A Rumination on Race and Fashion

Race and Style:

A Study of my own Blackness through fashion

I would say I got into fashion because of my mother, who has long held the belief that when you look good you feel good and as a child and quite frankly as an adult, I’m prone to mimicry. Watching the pleasure she derived from finding a discounted bag at Daffy’s, her heaven and sanctuary, as a kid was infuriating because I was dragged along and would have to occupy myself by hiding in the rounders and running the dancing belts through my fingers. Yet, now I see the appeal of something new and something borrowed. Instead, realized that what truly drove me into fashion was not my mother but the reality of my own Blackness.

I had a brief yet defining era of pencil skirts down to my knees, locking my thighs in place, long flowy blouses unsuited for my silhouette, and American Apparel and Urban Outfitters accessories I could barely afford. All of that was the failed attempt to be small, dainty, and white. At first, fashion was a means through which the unalterable state of Blackness could undergo a metamorphosis. I wasn’t necessarily trying to be fashionable; I was trying to fit in because there was something joyous and comfortable about being like everyone else. If beauty were going to be static and fixed by societal standards to exclude me. Then I, the 12-year-old that I was, and the person I was going to transform into, all squeezed into its narrow definition. I could not zip my body down the back, head to the crack in my butt, and reach my fingers into the slit between the skin and muscles, squeeze my nails through the tendons, pop out the filaments and bone and step into a new skin. My transformation into whiteness had to be more subtle than Gregor Samsa becoming a roach. I dressed my body to be unassuming, quiet, a blur, or a shadow. Then when the white girls had retired their gentle aesthetics, I took on the role of a real shadow this time, dressing head to toe in black and zipping up my sweaters to the collar.

In my journey of normalcy, the word “whiteness” hid behind me while I lagged 10 feet behind the group, upon realizing that my illusion failed. I spent all my time trying to be divisible, wanting to be viewed as a person but not a Black person. As a woman but not a Black woman. No amount of white lace and floral patterning would free me from the shackle of Blackness because the shackle wasn’t one of being but one of perception. Dressed in gowns or trash bags cinched at the waist, I would be side-eyed, whispered about, and escorted out; so why not at least give them something to look at? It wasn’t an all-at-once process—redefining my Blackness as deserving. It was a day-by-day introspection and slowly reds, blues, pinks, greens, and golds bled into my wardrobe. I don't want to be white and neither do my clothes. My clothes developed into an assertion of my race. Since I couldn’t hide it anyway it was going to be loud, colorful, and bludgeoning. I like a skintight silhouette because it doesn’t hide the fact that I have a body, that I am a body, solid and fixed. Philosophers have long pondered that the mind may be an entity individual from the body when I wanted to be pulled to pieces the mind-body problem would’ve been a consolation, but my current theory is that my soul too is Black and woven delicately into my veins and when I dress my body I’m adorning Black skin and revealing a Black soul. My clothes no longer consume me, I stuff them onto and into myself. Fashion is now my way of breaking the paradigm of hypervisibility to the state and invisibility to the individual.

Don’t get me wrong, beauty is a looming force. I can beautify myself to a certain extent through my wardrobe but none of that alters beauty as a societal construct, the one that I am powerless against. I don’t want to be taught or to be learned or to be “loved.” I want to be inherent. Predisposed in someone’s brain. To be beautiful. I want it to feel biological the way I am loved. Nothing forced about someone wanting to lay their fingers in my inner folds or having to take me in with a big gulp. Are my thighs not graspable? Are my lips not soft and plump and meant for kissing? Is my back not a smooth surface you want to lay your hand on and reach inside to grind my spine under your thumb? I’m sure in some way the way I dress is akin to Buffalo Bill saying, “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me. I’d fuck me hard. I’d fuck me so hard” but I’m not begging for beauty anymore. Clothes are my liberation away from the definitions belonging to definers and into ethereal Blackness.