, this show wielded immense power in the realms of culture, fashion, and concrete economics. It represented uplift and subversion, which by that point in West’s career were par for the course. Furthermore, as discussed, each of these elements speaks implicitly to West’s outlook on race relations, black empowerment, and the long history of slavery. However, the show’s most striking statement on these topics may have been its visual similarity to a United States slave market. By overtly organizing the visual architecture of the YEEZY show around strict hierarchies of power and observation that mirror a slave market, West reinforces the show’s subversive identity. In presenting the models as robotic, even to the extreme degree of being non-human, and stripping them of any agency, West seems to be communicating a belief that the industries of fashion and art are plagued by a sort of pseudo-slavery culture. Literally, the models are elevated on platforms and illuminated in the center of an arena designed specifically for spectator events like sports games and concerts. This visual hierarchy, in which the product and person are nearly indistinguishable—an effect only heightened by the show’s preponderance of skin-tone garments—closely resembles a scene of bodies at auction. This effect is reinforced by the tight rows and columns in which the models are arranged. Interestingly, many depictions of actual slave auctions don’t display this kind of rigid physical grouping, so the show isn’t attempting to literally reflect the historical realities of these auctions. Instead, it is attempting to communicate through this presentation the core of the issue, which is commodification of the human body and suppression of the human spirit. Along with the relationship of the models to their audience, their physical arrangement does so in an overt and powerful way. More than just in its outward visual presentation, however, the show’s hierarchies and power dynamics recall those of slavery. West gave all of his models a list of 38 instructions, primarily of what they were not allowed to do, before the show. This list, presented in all capital letters, reads as an aggressive stripping away of any physical and emotional agency that the models have to a cartoonish degree. The effect of these rules, and their being made public, further blurs the line between human and commodity in the YEEZY show. Of course, the models were paid for their work, but in the overall architecture of the show they exist only as subservient to the rules of their master. Ultimately, as West’s project are often wont to do, the season three show attempts to
F23 comment on a number of interrelated, but meaningfully unique issues. While some elements of its comments on these matters end up as complex and convoluted as the matters themselves, the tone of the show is without question one of loud, ecstatic subversion and inversion of entrenched power structures. From its visual language to the practicalities of its presentation and reception, the event will likely come to be understood as a crucial inflection point in the histories of the music and fashion industries, and perhaps in the history of race in the United States as a whole.  
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Esclavitud perpetua: Perpetual Slavery in the Lives of Colombian Palenqueras by Julissa Higgins Existing scholarship about past—and modern-day—slavery rarely cite Colombia, often focusing instead on places like Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. But Cartagena, Colombia was one of the largest slave ports in South America during the times of slavery. In fact, before the early 1600’s, the only place in Spanish America where African slaves could be legally imported was Cartagena. As a result, Colombia currently has the second highest population of Afro-Latin Americans in South America, only second to Brazil. This large influx of slaves resulted largely because of a rapidly declining population of Colombia’s indigenous populations. The slaves that fought to be free or ran away were known as cimarrones, and lived in towns called palenques. It is from the name of these towns that the word palenqueras originates. In fact, the palenqueras of Cartagena come from a neighboring town called San Basilio de Palenque, which was where the first free Africans in the Americas who gained recognition from the Spanish Crown were from. While they are considered to be some of the first free slaves, slavery is still a major part of their identity and palenqueras still face many of the same issues that Afro-Colombians whose ancestors were not freed in the late 1600’s face. The palenqueras in Cartagena, some who still live in San Basilio de Palenque and others who have permanently moved to Cartagena, are fruit-sellers but many earn most of their wages by posing with tourists. In fact, if tourism wasn’t such a large part of their meager earnings, it is hard to believe they would be wearing such elaborate dresses under the hot Colombian sun. As women who pose for tourist photography in traditional dresses, it is clear that what they do is play into notions of Colombian-hood for a foreign-public. That is, they present an image of Colombian identity to the rest of the world that often excludes them from the narrative altogether. This is the tension that we will explore in this essay. Despite such a heavily Afro-descendant population in Colombia, the country still grapples with racial issues. More specifically, there are a plethora of issues that disproportionately affect Afro-Colombians: among these are a lack of access to a basic education, displacement, low-paying, difficult jobs, and erasure on a national level. In fact, the average education level of an Afro-Colombians is 30 years behind that of their white counterparts; 17% of all displaced people in the country are Afro-Colombians, largely due to disproportionately high violence levels in their regions; there are very few, if any, AfroColombians that hold public office or are the head of private companies, and most are affected by an unspoken of caste system that forces them into menial labor; they are widely unrepresented in politics but also in the country’s census statistics; and, there has often been criticism that “since colonial times, nation identity and notions of ‘Colombian-hood’ have been constructed by purposely excluding those of African and indigenous descent, but most of all those of African descent.”
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Given these facts it is not difficult to see how even freed slaves, some of which are now Cartagena’s palenqueras, still face the same racial issues as their counterparts whose ancestors were not freed earlier because they are woven into the fabric of the Colombian racial system. The darker their skin, the more likely they are to be discriminated against, as Colombia works on an official stratus system, that separates people into different socioeconomic classes. The palenquera is no exception. As we will explore, this image of the palenquera above is interesting for many reasons. For one, this woman is dressed as a traditional palenquera and, as such, plays into notions of nationalism and Colombian identity despite being both erased and disproportionately targeted by the stratus system she operates in. In the essay that follows, I argue that while palenqueras are descendants from freed slaves, the vestiges of slavery from their past, and from the past of their Afro-Colombian counterparts, are still present; the image of the palenquera above, a woman who despite her status as a cultural icon still lives in poverty and holds a menial job is proof of this. Despite the beautiful, colorful façade there is not much that is trivial or light-hearted in this image; in fact, her dress, the background, and the fruit basket all seem to forget her, to hide her. It is easy for the viewer to glimpse over her replaceable body, with so many other palenqueras who do the same job and wear the same dress. She is erased, and almost left behind, by the vibrancy of the image. She is not being photographed because she is a cultural icon of beauty but only because her body is able to display the bright Colombian flag. She is a forgotten part of society, facing erasure because of her status as a woman, as an elder, but perhaps most of all because of her Afro-Colombian
F26 identity and dark skin. The woman in the image almost seems to know this, her face either looking ‘bored’ as the Irish photographer writes in her caption, or worn down. The dress style of a palenquera does not differ much from woman to woman. Their brightly colored polleras, or traditional skirts, have become one of the staples that has helped to create their status as cultural icons in Colombia. As such, their dress is almost a trademark of their identity and helps to reveal the ways in which this identity is inextricably linked to a past of slavery and nationalism. One of the first things that stands out from her costume is probably her head wrap. It is rare to see a palenquera without one. Today, head wraps are not popular among Colombians as adornments to be worn out in public. Most women of African descent typically opt for their natural hair, using head wraps only at home. The reason it is part of a palenquera’s uniform is because the dresses they wear are the traditional dresses that have worn by palenqueras for decades. This head wrap was once a very popular form of adornment, particularly among Afro-Colombian women along Colombia’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Back then, as they do now, head wraps were used both for bodily adornment but also for utilitarian purposes; they protect natural hair. One of the most important things that the head wrap signals here is the African origin of these women. In her essay “Black Hair/Style Politics” Kobena Mercer argues that hair is one of the most important racial signifiers. In covering, protecting, and adorning hair of Afro-Colombian women, the head wrap enters this conversation as an adornment that is racialized. In this case, it is clear it is used—at least partly—for adornment purposes: the vibrant blue of the head-wrap matches the color of her dress. She also uses a red flower, another common accessory of traditional Colombian dress to further embellish it. But the fact that this head wrap is part of the traditional dress of the palenqueras also makes it a part of a national conversation on identity. This head wrap informs what it means to be an Afro-Colombian woman, creates and cultivates a visual representation of identity among these women. Even more so, however, it creates and cultivates a visual representation of what it means to be an AfroColombian woman for the rest of the world, for the tourists that enter the walls of Cartagena’s walled city. The dress that the palenquera wears in this image is a traditional Colombian pollera. It is the same style of dress that cumbia dancers wear. Over time, the pollera has become a symbol of national identity and has been used as a tool of nation building. One of Colombia’s most popular traditional songs that Ana Maria Tamayo Duque explores in her essay is titled “La Pollera Colora”—or The Red Pollera—and is considered by many to be Colombia’s “Unofficial National Anthem.” It is not difficult to see, given this example, the importance that the pollera is given in Colombian conceptions of identity. But an important part of the history of the pollera, as Tamayo Duque points out, is the body that traditionally wears it. In fact, the traditional cumbiambera, or cumbia dancer, is typically a woman of either African or indigenous descent. In either case, it is usually a darker-skinned woman who is the ‘color of the brown leather drums.’ Though it is not often spoken of, or acknowledged in popular national discourse, this is the kind of woman who has a history of slavery and colonialism in her past. The fact that this is the traditional dress of a palenquera
F27 is not surprising, but it still serves as a reminder of her history as a woman descendant of slaves. The palenquera also plays into this theme of traditional Colombian-hood by wearing the pollera. She does not do this to connect to her culture or establish her identity within a society. As we will later discuss in further detail, she is playing into notions of nationalism for an outsider’s eyes; by wearing this pollera and becoming a symbol of her nation she is able to barely make a living wage taking pictures with tourists. Although there is not much information on the photographer who posts travel photography on Flickr, except for the fact that she is originally from Ireland, we know that, when taking images of these women and of Colombia, she comes in with an outsider’s gaze. This is not unlike the gaze that other tourists have when visiting the country. The colors in this dress are also important. Although not all palenqueras wear polleras with the colors of the Colombian flag, many do as a sign of patriotism. There is a popular Colombian song that I have reproduced below that explains what the three colors of Colombia’s flag represent. ¡La bandera de Colombia es muy linda, si señor! Ella tiene tres colores y por eso es tricolor. Amarillo es el oro, el azul el ancho mar, y el rojo es la sangre que nos dio la libertad. The yellow represents ‘gold,’ or Colombia’s wealth; the blue represents the ‘vast sea,’ likely a reference to the fact that Colombia is the only country in South America that has two coastlines; the red represents ‘the blood that gave us our liberty.’ But whether or not we agree with the symbolisms attached to each color, we might agree that the colors are an important part of national identity and of what the people pride themselves on. The fact that the dress is made up only these three colors is a way in which these women are promoting a sense of unified national identity. This sense of a unified Colombia is possible because Colombia claims to be a country that is race-blind. In reality, however, Colombia is a place where regional identities are stronger than national identities, and where regional identities are often characterized by the predominant racial makeup of the area. Colombia’s pacific coast, for example, is home to one of the largest demographics of Afro-Colombians in the nation, and is also one of the poorest areas of the nation, as a great majority of the country’s resources are channeled inland in the predominantly white capital city and its surroundings. It is difficult to argue that Colombia is as unified as the proud demonstration of the country’s colors on her dress show. The palenquera in the image is almost a walking contradiction: a ‘proud’ Afro-Colombian woman who has been exploited by the system of the country she appears to revere. Though over a century has passed since Colombia abolished slavery, AfroColombians still find themselves in its binds. The labor that palenqueras and other people of African-descent must endure to make a barely-living wage is a testament to this. Returning to the song that defined what colors on Colombia’s flag mean, it is this blood of martyrs that granted Colombia its liberty. We must ask ourselves, however, who it is that is granted liberty and who it is that has shed blood. One might argue, given the gross invisibility that people of African and indigenous descent face in Colombia that this promised liberty is not
F28 meant for them. One might also argue, given Colombia’s history with slavery that still manifests itself into the present day that it is the Afro-Colombians whose blood has been shed to build the country that exists today. That much does not contradict the use of the Colombian flag as an adornment on her body. It is her body that holds the country—and flag —up. It is on her shoulders that a few can find liberty. And while she does this, the dress hides her, makes her invisible, renders her nothing but a backdrop on a tourists’ photo, a prop. The fruit basket that is being held up by the two stacked, plastic chairs is one of the most important parts of her persona. For one, while this basket is traditionally carried on their heads or in their hands, the fact that it is being placed on plastic chairs communicates that she might be tired from holding it up to put on the spectacle for tourists. This palenquera might be on a break from selling fruit or has no customers but, either way, it is clear that she is also on a break from her performance as a cultural icon for tourists. But we also know that her main job is to sell to tourists because while the fruits she sells are native to Colombia, they are not the typical fruits that Colombians regularly eat. More popular fruits include lulo, pitaya, tomate de árbol, and guanábana. The fruits that these women sell are apt for foreigners who have never tasted more traditional fruits and who might not be accustomed to the taste. Bananas and watermelons, in contrast, are a safe bet. A foreigner might not even notice that these fruits are not the ones that are typically enjoyed by most Colombians because to an outsider’s view they are still tropical fruits.
