Part 1

2020 was a difficult year for the fashion industry as it had to adapt to the New Normal by having to look into new innovative means to showcase collections and products. This new normal led to the first virtual digital fashion collection of the season by Anifa Mvuemba, who presented her label, Hanifa, in a groundbreaking digital 3D fashion show which was met with high praises on the 22nd of May 2020.

We also witnessed the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement around the world, especially in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, and New Zealand, which led to the fashion industry being called out for their ignorant and blatant racist behavior towards people of color and the lack of representation and coverage of POC in the fashion industry.

Anifa, a woman and a black fashion designer who is overlooked, and the lack of representation and the coverage of POC women in the Fashion Industry, led me to dig deep into the past  and educate myself on black women who have shaped and built the fashion industry.

In the 1860s, former Virginia-born slave Elizabeth Keckley became the personal dressmaker and close confidante of then First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of then-President Abraham Lincoln.

Although her journey to the White House was an arduous one, Keckley finally bought her freedom from her St.Louis owners and then established herself as a skillful seamstress to one of the most influential women in Washington D.C.

Elizabeth is not only known as a skilled seamstress, she is also known as civil rights activist and author.

Image: Zelda Wynn Valdes

Born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 1905. Zelda Wynn Valdes lived during the Jim Crow law era when racial segregation was part of the daily life of every person of color in the United States of America.

She first designed for her grandmother and started working as a storeroom worker in a boutique and eventually climbing her way up to seamstress after that she had a high profile clientele, creating gowns for Maria Cole and costumes for Eartha Kitt, Dorothy Dandridge, Marian Anderson, Josephine Baker, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Describing her design process for Fitzgerald in a New York Times feature, Valdes said, “I only fit her once in 12 years. I had to do everything by imagination for her. She liked fancy clothes with beads and appliqués.”

Most famously, Valdes had a long-standing relationship with the Playboy Club of New York, and she is often credited with designing the Playboy Bunny costume.

Image: Ruby Bailey

Ruby Bailey, the least known and the most flamboyant of black women fashion designers, was a contemporary of Zelda Wynn Valdes.

The two both lived in the epicenter of black creativity in early twentieth-century Harlem. Both were also members of the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers, which was founded by an educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune to give black designers more influence in the fashion industry.

The Bermuda-born artist and fashion designer was also a painter and an actress and were an important figure in Harlem's social and artistic scene as she designed costumes alongside Hollywood costume designer Adrian, which led her to make an important name for herself the as an artist, costume designer
and fashion designer.

Her designs were filled with prints, bright colors such as black cocktail dresses embroidered with jewel-encrusted spiders and bees. She reimagined her African heritage in bold prints that expressed a nascent Afrocentricity.

Image: Anne Lowe

With dressmaking, a passion shared for three generations in her family. Anne Lowe is probably one of the most celebrated black designers in the fashion industry.

Anne Lowe was born in Alabama, where she started and opened her business. In her early years, she enrolled in design school and was the only black student at the S. L. Taylor design school and was segregated from the other students in a separate classroom.

Soon after completing her design study, she gained widespread success and opened two shops of her own in the Upper East Side and even had a short-lived boutique in Saks Fifth Avenue. Her biggest claim to fame is having been the designer of the gown that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wore to her 1953 wedding to future president John Kennedy.

Anne was a well-known figure among American upper-class white women and was often referred to as the “Coloured Lady” by her upper-class white clients.