F29 But fruits are also sustenance, both in that they can provide nutritional value but also monetary value for the palenquera. They are a sign of Colombia’s fertility, providing food to its inhabitants, a symbol the palenquera takes on by being a purveyor of fruits. It is not unusual that a woman takes the role of fruit seller, particularly as it is the female body that is often thought of as being connected to the land, a physical representation of the nationalistic image of Colombia. In another way, the fruit is also a purveyor of economic value for the palenquera. Whether or not it is her main source of income, it allows her to attract tourists in the first place. Without having some sort of performative role, “the fruit seller,” she would have no income from people who pay to take pictures with, and of, her. Finally, the fruits are so generic that they might even be confused for props, as being purely for decoration or adornment. This also lays claim to the performative role she plays. What is important is not whether or not they actually are fake fruits but that they could be. Whether or not they are real does not matter much to tourists who do not buy the fruit and only pay to take a picture. It is difficult to tell from a photograph, after all, whether something is plastic or not and, as such, this aspect of the fruit does not contribute much to authenticity of the performance. If it did, the fruits would not be bananas and pineapples but, perhaps, lulos and guanábanas. But the dress of the palenquera in the image is not the only thing that is striking. Her expression also reveals something about her condition. Her face looks somber, tired, no longer youthful, wrinkled, particularly as it is juxtaposed to the vibrancy of the wall in the background, a trademark of Cartagena’s walled city. This is important considering that most palenqueras, mimicking the vitality of the city, are meant to be happy and smiling, as if to demonstrate pride in their performance. The woman does not look neither happy nor prideful. Instead, her face seems to communicate something about her identity that most images of palenqueras do not. On the one hand, if the woman in the image is simply tired, it is a demonstration of the travail she must endure even at her age to be able to survive in Colombia. On the other hand, the image seems to communicate that her work is not only tiring but exploitative. This is one of the remnants of slavery and of the denigration of the black (female) body in Colombia. What the image shows is the reality of her present condition. The reason this image is so powerful is not only because of the dress and accessories but because if her face looked any different, this image would communicate a completely different message. The reality is that only a person of her skin color would be doing the kind of work she does. Most, if not all, palenqueras, by definition are black women, of African descent. Colombia is a nation that has been built upon the backs of slaves and the descendants of slaves. There is a caste system that is not spoken of; jobs are often determined by skin color and skin tone. The darker one’s skin, the more likely one is to be under conditions of extreme poverty. The palenquera in the first image seems to understand this at a visceral level. This image of the palenquera is a prime example of the ways in which these women who come to Cartagena to sell fruits and take pictures with tourists still grapple with a past of slavery and are intertwined with the process of nation and identity building in Colombia.
F30 Although the ancestors of these women were among the first slaves to be freed in the Americas, they still carry with them the burdens of blackness in a place that, on the one hand, refuses to recognize them and, on the other hand, insists on keeping them in the lowest rung of the social and economic ladders. Slavery endures in Colombia and plays out in seemingly inconspicuous ways—the toil of the people who live under extreme poverty, the erasure of a group in the quest for a whitened national identity; the list goes on. But in thinking about the ways in which slavery seeps into the daily lives of Afro-Colombians we must realize that to them their daily struggle with inequality and erasure is felt, endured, visible.  
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Charleston Slave Badges: A Primary Source Analysis by Matthew Murphy Charleston slave badges refer to the metal squares crafted to identify slaves who were hired out by their owners in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1800s. The badges, typically made of copper or brass, were issued by the government to essentially keep track of slaves as they moved beyond the master’s estate. By legislatively requiring badges to identify slaves outside the master’s estate, representatives of the city government could control, standardize, and effectively limit the employment of slave labor within Charleston’s city boundaries. Slaves found acting in defiance of this law by not wearing the required badge were subject to arrest, taken to jail, and steeply fined. Although many of these objects have survived as antebellum artifacts, there is a dearth of information about these badges, which leaves historians comfortable room for speculation. Numerous urban metropolises in the American South established slave badging legislation – including Norfolk (Virginia), New Orleans (Louisiana), Mobile (Alabama), and Savannah (Georgia). However, Charleston is the only city that implemented and strictly enforced these rigid and formal regulations on ancillary urban slave labor. When properly contextualized, analysis of Charleston slave badges lends historians insight into the experience of urban slaves in the 1800s. Understanding these items through analysis and contextualizing the questions subsequently provoked illuminates the ways in which fashion is an important and useful lens to study slavery. To best analyze these badges as primary sources, it is first enlightening to consider the economics of slave badging in Charleston. Slaves were required to wear this type of identification whenever they were working beyond the purview of their masters. Slave owners were required by law to buy these badges from the Charleston treasurer’s office and renew them each year for a fee. The fees paid for a badge were set according to the label inscribed. While badges that labeled slaves as servants or porters required low fees, badges indicating skilled artisanship such as carpenter, fisherman, or mechanic cost significantly more. This sentence was vague. This suggests the government inserted its power to restrain progressive language in the discussion of slaves as viably skilled Americans. While a slave owner might be disincentivised from hiring out slaves by high badge costs and supplemental taxes, one can comfortably assume hiring out slaves was still profitable for the masters who did. Participating slave owners held total legal rights to all income resulting from ancillary slave labor. This was usually the case, though a division of monies between slaves and their owners seldom existed. Considering the economic motivations of acquiring a slave badge in Charleston, the average cost of a badge was $2 in 1835 – approximately $50 today when adjusted for inflation. The City of Charleston effectively levied a tax on hiring out slaves by establishing the badge requirement. In fact, the City instituted tax breaks for those who did
F32 not hire slaves out and penalized slave owners more harshly with each slave they hired out. Beyond taxing, the number of slaves allowed to be hired out was capped annually. For example, the City of Charleston permitted the creation of 5,000 slave badges for the year 1860. Clearly, the city government sought to discourage and limit this type of hiring out practice that led to greater mobility in the enslaved population. Slave badges were extremely formulaic in the information they conveyed, yet the design of the badge itself differed from year to year. For instance, one copper badge in The Charleston Museum collection is octagon shaped. It is 5 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters long. At the top of the octagon, a small hole is drilled – seemingly to fasten the ID badge to a slave’s clothing or, as was usually the case, around his or her neck like a dog tag necklace donned by today’s American military personnel. Below the tiny hole, “CHARLESTON” is arched in all caps. A tiny star is embossed on either side of the city’s name. It is prominently dated 1813 in a sizable font below the cities name. Below the date, “CARPENTER” is written by a large stamp. “No. 42” is etched in cursive at the bottom. While this badge may represent the typical production of Charleston silversmith John J. Lafar in 1813, other badge makers took different liberties in conveying this information. Another copper badge in the museum’s collection is square shaped; however, the metal crafter decided to orient the badge as a diamond instead. Pivoted on its edge, the badge measures 4.6 centimeters in height and 4.4 centimeters in width. A hole is drilled at the top and the corners of the metal are chamfered to make for a symmetrical sloping edge. In similar fashion to the 1813 badge, “CHARLESTON” is printed semicircular in all caps with tiny stars pressed on either side of the city’s name below the tiny hole at the very top of the diamond. Immediately under the city name, “1588” is prominently engraved to denote slave number. A dotted rectangle beneath this number artfully encases “SERVANT” written above the year 1839 at the very bottom. No maker’s mark is included.
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Although the form was inconsistent, the information featured on Charleston slave badges remained constant. All badges featured the city’s celebrated name, the year, a label denoting the type of labor in which a slave would be participate, and an identification number. To demystify the practice of slave badging in Charleston, a historian should explore these four categories of information in terms of their significance to the person who wore it. First, the prominent inclusion of the city name establishes the confines within which a slave can lawfully operate. Requiring these badges to be worn and including the city’s name reinforces the power of municipal authority; whether a Charleston slave were in the sight of his or her master or not, the City of Charleston was still bounded around the neck to remind the slave of the city’s jurisdiction restricting freedom. Second, the year reminded slaves of the temporariness and contingency of his or her escape from the master’s estate. Third, the labor label served as a reduction of a slave’s humanity. This label told authorities all they needed to know about a slave: what type of labor he or she could lawfully perform beyond the master’s gaze. Lastly, the identification number further lessened a slave to an itemized number. Slaves were not identified by name, but number. The information included on a Charleston slave badge thoroughly reduced a slave from human to object. Tagging/labeling (as if merchandise) is a common marker of commodification. As you know, many slaves were also branded. While the information presented by a slave badge was constant and reduced the humanity of slaves, the differences in design represent the creative liberties white people possessed in directing the black experience in antebellum America. With laws, city officials were able to pin the confines of black movement throughout the South. Furthermore, labor labels were constructed by masters and controlled by government representatives to impose boundaries and restrictions on the quotidian activities in which black people were allowed to participate. The slave badge served as a physical manifestation of the definitions imposed upon slaves in Charleston. The practice of slave badging essentially tagged a human as property and allowed creative sanctity to the imposing racial hierarchy. It is interesting to note that in parallel credence, the City of Charleston required by law that all dogs wear ID tags. To reduce the human status of the enslaved, the city government took creative liberties and crafted subliminal parallels between slaves, objects, and beings of no agency. To hone in on the experience of slaves in Charleston more specifically, it is important to contextualize this antebellum environment. During this time, “the seaport of Charleston” made it “one of the wealthiest and most important cities in the South.” While the popular image of antebellum slavery is that of the rural plantation, it also permeated urban life – as in Charleston, South Carolina. Urban slavery was characterized by mixing between enslaved and free black people as well as white people especially in the workplace. About ten percent of slaves in the Antebellum South lived and worked in cities. These slaves labored across the entire range of economic activities from domestic labor to industrial work. They worked arduously as porters in shipyards doing back-breaking work. Badges were only worn by slaves working in the city; slaves living and working on the rural plantations were not required to wear them. This reflects the complicated nature of enslaved labor in an urban setting. The badges only identified the type of work they were permitted to do. This was strictly enforced by policemen in an effort to protect white jobs. Whereas a third of white southern families held slaves in the early 1800s, non-slaveholding employers
F34 contracted slave labor at a per-hour rate. This was true especially for work involving skilled craftsmanship and it was substantiated as properly profitable for the slave owner and master. On the other hand, white laborers objected to what they saw as unfair competition. "There was a great deal of resentment [from] white artisans [who] complained vehemently." While urban slavery allowed for a bit more movement and freedom than plantation slavery, the psychological confines were equally harsh. Although analysis and contextualization of these slave badges as primary sources can provide us with some general knowledge about slavery in Charleston, the bigger question still persists: what can we know about an enslaved person just from this badge? Michael Hodder, an expert on Charleston slave badges claims these objects have the ability to "evoke a personal history which is almost unfathomable: beatings, hardships, tears, pain, separation, loss, a terrible sense of abandonment." At the same time, he adds, "one can read into them a sense of hope and planning for the future—the slave working to earn as much money as possible, perhaps to purchase his freedom or the freedom of a family member." It is just this duality in understanding the object that makes slavery such a difficult concept for us to grapple with. While there is so much we might learn about the macro experience of slaves in Charleston from these badges, there is so little conveyed about the micro experience. Although the badges reveal the thorough commodification of Charleston slaves and the skills by which they were defined, we cannot pull any information about the human experience of a singular enslaved individual. And it is this micro experience that truly matters! James Horton, a professor of history at George Washington University, says seeing and observing a slave badge elicits and emotional response as we realize “that one person actually owned another." To truly understand this object, one must understand its function. To understand its function, we must imagine ourselves as a slave with the badge hung around his neck. As Hodder proposes, “Imagine how it felt against his chest, how it felt to present it whenever someone demanded. At the end of the day, did the slave hang up the badge in his hut or did the master keep it? What happened if a slave lost his badge? What happened at the end of the year? Was the badge returned to the city marshal’s office, turned in, taken to a local mill, melted and then reused?" All that we can know about this visual artifact is the profoundly inhumane and brutal nature of slavery in the American South that it represents. The use of Charleston slave badges extended beyond the identification of hired-out slave work. The Charleston Museum’s collection of slave badges most prominently displays one copper badge with the distinction “free.” While slave badges convey the evilly commoditized reality of Charleston slaves, the badges also represent a system of slavery that provided slaves a minor sense of freedom while still being captive; these slaves did have more of an opportunity to undermine the control of the master with greater distance from his domain. In this way, slave badges may ironically be evidence of relative freedom of movement within Charleston. The badges represented some freedom to acquire one’s own little sum of money to save. Yet in accordance with the rule of law these badges so intimately deal, we must consider Charleston slaves as fully captive before abolition – because this was the true and legal reality. In this light, the badges wholly imply that a slave’s labor and whereabouts were more important than their identity, perspective, and emotional rendering of the world. Through the badges, we can see clearly that slaves were- as Stephanie Smallwood suggests- commodified in thoroughly and systematically scientific ways. This
F35 enforces our understandings of social death and the purgatorial existence of slaves – somewhere between life and death, human and product. 
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The American Struggle of Ann Lowe: Power, Powerlessness, and Female Portraiture by Reade Rossman “She is more interested in the creation of clothes, who will wear them and where they will be seen,” Gerri Major wrote of dressmaker Ann Lowe in December 1966, “than in what they cost and what her profit will be.” The photos and accompanying article paint a picture of a devoted dressmaker–one who remained a mainstay of elite American fashion despite facing deep-seated barriers to wealth. The piece, first published in Ebony, serves as a rare example of an outlet in which one black woman could celebrate another so publically–with Major appointing Lowe the “Dean of American Designers.” Despite such a title, however, Lowe was unable to surpass barriers to wealth that had undermined the work of black seamstresses and designers for centuries before her. She earned notoriety while being unable to shed the history of black women in fashion–one of enslavement and exploitation . Born and raised in Alabama, Lowe was the great-granddaughter of an enslaved seamstress and her white owner. Following in the footsteps of her grandmother and mother, she became an adept seamstress as well–mastering the built-in-bra and discovering her signature satin flower technique as a teenager. Her big break came when she produced four ball gowns for the First Lady of Alabama following her mother’s sudden death. After a 1927 move to New York, Lowe began designing for Saks Fifth Avenue, before opening a store in Harlem and later becoming the first black designer on Madison Avenue with the establishment of the American House of Ann Lowe. Her most well-known gown–Jackie Kennedy’s 1953 wedding dress–helped bring her work to stores such as Neman Marcus, Henri Bendel, and Saks and by 1961 she was listed in the National Social Directory and the Who’s Who in American Women alongside many of her clients. Despite this success, her designs went uncredited in magazines such as Vogue, and she charged barely enough to break even on many of her pieces. In 1963, she declared bankruptcy–-claiming, “One morning I woke up owing $10,000 to suppliers and $12,800 in back taxes.” Most articles on Lowe, including that of Major, attribute her financial turmoil to poor business acumen, claiming, “Losing money on…beautiful gowns is a Lowe failing.” It seems, however, that Lowe understood her limitations as a black designer, and sacrificed the possibility of longterm wealth for notoriety instead. The allure of a Lowe gown was not only its craftsmanship but its relative affordability for members of High Society–typically costing hundreds of dollars less than other designers. Lowe remarked at one point, “I love my clothes…and I’m particular about who wears them.” Her commitment to high quality and lower prices bolstered her reputation and incentivized customers to choose the American House of Ann Lowe over more expensive white boutiques. This tradeoff, however, hindered her ability to build legitimate wealth and left her nearly broke at the time of her death.
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One photo at the center of the article manifests this dichotomy – displaying both the power and powerlessness of Lowe as a black entrepreneur during Jim Crow. Pictured in her typical all-black dress and matching hat, Lowe is the primary sitter of the photograph– staring at the camera while seated in her studio. Model Judith Palmer stands behind her, displaying a theater gown and coat of “Italian Mercado silk with black lace embroidered in black soutache.” The setting as well as Lowe’s presence in the foreground of the photo inverts popular imagery of black female servitude and white domination, while also appearing reminiscent of 17th-century Renaissance female portraiture. These paintings serve as an apt lens through which to view the photo of Lowe–they generally included white and black women in the same frame as a celebration of white identity. They often served multiple and seemingly conflicting purposes: to display both the individuality and the class of their subjects. The men who commissioned such portraits– generally holding the money to pay for them–intended them to serve doubly as markers of unique familial wealth and links between Europe’s top families. Women were painted almost exclusively by side profile in the 15th century, which served as an ode to their chastity and innocence. These women lived under strict social codes, adhering to mores in order to avoid poor reputations and violence. Humanists of the time such as Marsilio Ficino frequently espoused ideas about the need for such invisibility, claiming, “women should be used like chamber pots: hidden away once a man has pissed in them.” Laws called for women to remain out of public view and accept their, “duty to bear the children sired by their husband and, like little sacks, to hold the natural seed which their husbands implanted in them.” While women did increasingly enter public view via art during the Renaissance with the help of artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, the connection between the female subject and her male viewer remained one of objectification. Adopting “three quarter face” and straightforward portrait techniques to enhance the “sense of connection between sitter and viewer” did little to annihilate the power of the male gaze. This gaze helped disseminate notions of European beauty and wealth among the merchant class in the 16th and 17th centuries. As outlined by Kim Hall in “An Object in the Midst of Other Objects,” the inclusion of black bodies in Renaissance portraiture became de rigueur as slaves served to juxtapose white femininity and display wealth. White women generally appeared as subjects at the center of the painting, facing the viewer as their black slaves looked on endearingly. They often served as a “biased comparison of the attendant’s black skin with the white skin of the woman” to create the notion of “glow and radiance” around the primary sitter. While both figures are objectified by the male gaze, as Hall points out, “the slave becomes a sign of profitable difference and the promise of continually multiplying wealth and novelty that would fulfill [the white woman’s] desires and complement her beauty.” Figures rarely touched, if not for the slave offering something to their master in images such as Constantyn Netscher’s Woman In An Arched Stone Aperture. Their dress either served to juxtapose that of their master or occasionally parallel it with small accoutrements such as pearls in images like Gignes’ Lady with a Negro Servent and Pierre Mignard’s Portrait of Louise Renée de Kéroualle.
F38 What, then, connects a 1950’s fashion designer to slaves who lived nearly four hundred years before her and an entire ocean away? By staging Ann Lowe as the primary sitter in her portrait, Ebony allowed her to claim bodily agency and demand power in a way that was inaccessible for the black women who came before her. Whereas slaves were generally placed at the periphery of portrait paintings, seemingly endlessly doting on their masters, Lowe appears at the foreground of the photo. She stares directly into the camera despite her body being partially shifted away, as if she is turning towards the camera for the express purpose of looking into the lens. Her gaze is no mistake: transfixed and intentional, she demands attention. Her figure extends from the lower right corner of the photo to the left side– physically demanding nearly the entire lower width of the frame. Lowe both acknowledges and confronts the male gaze through her positioning–inviting the viewer to recognize her power as the creator of the piece which appears in the background. Her position as the sitter rather than the stander commands attention while also displaying an heir of ownership over the space. Judith Palmer, the model who wears the piece, serves as a prop in many ways by modeling the gown and coat and holding it open to reveal its inside detail. This inverts the paradigm of white women as subjects and black bodies as props. The slave children in Netscher, Gignes, and Mignard don symbols of colonialism and naval domination such as pearls and coral–linking them both to their owner (the individual) and to a greater ideal of European domination (the collective). There is no creativity behind the fashioning of these slaves, however, as they stand to represent an interim acquisition rather than a final product. That is to say that while Ann Lowe’s dress is created as a work of art, one she has
F39 been given significant thought and unique craftsmanship, the dress of Renaissance portraiture slaves links them indisputably to their owners. They serve as objects of wealth acquisition and colonialism rather than as people with their own autonomy. The setting of the photo further transforms this paradigm of white ownership and black servitude by allowing Lowe to physically inhabit her own property. Compared with the Renaissance standard of slaves being unable to own property and instead serve as property themselves, Lowe’s boutique carried legal and social clout. Becoming the first black designer on Madison Avenue was no small feat, and she faced considerable hardship in attaining the space–her white business partners eventually helped seal the deal. The walls of her studio, as noted by Ebony, feature sketches which have been rendered into gowns for her most elite clients. Her portrait features these drawings in the top left as evidence of her craft: they set precedent in an otherwise unprecedented power dynamic. The fact that the sketches are exclusively white women bolster the notion of Lowe as a cultural disrupter–she becomes one who intimately regulates white culture rather than being regulated by it. While black women informing white culture is hardly new, the fact that Lowe receives credit for such work is. She yields considerable power over the manifestation of white femininity, in a way almost akin to that of painters of the Renaissance. Whereas these painters used black bodies as powerless props to juxtapose white femininity, Lowe’s portrait takes place in a space where white femininity is intimately controlled by the black body. This roots itself in the fact that the model is wearing an article that has been hand-embroidered in the studio by Lowe–a stark contrast to Renaissance paintings in which black
F40 touch is considered dirty or unclean. In this case, Palmer wears a physical manifestation of black touch and creativity. Lowe’s position as the primary sitter of the photo and the owner of the setting in which it is taken does not entirely annihilate the threads of paternalism which dominate the Ebony photos and article. Despite being written by a reputable black female journalist, the article follows in the style of other biographies of Lowe in that it praises her dedication to craftsmanship and indifference towards money. Major notes that she talks, “without bitterness about prejudices, financial mishaps, ill-health, and domestic problems which have plagued her for half a century.” This sentiment is corroborated in accounts such as that in the National Archives, where Lowe is quoted as saying “I feel so happy when I am making clothes that I could just jump up and down for joy” and states that she is motivated by her desire “to prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer” rather than fame or money. Her portrayal as a naïve spendthrift is cemented most directly in the Ebony article, however, when she is described as a “great designer and indifferent business woman who, as a result, worked herself into bankruptcy, into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service and in and out of a number of self-owned shops, partnerships and commissions arrangements.” Her financial ruin is frequently portrayed as a personal choice, failing to acknowledge the deepseated racism that most likely limited her ability to charge fair prices while maintaining notoriety. The fact that the name Lowe “became synonymous with fine gowns for elegant ladies” while leaving its owner nearly broke and blind at the end of her life is not a coincidence. In order to achieve the level of status she did, Lowe sacrificed higher pay. This is probably best exemplified in her work on the bridal party of Jackie Bouvier and John F. Kennedy’s 1953 wedding. Just a week before the wedding, a flood ripped through her studio, destroying ten out of fifteen gowns in the process. Lowe and her assistants worked without stopping on the dresses and were able to recreate three months of work in under a week. As Ebony describes, “Remaking the dresses had turned a $700 profit into a $2,200 loss, but she never mentioned the accident to the bride’s mother.” It is hard to believe that one could forget to mention a $2,200 loss (over $20,000 when adjusted for inflation) without greater intentions. Perhaps Lowe feared that the accident would reflect poorly on her, or on the trustworthiness of her studio. It is with this incident in mind that the symbolism of Lowe’s portrait appears particularly pertinent–drawing likeness to the powerlessness and exploitation of black slaves in Renaissance times. While Lowe’s gaze affixed at the camera rather than the white subject suggests autonomy, the fact that the white woman maintains the same gaze rather than looking at Lowe is notable. She displays the design without displaying any recognition of the designer herself. This does not serve as a true inversion of Renaissance imagery–the gaze of the white woman would have to be affixed on her black counterpart instead. The photo, therefore, separates the two women entirely, with their only form of connection being the gown. Taking Lowe’s financial background into account, it’s fair to posit that she made little money off the creation of the dress–reaping social capital instead of economic. In this light, their relationship shifts into the realm of exploitation. Lowe’s clients expected high quality and affordability that did not generally manifest in the work of white designers. As The New York Post points out, “Lowe…unknowingly gave [the Kennedy’s] a bargain, charging $500 for Jackie’s ensemble, compared with the $1,500 the dress likely would have cost from a
F41 competitor.” This understanding among high society¬–that they could look good at the cost of a black woman’s health and wellbeing (Lowe eventually lost her eyesight to glaucoma and could not afford surgery)–reinscribed aspects of slavery that were disguised during Jim Crow. The Ebony portrait captures the perennial struggle of Lowe’s life–to achieve notoriety and success and still be limited by an insidious and perpetuating legacy of slavery and racial discrimination.
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Saggin’ or Swaggin’?: Criminalizing Black Autonomy from Sumptuary Laws to the Carceral State by Reade Rossman They were likened to dirty diapers, their wearers compared to waddling penguins, and their genesis tied to homophobic myths about slavery and prison culture. City council members publicly shamed them, with some passing “droopy drawers” laws as means of criminalization. Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama implored “brothers” in 2008 to “pull up their pants” shortly after Dallas rapper Dooney Da Priest asserted that the trend was just, “the N-word spelt backwards” in his 2007 song “Pull Your Pants Up!” The New York Daily News mocked the new “crack epidemic.” This was the case of sagging–one of the most notorious and polarizing trends of men’s fashion, but one which nonetheless endured for nearly three decades. Sagging, the act of wearing pants with or without a belt at various levels below the waist, could be seen in nearly every urban center across the U.S. as well as in myriad music videos and across red carpets until the end of the aughts. Critics condemned the trend as symbol of disrespect, associating its baggy nature and young wearers with laziness and a denigration of traditional American values. White government officials, as well as school administrators, airline and transit agencies in places like Louisiana and Georgia outright banned them. In more liberal states, however, black leaders were used in veiled efforts to discourage the trend in the name of respectability politics. One campaign at the center of this debate was that of then-New York State Senator Eric Adams (now Brooklyn Borough President) whose 2010 “Stop the Sag” billboards urged onlookers to wear their pants at the waist. Billboards featured two young men (one clearly black) sagging, with a picture of the senator on the lower left and phrases such as “We are better than this” and “Raise your pants, raise your image!” framing the photo. In interviews regarding the campaign, Adams claimed he was influenced by a subway encounter in which fellow riders shunned a young man wearing low-riding slacks. He was concerned by the fact that, "Everyone on the train was looking at him and shaking their heads. And no one said anything to correct it." In his words, the debate was not raced but rather a matter of generational difference, "Children will be children. But as adults, we need to be on record and tell them they're doing something wrong." This language once again framed sagging as a new fad. The trend’s popularity among young black men and its ensuing criminalization, however, drew similarities to zoot suits of the 1940s as well as to earlier sumptuary laws that dominated slavery-era America. In short, while sagging may have been new, the ideology behind it was not. The trend as a sartorial emblem of resistance served to reclaim the baggy silhouette as one of black autonomy rather than of violence and control.
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Adams’ campaign refused to acknowledge this power, however, and instead suggested that fashion choices could ameliorate centuries of systemic racism and disenfranchisement. The billboards hoped to target young black men by featuring them as the subject of the photo as well as by using collective language to emphasize the identity of the messenger. The faces, and therefore the distinguishing characteristics of the two young men, are unknown as they are merely reduced to the image of their behinds. Their stance indicates that they were still for the taking of the photo rather than walking, indicating consent to be photographed to a certain degree. Whether or not they consented to appearing in a campaign rebuking their very style of dress, however, is highly debatable. While one subject wears short sleeves and is identifiably a person of color, the other wears long sleeves and is therefore raceless, though presumed to be a man of color by association. The only other photo on the billboard is that of Eric Adams himself, posing in his state senate portrait. The dichotomy between his sitting in a tailored suit in front of the American flag and the photo of the young men on an unknown street is striking, and intended to be so. Adams paints himself as the ideal representation of a black man: one who is able to navigate the straits of white America by conforming to it and one who has been rewarded for doing so. Below his portrait reads, “Sponsored by NYS Senator Eric Adams” in case there is any confusion to a title which carries such immense social capital. Despite painting himself in stark contrast to those who sag, Adams wants them to be able to relate to him. This is manifested through phrases such as “We are better than this!” in which Adams links his identity as a successful individual to a collective black identity as well–with the photo as supporting evidence. There is perhaps no phrase as presumptuous however, as the one bolded at the center of the billboard proclaiming, “Raise your pants, Raise your image!” The statement speaks to the audience of young black men
F44 directly, insinuating that such a choice can raise their proverbial image in the eyes of white America. To assume that fashion can eclipse systems of oppression both belittles the art and exploits it. The phrase negates the fact that sartorial expression carries immense meaning, and instead plays into the stereotype of fashion as a series of simplistic and frivolous decisions. That being said, the phrase also exploits the art by suggesting that it can change status. While a suit may alter the shape of your body, as well as send messages about social and economic status, it cannot change skin color in society built on racial hierarchy. By signaling his commitment to a collective black identity as well as to dominant white culture, Adams feeds into a fruitless game of respectability politics. The framing assumption behind his billboard is that wearing pants at the waist will “save” black men from deeply entrenched systems of oppression. His sentiments are not unique, however, and are echoed in writing like that of curator Shantrelle Lewis, who asserts in her book Dandy Lion that baggy wear does nothing to disrupt stereotypes. She explains that, “Trayvon Martin was shot in a dark hoodie, and Michael Brown was wearing baggy clothes when he was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri. For Black men, fashion choices can be a matter of life or death.” While both Adams and Lewis exhibit legitimate concern for black lives, they do so by channeling blame onto the victims rather than the perpetrators. It is understandable, however, that oppression manifests in myriad ways and that respectability politics may be but one tool with which to survive. As journalist Jamil Smith bluntly puts it, however, “It is not the job of marginalized people to convince those in power not to kill them.” This is especially true in regard to fashion, a form of self-expression which establishes individuality as much as it can collective identity. As fashion theorists Susan Kaiser and Sarah McCullough point out, the issue in likening sagging to danger, “transforms fashion subjectivity–and challenges to hegemonic fashion norms¬–into a rationalization of historical patterns of discrimination and fear.” This narrative of black autonomy as dangerous and criminal, however, is nothing new. It was cemented in slavery and reified in fashion choice via sumptuary laws and later through the reaction to zoot suits. Sagging as a product of the prison industrial complex is what makes its later criminalization so ironic. Its conceptualization in the American imaginary as an act of rebellion and a symbol of gang culture can be traced back to the fact that prisoners were long denied belts for fear they would commit suicide or assault. The effect of Reagan’s “War on Drugs” in the 1980s transformed African-Americans into “public enemy number one” rather than drugs themselves and in thirty years, the U.S. prison population has grown by 335% with the black male population jumping by 20%. The disproportionate number of young black men entering prisons during the 1980s combined with the rise of the black community’s most commercialized form of self-expression–hip hop–relayed sagging into popular culture. Hip hop artists had found a wide audience for tales of urban plight by the early 90s, with fashion becoming one of the hallmarks of influence. Black fans, and some white ones as well, took to sagging not only as means of rebellion but to show dedication to their favorite artists. In the same manner that jazz had influenced flapper subculture, and 80s metal had influenced goth subculture, rap music inevitably manifested in sartorial expression. This time, however, it was black bodies as purveyors of culture rather than white ones. This meant that the very personal nature of clothing choice was bound to be heavily policed, as those who sagged appeared in public forums historically unwelcoming to black
F45 self-expression. This had manifested years earlier with menswear such as zoot suits, which provoked white ire and even riots during the 1940s. Zoot suits served as a prelude to turn of the millennia baggy-wear, and proved that the narrative of sagging as a function of generation was falsified. These sentiments were espoused by critics like Eric Adams, who proclaimed “children will be children” in regard to his billboard message and as early as 1988 when one of the earliest mentions of sagging in the press included an LA police officer claiming, "Kids today are dressing for death." This portrayal of adults versus children rather than of dominant white culture versus subculture served two purposes. The first was to shift blame off white hegemony, instead looking to a universal identity marker like age to veil racist policing efforts. The second purpose was to infantilize those who sagged, drawing on minstrelsy tropes of black people as childlike and simple-minded while simultaneously playing into notions of savagery and primitiveness. Years before the so-called “fad” of sagging, however, West Coast teens had set the stage. Oversized, bulky suits–usually acquired by means of a thrift store or familial hand-medown–became the norm among minority youth in Los Angeles during the 1930s. These “zoot suits” as pointed out by fashion historian Tanisha Ford at the University of Massachusetts Amherst were generally born from improvisation, “since many of the kids couldn’t afford tailors.” This form of youth style was also unfairly linked to gang culture and exploded into popular media when in June 1943 white servicemen (namely sailors and police officers) perpetrated a week of violent attacks against wearers. Even the dandyish nature of the suits could not serve as armor for the black and brown bodies which they clothed, proving that sagging and its criminalization were not a function of a single generation. The rebuke of zoot suits and sagging can be traced back culturally and legally to sumptuary laws of the slave state. Originally intended to prevent the consumption of luxurious objects, namely fabrics and articles of clothing, 18th sumptuary laws were a form of policing intended to publicly retain American social hierarchy. In an ideal state, the possibility of mobility was null. As historians Shane and Graham White point out, however, sumptuary legislation such as The South Carolina Negro Act of 1735 was unenforceable, and served only to appeal to “to the idle dreams of slave-owners.” For slaves, the ability to “pass” as free was powerful, and the appropriate sartorial expression could indicate two very different identities. While the nature of sumptuary laws appears antithetical to that of criminalizing saggy pants–one involving luxury and the other involving perceived poverty or laziness–they both showed the white fear derived from black autonomy. This fear drove nearly every attempt to prevent black self-expression, whether it was through adornment of luxury fabrics or through perceivably criminal clothing. The very silhouette of sagging pants, while originally intended to represent lack of control, also upended norms through which to channel it. That is to say that while prisoners originally lacked belts, once the style infiltrated free society it became a method of resisting tight-fitting clothing. Many fashioned belts around their pants while continuing to sag. While some have argued that suits can be a form of armor, they also reveal the curvature of the body. Baggy pants reveal little about the wearer, perhaps serving as a rebuke to enduring tropes about the hypersexualized and hyper masculine black male body.
F46 Sagging pants have endured for decades as emblems of resistance in for some and as criminal for others. The fact that their genesis story can be traced back to prison, and created the possibility of a pipeline back to prison if worn on the outside, shows just how intent white America has been on surveilling and controlling black autonomy. The espousing of a generational narrative rather than a racial one as reason for criminalization has served to shield the very intent behind it. Zoot suits and sumptuary laws, however, have shown that sagging has never been about millennials and their parents but rather about black selfexpression and the white rage it provoked. Stripping people of belts was believed to be warranted, but once the style was reclaimed its wearers were rebuked culturally and legally. Their only course of action, for many, was to play into respectability politics or face recourse. It seems Eric Adams took his pick. 
F47
The Feminized Golliwog: Identifying the Line Between Exploitation and Reclamation in the Work of Patrick Kelly by Skylar-Bree Takyi It is difficult to determine the most noteworthy aspect of designer Patrick Kelly’s exceptional entrance into the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créaturs de Mode, “the pantheon of 43 Paris-based designers who may show at the Lourve.” In 1988, Kelly, a gay, Black man from Vicksburg, Mississippi became the first American inducted into the infamously exclusive French fashion collective – home to the likes of Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, and Chanel. Though his race, sexual identity, and national heritage designated him an implausible candidate for industrial acceptance, his short career was all the more unlikely given his designs’ fixation on imagery rooted in the degradation of Black Americans. Kelly’s infatuation with racist, Black memorabilia manifested most notably through his use of a feminine golliwog figure that ultimately became the face of his brand in Europe. Though Kelly’s career came to an abrupt end following his AIDS-related death on New Year’s Day 1990, it might be safely assumed that the frenzy of excitement and urgency surrounding his work – and perhaps more importantly, his persona – would have only continued to grow exponentially had he lived. His unprecedented stint as Paris’ fashion darling cannot go without questioning – to understand the exact arithmetic that resulted in his superstardom is to also better comprehend an industry with a history stained by prejudice, racist rules of entry, and oppressive intellectual theft. Those who praised Kelly tended to align his designs with the whimsical and the ridiculous: “The first thing that hits you about Kelly’s art is the sheer fun of imagination, as if a big kid were designing clothes, but a precocious kid who could riff on Surrealists such as Man Ray.” Critics fixated on his near-obsessive use of mismatched buttons, gaudy sequins and bows, and flowers, a tactic that distinguished him from “the brassy, geometric monotony of the ‘80s.” The industry’s propensity to comprehend Kelly solely through his designs’ exuberance and childlike joy, while apt, entirely sidelines the racialized motifs equally (or perhaps more) central to his work. Robin Givhan’s meditation on Kelly’s legacy says as much: “Any lasting contribution that Kelly made to fashion's vocabulary is dominated by the singular significance of his ethnicity. Kelly was AfricanAmerican and that fact played prominently in his designs, in the way he presented them to the public and in the way he engaged his audience. No
F48 other well-known fashion designer has been so inextricably linked to both his race and his culture. And no other designer was so purposeful in exploiting both.” Although Givhan’s words might suggest a body of work rooted in themes of social justice and equalizing representation, her careful use of the word “exploited” is a conspicuous choice that induces the reader to think beyond these first assumptions.
To say that Kelly’s collections were racially charged would be a gross understatement. His work actively utilized archaic images of Blackness hearkening back to the antebellum South and beyond. Among these was a skirt of bananas inspired by the iconic costume worn by his fellow Parisian expatriate Josephine Baker. Like the original costume, Kelly’s design was an entry in the ongoing dialogue linking Black individuals with the jungle, apes, and savagery. This was only one in a number of recurring motifs that drew from incredibly offensive and inflammatory depictions of Blackness. Caricatured Blackness punctuated each and every one of his collections, manifesting in innocuous forms like hats fashioned to look like the watermelon wedges that Black Americans had been stereotyped to love and in less innocuous forms like an entire dress covered in golliwog caricatures. Kelly’s fascination with
F49 these grotesques extended beyond fashion: “…Kelly's vast collection of black memorabilia are as important as his garments. Kelly accumulated more than 8,000 examples of advertising, dolls, knickknacks and household products that employed racial stereotypes, caricatures and slurs.” The designer was remembered as never leaving home without pockets stocked with homemade pins in the form of small Black baby dolls, their lips dyed bright red in the fashion of minstrelsy. Is it any wonder, then, that the highly racialized golliwog became his brand’s mascot? Though similar in kind to American traditions of minstrelsy and depictions of mammies, the golliwog is a distinctly European tradition. First appearing in the children’s books of English author Florence Kate Upton in the late 1800s, the golliwog is identified by its blood-red lips, coal-black skin, and wild hair. Though the character is revealed to be kind and loveable, and eventually became the protagonist of Upton’s subsequent novels, he is introduced as “a horrid sight, the blackest gnome.” Upton’s books were incredibly popular, and, arguably, can be held accountable for the mass proliferation of the golliwog throughout Europe and the United States. There, the golliwog joined its cousin images to create the family of racial archetypes immortalized in the genre of knickknacks, advertisements, and paraphernalia collected by Kelly. Though golliwogs typically appeared male, Kelly’s own was distinctly feminine, marked by her large, circular yellow earrings. The image was copyand-pasted onto dresses, suits, and every Patrick Kelly shopping bag in Europe. The golliwog appears in slightly mutated form on two dresses from Kelly’s 1986-87 Fall/Winter collection. The dresses are simple, crafted in red and black from wool, angora, and spandex and featuring slightly pronounced shoulders. They are silhouettes characteristic of Kelly: "He draped jersey in bold colors contoured to accentuate a woman’s curves, earning him the nickname the King of Cling.” At first glance, the dresses seem to be but another exhibition of Kelly’s unwieldy button obsession. But further examination reveals a method to the madness – black buttons arranged in a semicircle form a simple crop of hair, two white buttons with black centers create eyes, two opposing yellow buttons become earrings, and a curved row of bright red buttons constitute the golliwog’s ever-smiling mouth. The dresses employ a certain level of subtlety, relative to Kelly’s other designs that reference the golliwog. They simultaneously simplify the character, removing even the bare-level of detail afforded by Kelly’s logo. In this iteration, there is nothing to suggest the golliwog’s curly hair or her bright white teeth. It becomes apparent that these characteristics are ancillary to her depiction. It is not necessary that we know her hair texture, that she has teeth, or even that her skin is black (as one of the dresses is red). The inclusion of the unblinking eyes, earrings, and beet red mouth establish the primacy of these particular features in depicting a golliwog. This is yet another homage to America’s racist past, another manifestation of Kelly’s infatuation with the stereotype’s ability to depict the Black face. It seems almost impermissible that Kelly apparently never publicly commented on the racial figures that featured so prominently in his collections, and yet it remains true. Those who succeed in acknowledging Kelly’s chief preoccupation invariably attempt to identify his reasons for centering the brand so squarely in such incendiary themes. One article suggests that the use “confounded the power of hate behind such images with an overdose of love, transforming the message of such caricatures from a hate crime into a shared joke everyone
F50 could laugh at.” But the rose-colored lenses through which this article reads Kelly’s motives are troubling. Although Kelly made a point of including a spray-painted heart in the décor of each of his shows, to suggest that this alone renders his work rooted in love is simply too reductionist to stand. It stems from a naiveté that wholly internalized Kelly’s sanitized, publicized comments regarding his target audience: “I design for fat women, skinny women, all kinds of women… My message is, ‘You’re beautiful just the way you are.’” Kelly’s rhetoric, while pleasing to our more idealistic notions, fails to account for the evident fact that only remarkably thin women traversed his runways (with the one-time exception of a typically-thin model who was eight months pregnant). Similarly, this love-based understanding of his caricature-use wholly ignores the violent and traumatic history inextricably tied to these images. Furthermore, it presumes a kind of wholesomeness that simply is not supported by a designer – and truthfully, a businessman – wily enough and willing to proliferate an image in Europe that he knew could not circulate in the United States.
So, why was his commercialization of black caricature able to generate such massive popularity in Paris and not New York? After dropping out of college Kelly spent a negligible year in New York, unable to gain traction. His subsequent move to Paris sparked a nearimmediate change in his career trajectory, largely owed to a chance meeting with then-editor of French Elle, Nicole Crassat, which led to a six-page spread. Those initial lauders of Kelly’s work all highlight that same, familiar whimsy (“Patrick was charismatic, and his dresses were elegant, colorful, funny, and unpretentious.” ). They make no note of the gravity
F51 intrinsic to his image use. This ignorance becomes particularly apparent in an anecdote told by Bjorn Amelan, Kelly’s former partner in both business in love. He recounts inadvertently developing Kelly’s taste for Black memorabilia by gifting him an ashtray that featured a Black caricature on its surface. “I was totally innocent of its loaded racist history… I only saw a funny, charming piece.” Amelan cites this as a turning point, after which Kelly began to design his logo and the first collection that informed his subsequent work. Amelan understood this as Kelly’s tendency to appropriate and enhance, “rather than hiding it… There’s an empowerment in an act of ownership – not physical but mental ownership.” But so too does this reading of Kelly’s actions provide him the benefit of the doubt. For it is equally plausible that in this moment, Kelly was made profoundly aware of this utterly European response to such images. Where Americans might only experience intense indignation, or perhaps even disgust, Europeans could alternatively see something cheeky, fun, and innovative. After all, Kelly’s work was for them only another addition in a long list of acceptable golliwog imagery. It is clear that even if Kelly’s aim was to take images that had historically been used to degrade and refashion them as celebratory emblems of Black being, his customers and critics were largely unaware of any such intentions. Their fascination with his work stemmed from an association of these images with a juvenile ebullience, likely stemming from their association of the golliwog image with the golliwog dolls and books of their own childhoods. They saw in Kelly’s feminine golliwog a confirmation of the harmless, jovial, unbearably Black creatures that childhood games and story times had confirmed Black individuals to be. It elicited in them a nostalgia, one so potent and lacking in self-awareness that it singlehandedly propelled Kelly
F52 from virtual namelessness to a position in one of the world’s most renowned, exclusive fashion circles. Kelly’s careful crafting of his persona and image, in collaboration with the artful attention to detail displayed in his ad campaigns and runway shows, reveals a man too masterful in the ocular realm to leave such things to chance. His omnipresent pair of oversized overalls simultaneously functioned as his personal variation on the “designer’s singular outfit” and as a sly reference to the Black South’s (and likely his own) sharecropping heritage. His brand’s advertisements are splattered with the color red, from the upturned brim of his own “Paris” hat to the heels adorning his models’ feet. Even those campaigns that exclude the color red from the designs are purposeful in their retention of the blood red staining each model’s lips. The homage to the golliwog’s permanently ruby mouth is evident, and suggests a strong sense of creative direction from Kelly. To then believe that a man so cognizant of creating and maintaining a throughline in his collections over the years would not have a working knowledge of the politics that rendered his work so marketable to the European audience seems to be willful ignorance. Though this might border on cynicism, it does not seem a stretch to suggest that Kelly was a very aware and intentional manipulation of the aforementioned European nostalgia and affinity for golliwog imagery and other caricatures that reaffirmed Black stereotypes: “The designer himself was always seen in outsize overalls -- even if the occasion was formal and before such silhouettes became the uniform of rappers and their fans […] Kelly acknowledged most every stereotype attributed to Southern blacks. He made fried chicken for his friends, sprinkled his conversations with ‘honey chile’ and made liberal use of aphorisms gleaned from the Good Book and at his grandmother's knee. One could argue that as an expatriate in Paris, Kelly profited from enduring and damaging stereotypes while blacks back home suffered them. He played the quaint Southern naif.” Kelly was able to bundle up unsavory parts of America’s slaveholding legacy and neatly repackage them for unconcerned, unaware European consumption, informed by their unfettered acceptance of the golliwog caricature. Regardless of his intent, there is a truth that cannot be unmarried from Kelly’s knowing use of golliwogs, watermelons, and overstylized lips in his designs – his work allowed for an industry in which a white model sporting bright red lipstick in the minstrel tradition might wear a dress shrouded in golliwog imagery down the runway, and the next day a wealthy white woman might appear in the streets of Paris doing just the same. If we are truthful about the demographics of the individuals with time and money enough to follow Kelly’s movements and invest in his pieces, it becomes readily apparent that the majority of his clientele must have been white women. This realization does the work of rendering Kelly’s designs in an entirely new light. They can no longer be read as an artful reappropriation, not once it is known that these were items crafted in large part for white consumption. This very concept – that Kelly designed clothing employing racist caricature for majority white audiences – completely nullifies any argument that might suggest these images were employed in an attempt to reclaim the humanity lost during the years of slavery
F53 and the period afterward during which they proliferated. Rather, it blurs the line between his clothing and the very memorabilia by which it was inspired: one is no longer able to identify a difference in their respective objectives of creation. If Kelly’s work is understood through this motive – to simply produce more racist, caricatured memorabilia for the amusement and pleasure of white patrons – it leads one to wonder why it ever was deemed permissible. It is likely that Kelly’s racial identity and Southern heritage guaranteed him a benefit of the doubt from peers and would-be critics. So few fashion commentators of the day mentioned, even in passing, the racial overtones of his work, suggesting that it was never given a second thought nor considered worth mentioning. Kelly was afforded a presumption of good intentions that likely would not have been conferred upon a hypothetical white analog. It was assumed that Kelly’s intent was to flip these caricatures on their heads, reclaim their images, and rectify the injustices committed in their name – and the lack of published commentary from Kelly regarding these images implies that this was an assumption he considered useful and not worth disputing. Kelly’s short-lived career problematizes our usual understanding of the word “reclamation.” It forces us to consider an unusual premise: where might reclamation end and exploitation begin? Our race-based assumption that Kelly’s use of the caricaturized images stemmed from a desire to rectify a visual injustice is less indicative of his motives but our own propensity to project our desires for racial justice. It stems from an optimism that I wrongly characterized earlier as naïve. The truth of the matter is that this kind of blind hope is not naïve, or unknowing, but rather a coping mechanism, dating back to slavery, necessary for the continued sanity and emotional wellbeing of Black individuals. Our unwavering faith in Kelly’s good intentions is rooted in the base need to protect ourselves from further harm and trauma, to believe that Black individuals would only have the best interest of their people at heart. But our study of Kelly’s work and navigation of the Paris fashion world reveals this was never the case. His ubiquitous acceptance into the fashion world no longer appears unlikely, but typical of the fashion industry’s (and greater society’s) rewarding of individuals and works that reaffirm and avoid challenging preconceived beliefs regarding Blackness. In this way, Kelly is transformed from an outlier into yet another Black artist fashioned into a tool of the maintenance of white supremacy.
F54
Weaponizing the Mammy: How Betye Saar Gives Power to the Mammy by Gabriela Thorne Art has a multitude of functions. It can serve as a kind of catharsis allowing artists unleash their emotions. It can be a space for creative relief allowing artists to let their imaginations fly. It can also provide a space for activism and social justice commentary. The Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s provided Black artists with all three. It showed that art can be both personal and political. Through their art, Black artists were able to celebrate Black culture and Black power. They were also able to weaponize their art to create political commentary. The Black Arts Movement was an artistic revolution for Black people. In 1972, Betye Saar, a Los Angeles based artist, would create her visual masterpiece titled The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which would bring her fame. From the influence of the Black Arts Movement, this piece would arise to question ideas of black womanhood and existing stereotypes. In this piece of artwork, Saar employs the use of the mammy figure to create a shoe box size piece of art integrating questions of slavery, Black female liberation, and the commodification of Black bodies. By utilizing the mammy, Saar converts this stereotype from a symbol of White power to a symbol of Black power and liberation. Saar converts the mammy into a figure for and by Black people. The 1960s was a time of great change for African Americans. The Civil Rights movement would come to an end and lead to great political and social change with the addition of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, two great leaders of the movement, would be assassinated creating a great loss for the community. These social and political changes would inspire of wave of Black nationalism and Black power, which would lead to the creation of the Black Arts Movement. Amiri Bakara, formerly Leroi Jones, and Larry Neal are both credited as the primary theorists of the Black Arts Movement. The movement began roughly in the mid 1960s with the creation of the Black Arts Repertory in Harlem, the Broadside Press in Detroit, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago. The Black Arts Movement was a call to shift Black artists from making art geared toward White audiences to making art for Black audiences. This movement “championed aesthetic pleasure of blackness and focused on reception by black audiences.” This movement occurred simultaneously with the Black Power Movement in the United States and both movements together championed Black nationalism. According to Neal both movements “relate broadly to the AfroAmerican’s desire for self-determination and nationhood.” During this time, Blackness as a whole was celebrated. The movement was a
F55 national movement that would spread to a multitude of cities including but not limited to Detroit, Harlem, Chicago and Los Angeles. Los Angeles became a hub for Black people and Blackness in California allowing the Black Arts Movement to flourish on the West Coast. Born in 1926 Los Angeles to mixed-race parents, Betye Saar would become a prominent Black artist on the West Coast influencing future generations to come. She began her artistic journey at UCLA where she studied design. Because of her race, Saar did not believe she could be an artist and instead thought about becoming an interior decorator. After college, she created her own greeting card line and eventually formed an enamelware company with designer Curtis Tann. Her artistic career began when she went to pursue a master’s at California State Long Beach in the late 1950s and discovered the art of printmaking. For Saar, art gave her “the freedom to experiment.” From her experimentation, she continued to make art. She moved to use the technique of assemblage after seeing an exhibition full of assemblages in the late 1960s. Saar stated that she began to collect random objects from yard sales to create her art. The objects she collected changed from random objects from yard sales to used objects with African symbols and meanings. With the growing Black Power Movement, Saar’s art began to change and reflect her anger and frustration. Her art engaged with themes of liberation, slavery, Black womanhood, spirituality and racism. Saar’s influence was and still is felt in the artistic world, particularly on the West Coast. Her use of assemblage and historical objects would influence other artists at the time to engage with similar forms of art.
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In 1972, Saar created The Liberation of Aunt Jemima which became her most famous work. Utilizing both assemblage, which was a technique that combined both artistic and non-artistic materials to create a work of art, and racist stereotypes and figurines, Betye Saar channeled her frustrations into this masterful work of art. In an interview, Saar recounted how she started to construct the piece. Saar stated “I wanted to do something that was about a woman and I wanted to make my protest feelings heard.” The piece came together when Saar found a metal mammy figure with a space for a notepad at a flea market. Instead of paper, she placed a postcard with a mammy carrying a mulatto baby. In the mammy’s hands, she placed a hand grenade and a rifle in addition to a broom. From Aunt Jemima packages, she constructed a collage of the faces of Aunt Jemima which serve as the background for the piece. Lastly, she would add a Black power fist to the post card and pieces of cotton to the bottom of the box. Thus, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was created. The piece can be broken down into three separate parts: the Aunt Jemima background, the postcard with the mammy and baby, and the mammy figurine armed with a broom and weapons. Saar utilizes three different iterations of the mammy here to give power and agency to Black women. The mammy was a stereotype created to control and subjugate Black women. The stereotype consisted of painting Black women as asexual domestic beings whose sole purpose was to care for the slave master and his family. The mammy was typically presented in a long dress with a cinched waist, a headscarf tied around her hair as protective measure, and an apron indicating her domestic responsibilities. She was often portrayed as very dark skinned and overweight. She was created to be unattractive in juxtaposition to gentile White Southern woman. The mammy’s responsibility was to her master. She was supposed to take care of the master’s children as well as her own, clean the house, prepare the food, and carry out any other domestic duties as requested. Idleness was not for the mammy. If Black women did not work, they were considered lazy and useless as they were not fulfilling their role. In additional to her motherly and domestic qualities, she was painted as kind and very loyal to her White family. Despite whatever abuse she faced, she was always loyal and willing to work for her White family. These stereotypes of the mammy would continue after slavery and greatly affect how Black women were seen and valued. There are similarities amongst the three female figures in the piece indicating that they are mammies. They are seen wearing a long dress cinched at the waist, except for Aunt Jemima since only her face is seen. They are all depicted with a handkerchief covering their hair. All three in the art piece seem to be smiling. Seeing them smiling is odd given that they were enslaved and had no autonomy. However, having them smiling reinforces the idea that they enjoyed working for their White families. Even though the full body of the mammy figurine and the Aunt Jemima cannot be seen, it can be assumed that they both would be wearing an apron, similar to the mammy in the postcard has a green apron. Both the mammy in the postcard and the figurine have objects that symbolize and indicate their domesticity. For the figurine, it is her broom, and for the mammy, in the postcard it is the
F57 child. Lastly, all three seem to be overweight and dark skin. All of these elements are clear signs that these figures are mammies and indicates the pervasiveness this symbol. Aunt Jemima is a beloved common household brand even to this day. Known for its pancake mix and syrup, most probably do not know how the original Aunt Jemima logo and how it has transformed from its earlier more mammy-like features to an elderly Black woman. Saar found the images of Aunt Jemima as a sign that the mammy stereotype had not dissipated. It also showed how easily Black female bodies could be commercialized and used by White people even post slavery. The Black body was never something that Black people themselves had complete autonomy or ownership over. From the beginning of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Black people were shown and taught that their bodies were not theirs to keep or use. Their bodies belonged to their slave master and their sole purpose was production. The Black female body produced in two ways: crops and children. Black women were seen as the producers and creators of more slaves. In addition, their bodies were sexual commodities. Rape and sexual assault by their slave master was very common for Black women during and post slavery. They oftentimes had to deal with their slave masters unwelcome advances and many of these relations produced children. The postcard within the piece evokes the traditional image of the mammy while also showing how Black women’s bodies were sexual commodities. In the postcard, the mammy is holding a baby and smiling. As shown earlier, she is depicted in typical mammy form. She is the caretaker in this image. In addition to that, the baby is said to be a mixed baby according to Saar, which is why she chose the postcard. For her the postcard showed how Black women’s bodies were for the sexual consumption of the White man. From the postcard, there is no way to know if the child is the mammy’s or another slave’s child. However, because of the Black features it is clear that this baby is not fully White nor fully Black indicating that the child was probably the result of sexual assault between white man and black woman. The postcard is an interesting part of the piece because while the mammy is smiling, the child is crying. In fact, the child looks quite terrified. Even though it is not quite clear if the baby is fully white or mixed What is the child scared of? Is it scared because it knows soon that it too will undergo slavery? Was it simply crying because it is a child? It is odd to have such a difference between the two facial features especially for a postcard, which would be sent to a friend or family member. The last part of the piece and probably the most powerful is the mammy armed with weapons and a broom. Again, the typical image of the mammy is evoked as stated earlier. She has a broom in one hand showing her domestic duty to her white family and a gun in the other indicating her duty to the resistance. Of the three mammy’s the figurine is probably the most grotesque. Her skin is extremely dark when paired with her very red lips. She is clearly very overweight. Even though she seems to have a smile in this one, she does not appear friendly.
F58 The liberating factor of the piece comes from three of the objects: the two guns and the black power fist. Saar literally weaponizes the mammy converting her from an image of White power to one of Black power. She becomes a symbol of resistance. Saar noted that even though she is not a fan of guns or violence, “but that was a symbol of a weapon, to suggest a weapon for civil rights. And people understand guns. They don’t understand people talking and talking and talking. There’s no such thing as a peaceful transaction about getting your civil rights.” In addition, the use of the guns also invoked images of Black Panthers. The Black Panthers were known for carrying around guns as a form of self-defense against police brutality. The physical gun liberates the mammy from the oppression of slavery. Saar superimposes a large Black fist over the mammy’s figure. It consumes the mammy’s lower half. The fist is a visual and physical representation of Black power in the piece. The Black power fist became popular during this time as the Black Power Movement was occurring. Placing the extremely dark Black fist over the mammy’s body changes the mammy’s meaning. She is not simply this commodity for the White slave owner to take advantage of. She now has the power. The combination of the smiling and the weapons creates an almost sinister look of the mammy. She is smiling because she has her liberation which she will take by any means necessary even violent ones. The Black Arts Movement was a time of great political and social change. Black artists used art as a way to discuss and interrogate this change. They created art for the people by the people. Throughout her work, Saar transformed derogatory objects and symbols utilized against Black people to powerful ones for Black people. Her work reconstructs a meaning for these pieces. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima is a radical piece. The mammy is converted from a piece symbolizing White power to one creating Black Power. In one hand she wields her broom, a sign of her former slave past, and the other the rifle, a sign of her new militant ways.
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Costuming in Django Unchained by Amanda Zhang Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 revisionist Western film Django Unchained tells the story of the slave Django who becomes a bounty hunter and mythic hero in a series of violent serendipitous events. The story of Django Unchained is told through costuming. Sharen Davis who was hired as the costume designer for film, is an academy award nominated designer whose work was featured in films such as The Help and Dream Girls. The importance of using black creative thought to shape the most important and salient elements of the movie through narrative costuming cannot be overstated. The film utilizes dress to visually externalize the internal transformations within each character’s development arc. Costuming becomes an essential tool for navigating characterizations through the means of sartorial expression in the film. Given the importance of dress in communicating ideas of cultural exchange and characterization, this essay will focus on the role of dress and undress in character narratives in Django Unchained. The period-set Spaghetti Western takes advantage of distinct anachronistic temporalities. While the movie itself is set in 1858, two years before the Civil War, it is done in the cinematic tradition of the “Spaghetti-Western.” Costume designer Sharen Davis explains, “it’s a period movie within a period movie. It’s set before the Civil War, but it’s really a spaghetti Western, which is a late-60s, early-70s movie.” The significance of utilizing the Spaghetti-Western as a cinematic medium to discuss the ugly history of slavery lampoons the genre of sentimentally racist nostalgia films which were historically embraced by the American public in the conservative cultural push back following the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, as a modern filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino, is given the creative ability to overlay meta-commentary incorporating the current reality of racial oppression in contemporary society. Tarantino plays on the theme of inter-continentalism with regards to both slavery and cultural exchange and subliminally addresses cultural appropriation and cultural pretense in each of the temporalities. Appropriation is overtly portrayed in the time period of 1858 with the literal appropriation and use of slave bodies. However, Tarantino also spends considerable time focusing on Mr. Calvin Candie’s cultural consumption. Django and the Doctor first encounter Monsieur Candie at “The Cleopatra.” Despite the name, the entryway features a bust of the Queen Nefertiti, not Cleopatra. Even though Candie is identified as “a bit of a Francophile,” Doctor Schultz is discouraged from actually speaking French as “it’ll embarrass [Mr.Candie].” The inclusion of two absurdist examples of cultural appropriation addresses the broader pitfalls of cultural appropriation: first, that appropriated references are often understood erroneously and second, that cultural acquisition is not equivalent to the cultural knowledge, appreciation, or understanding that would profess legitimate cosmopolitanism. It is also worthy to note the historical context of British exploration and the
F60 fetishization and glorification of ancient Egyptian culture compared to the actual treatment of African slaves. Tarantino apparently eschews blame on certain white populations namely, the Germans and Australians, who though morally defunct were more interested in monetary gain than overt racial oppression but nevertheless makes a broader commentary on the consumption and appropriation of culture both throughout the 1960s and into modern-day. In the film, the act of undress contextualizes the importance of sartorial expression as scenes of undress are often the most emotionally raw. The naked slave body is figured as a locus of oppression as well as intimacy; undress and the removal of clothing becomes an important symbolic act of rebellion, agency, transformation. The movie opens by depicting the shirtless men of the slave chain gang, their nakedness in contrast to the traders visually marks their status. “Monsieur” Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, uses the naked slave body in brutally violent “mandingo fights” in which slaves are forced to fight to the death for his entertainment. Hildi, Django’s wife, is repeatedly violated through acts of undress throughout the film. Nonetheless, in focusing on the costuming of the film, the importance of undress as an act of reclamation and liberation should not be neglected. Undressing the self is an act of expressive autonomy. Furthermore, the naked slave body is reclaimed as a locus of intimacy, imagination, and rebellion between husband and wife in the case of Django and Hildi. Hildi, played by Kerry Washington, is first introduced to the story as Django’s wife from an earlier plantation. In a discussion with the Doctor on slave marriage, Django’s flashes back to a memory of his wife being whipped by an overseer. Hildi is pictured wearing a deep purple sleeved dress holding an orange beaded rosary in her hand. Sharen Davis discusses the significance of the color costuming, “I illustrated her whole arc. She started in a dark purple and ended in a light purple. Now she’s totally free.”2 While riding in the convoy to Candyland, Django imagines Hildi standing in a lush green field in a silky marigold-colored dress with an empire waist. The empire silhouette references the Napoleonic empire, an epoch which is stylistically insignificant to any of the film’s major temporal axes. But what does an empire silhouette evoke? Django’s imagination of Hildi’s dress therefore arguably exists in a liminal space outside the spatio-temporal constraints of the movie’s predominant period domains. Despite all aggressive attempts to limit expressions of slave freedom, Django’s fantasies of his wife are uniquely his, reminding him of his unyielding desire to save her from harm. As the rap song “100 Black Coffins” plays in the background, the viewer is briefly jolted to the present. At this point, the soundtrack is configured to contextualize the modern legacy of slavery. The song, written by rapper Rick Ross for the movie, uses the lines “I need a hundred black preachers, with a black sermon to tell From a hundred black Bibles, while we send them all to hell ...I seen a hundred niggas die I put that on my life, Lord, I wouldn't tell a lie ..I seen a hundred women burn As they stood firm, treat a nigga like a germ
F61 ...All I want is my woman, such a wonderful mother, (mama!).” The similarity between needing “100 Black Coffins” “a hundred black preachers” in the context of both slavery and in the modern police state forces the viewer to simultaneously consider the lives of the women who likewise affected by racial and patriarchal oppression that get left behind when black men are killed. Upon arriving at Candyland, Django sees Hildi in person initially being pulled out of Candie’s torturous “Hot Box.” The first scene depicting Hildi contemporaneously shows her naked body curled in fetal position; her hair is loose. She is drenched in water, dragged out of the coffin and carted off in a wooden wheelbarrow under Candie’s orders to be washed up and sent to Doctor Schultz’s room for the evening. In the next scene, Hildi appears wearing a facsimile blue imitation of the off-the-shoulder belle gown worn by Lara Lee, Candie’s sister and mistress of the house. Hildi’s hair is uncovered but wrapped in two buns on the side of her head, evoking an uncomfortable juxtaposition between the seeming irregularity of her current dress and her recent traumatic experience of agonizing undress. Actress Kerry Washington describes how “Broomhilda’s clothes aren’t her own...even in talking it through with [Sharen Davis], when we were talking about the Broomhilda stuff, it was always ‘What would he put her in?’ ‘What would the woman of the house dress her in? Oh, she’d dress her like a doll.'” Hildi next appears in black and white uniform garb as a domestic slave in “the Big House” serving dinner to Doctor Schultz, Django, and Candie’s posse at a dinner party. Unlike the other slave women, who wear bright white wraps over their hair, Hildi is differentiated by her uncovered hair. At dinner, Stephen becomes suspicious of her and she is violently undressed by him after he eggs on Mr.Candie to show Django her scarred back. Judging Django’s reaction, Stephen concludes that he and Hildi know each other and informs Candie. Upon realizing he has been duped, Candie performs an elaborate phrenological demonstration before revealing this knowledge to Django and the Doctor. Hildi is dragged by Stephen out into the dining room before Candie smears red blood on Hildi face down the white collar of her dress. The next time Hildi appears, she is shown being thrown onto a bed wearing a fulllength hyacinth purple skirt and a white button-down shirt with a thick tan leather belt knotted at her waist. In the initial scene, Hildi is shown wearing dark leather work boots. However, in the subsequent scene before Django arrives to rescue her, she is shown without shoes, laying on her side, anxiously whimpering, presumably traumatized from earlier assaults. While, Tarantino uses graphic hyper-violent imagery throughout the film in masculine interactions, sexual violence is alluded to instead of shown explicitly. Hildi wears the same outfit until the end of the film, though she is later shown wearing boots. Davis describes her thought process for Hildi’s final “ride-off-into-the-moonlight look” as “[Broomhilda’s] segue into becoming a Western woman. She’s saying, ‘I’m as strong as you, honey.” From an artistic standpoint, the Hildi’s final dress is more important as a symbolic marker of her new status though Davis admits there is a logical gap in the plot confessing that “Where [Broomhilda] finds these clothes, we don’t know. You see her in a bed, and then you see her on the horse.”
F62 In contrast, the other female characters are costumed within the film itself to emphasize their fixed status either as sexualized objects or commodified labor. Sheba and Mercedes both appear to be sexualized domestic slaves employed by Monsieur Candie. Mercedes greets Django and the Doctor in campy French at “The Cleopatra” wearing a kitsch French maid uniform with high black stockings and oversized white hair bow. Sheba is pictured reclining opulently and drinking alcohol while wearing a diamond choker around her neck. Her hair is straightened and coiffed into a sweeping updo and her lips are painted red. Between the two Sheba appears to occupy a relatively position of status in Candie’s hierarchy. Nonetheless, her dress, composed of diaphanous burnt orange skirt and a flashy bustier sewn in gold brocade similar to that of Mr.Candie’s vest, visually identifies her as an extension of Mr.Candie’s ownership rather than a fully autonomous individual. While Hildi and Django experience character transformations through dress, by comparison Stephen wears the same austere black and domestic slave uniform with absolute pride highlighting implication of the slave psyche with regards the dynamic significance of dress. Unlike Stephen, Django’s character arc is expressed and motivated by changes in dress. In the opening scene of the film, Django is pictured walking in a chang gang while the opening credits roll, a Spaghetti Western ballad plays in the background. He is naked from the waist up and there are multiple lash marks visible on his back. The scenery changes as the chain gang is marched across the land. The gang of men all have natural hair in various states of outgrowth. Some, including Django, have facial hair. All are wearing coarse trousers tied with string. All are barefoot. Other than his name, there is nothing to physically differentiate Django from the other men when Doctor Schultz initially arrives. After shooting down the slave driving Speck brothers, Doctor Schultz recommends Django take the dead brother’s coat. Dicky Speck warns Django, “N____, don’t you touch my brother’s coat” but Django puts on the coat as well as a pair of boots while the Doctor pays the dying brother. The preceding scene, wherein Django sheds the rough blanket, emphasizing the removal a sartorial marker of his slave status, plays in exaggerated slow-motion. Even though the brother is dying, the Doctor performs the gestural act of paying him for Django’s attire anyways thus empowering Django to subvert the stereotype of a thieving slave. Before leaving, the Doctor tells the remaining slaves they can either take the wounded slave driver to the nearest hospital or instead free themselves, shoot and bury the slave drivers, and follow the North star to “a more enlightened area of this country.” The slaves all remove their winter blankets in a parallel act of defiance before each picking up sticks and closing in on the slave driver. The scene shifts to Django and the Doctor entering a small Western town. Both the Doctor and Django ride horses to the shock and horror of the white inhabitants. Though he does not wear a shirt underneath his newly acquired coat, he is shown wearing gloves and a hat, two markers of sartorial acquisition that also symbolically subvert his prior slave status. Django reveals the reason for his incarceration on the chain gang when the Doctor asks him about slave marriage in a cutaway montage. In the proceeding flashback, Hildi is being whipped while Django begs the overseer to take the punishment in her place. The over saturated color vignette pictures Django wearing a striped shirt similar to “negro cloth.” Significantly, Django is the only slave regularly pictured wearing a striped cloth. While the
F63 distinction is subtle, the pattern becomes important in differentiating Django from the other slaves as the “one in ten thousand” and in juxtaposing Django’s own character evolution in a parallel depiction later in the film. After leaving the town in bloody disarray, Django and the Doc are later shown in Tennessee surrounded by menswear and top hats discussing Django’s role as co-bounty hunter. The doc emphasizes that Django is “putting on an act” and that he must “[play] a character.” He follows by explaining that Django is free to “choose [his] character’s costume.” Django underscores the significance of the sartorial freedom previously denied to him as a slave in his response “You’s gonna let me pick out my own clothes?” The solemn realization of this oppressive denial is paradoxically positioned with the following scene which shows Django wearing a ridiculous bright blue frilly ensemble riding atop a horse. In her interview with Vanity Fair, Davis recalls, “Quentin had it in the script as powder blue. And I said, ‘I just can’t do that. It is very 70s, but that’s going to look like polyester no matter what I make it out of.’ I slipped a copy of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy in the back of the research book. He didn’t say anything, but he saw it. He sort of said later, ‘Oh! Make him look like Blue Boy.’” Interestingly this real-life anecdote mirrors that of Stephen, the curmudgeonly old man and head domestic slave at the Candyland Plantation, who having been at the hand and ear of the Candie family for generation explains that he is the one coming up with the ideas and, by suggestion, supplanting his recommendations into the minds of his white masters until they suddenly come to same realization as if by their own organic ingenuity. The painting of the Blue Boy from 1770s depicts the rosy cheeked son of a supposed wealthy hardware merchant. Even though the getup is primarily humorous, it is simultaneously provocative insofar as Jamie
F64 Foxx as Django costumes himself as a wealthy, white, European, boy outside the normative constraints of his perceived racial and socioeconomic status as a black man. Nonetheless, the viewer is encouraged to find humor in Django’s outfit as a brief respite from the principally violent and emotionally jarring narrative. When Django arrives at the first plantation, cast as the Doctor’s “valet,” essentially a glamorized Europeanized slave, he is lead around by a slave girl at the direction of her master. Regarding his servant status she asks: “So you really free?” “Yes I’s free” “You mean you wanna dress like that?” In a succinct but hilarious dialogue she affirms the viewer's suspicion that Django, having been given the freedom to choose his dress did so in a way out of sync with conventionally established norms for dress. Analogously, modern black celebrities and social figures are often criticized for their economic choices for being opulent or extraneous. Perception notwithstanding, Django fulfills a satisfying role in the subsequent revenge fantasy scene in spite of his dress. After evading the KKK’s hilariously failed attempt to raid the Doc’s stagecoach, the two are shown sharing a meal. Doctor Schultz offers Django a position as his partner for the winter. At this point, Django makes his second transformation from playing “valet” to becoming a partner and equal to the Doctor which is mirrored through the shift in dress. According to Vanity Fair, Quentin Tarantino was influenced by the Western film Bonanza and watched it with costume designer Davis for reference. Davis calls Django’s winter attire a “a rock-’n’-roll take on Bonanza’s Little Joe (Michael Langdon).”2 The hat-maker who designed Little Joe’s cowboy hat was Davis
F65 enlisted to create a hat for Django. Further, Davis explains that she used Charles Bronson’s spectacles in The White Buffalo (1977) as a reference for Django’s sunglasses. Although at this point, Django is a free man and partner, legally and visually, he is nonetheless confined to and inscribed within the intra-textual narrative of “Broomhilda,” the German legend told by Doctor Schultz. In this role, Django still performs the part of hero within a European story framework. Until he is captured after his surrender at Candyland, Django wears the same general attire. However, in a pivotal moment, Django takes of his jacket in the moments right before he walks out from behind the bullet-ridden table. In this act of undress, Django takes full advantage of his what seems would be his last moment of material freedom to reclaim the act of undress as one of autonomy. The scene cuts away to the preceding shot of Django hanging by his ankles in rope bindings. He is completely naked as the camera pans to scars on his back, and muzzle covering his face. Stephen tells him that, with his insistence, the Lara Candie came up with the idea to sell Django to the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company. Stephen extolls the mining company for working unsubmissive slaves like Django to death and into absolute anonymity asserting “[And] that will be the story of you Django.” Django’s penultimate transformation, which is visually represented in parallel sartorial markers, is the most salient of all insofar as Django becomes the master of his own hero story. The striped work shirt worn by Django earlier in the film reappears unsaturated in a darker hue as Django is being marched to LeQuint Dickey by Australian slave traders. Django, having developed the lexicon and mannerisms of a free man tricks the traders, shoots them, and baptismally douses himself using water from their canteen before taking their gun and riding off bareback in the sunset to rescue Hildi. The camera pans to a close up of another slave starting to smile, and Django is codified into legend. In the final explosive scene, Django appears at the Candyland mansion wearing the deceased Candie’s clothing. This final tableau presents Django as as an avenger, a subversive hero fashioned of his own right, wearing the master’s garb and appropriating the protagonist role of the Western film genre, challenging the viewer’s preconceptions of radicalized film archetypes. As a movie explicitly about slavery, the costuming of white characters is similarly rich in significance and symbolic meaning. The first slave seer Django encounters wears a shirt and trousers with Bible pages pinned to the fabric as he prepares to whip a young girl for breaking eggs. The conspicuous costuming overtly references the religious hypocrisy that underlies paternalistic justifications of slave owner’s benevolence. The color signification of whiteness and blood reappears throughout the film in the white Klan horse whose coat is splattered in blood and is most apparent in the white carnation Candie wears in his lapel when he gets shot by Doctor Schultz. The recurring contrast of whiteness with blood implicates the white plantation insofar as the racial domination of whiteness in such a context cannot exist without the blood that is sacrificed for its maintenance. Released in 2012, Tarantino’s film prophecies the present-date infatuation with racist historical regalia. In one of the funniest scenes of the movie, the Ku Klux Klan members gather around to complain about the quality of their Klan hoods. Jonah Hill takes off his Klan mask while another member laments “I can’t see f__ing sh_t out of these things.” There
F66 is a chaotic interlude of indecision before the leader of the Klan implies that the “full regalia” is somehow crucial to the integrity of the raid. Given the transformative nature of costuming demonstrated through the characters narrative arcs, it is sometimes difficult to imagine why many people in the real world still cling to the relics of a problematic past. Elaine Chun offers a theoretical framework for navigating this issue from a raciolinguistic perspective. She orients satire as recontextualization on the axis of lexical potentialism. With regards to other anti-racist linguistic strategies such as containment she comments that use of the n-word, a word which Tarantino uses liberally throughout the script, is difficult eradicate from the lexicon entirely. She puts forth, instead that “By evaluating anti-racist strategies in terms of how they engage with these language ideologies, we can explore why certain strategies, such as satire, carry a potential to significantly shift public consciousness, particularly as new media technologies continue to change how we experience words and their meanings.” Django Unchained satirizes and reimagines every notion of an American Spaghetti Western film. After all, Django Unchained is a story about a black man who supplants the white hero figure within the white genre framework of Americana film whose narrative costuming was ultimately shaped and authored by a black woman.
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Exhibition Day photos Here are photos from Comme des esclaves, a pop-up exhibition curated by students in “Fashion and Slavery.” The exhibition, which was held in the central arcade of the Harvard Science Center on November 28, featured visual artifacts that illuminate the connection between fashion and slavery.
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