This 1747 drawing by Cornelis Troost depicts a young black man wearing a feathered white turban, high cravat, and tailored gray livery. Although livery often signified subordination, Troost presents the sitter independently rather than as an accessory to a white patron. id.rijksmuseum.nl/200310137

Commissioned for the Obama Foundation, this is the first official portrait of the Obamas together. Drawing on her signature collage-based practice, Njideka Akunyili Crosby layers photographs, personal references, and historical imagery to create a richly textured meditation on their partnership.

The exhibition is extraordinary, but don't forget to stop by the Schomburg gift shop and pick up a copy of "Black Studies on 135th Street: The Founding and Future of the Schomburg Collection," edited by Barrye Brown, @lehelton.bsky.social, and Vanessa K. Valdes

While thinking recently about I Love Boosters, I go back to a question I've been thinking about for years: What is the relationship between Blackness and color? My new essay “The Color Is..." traces one possible answer. tatterstg.wpenginepowered.com/issues/issue-4/articles/the-color-is

Last week, I spent a few days at the Schomburg Center, going through photographs of James Baldwin as part of my work as a consultant for an upcoming exhibition curated by Karen Van Godtsenhoven. One of the highlights was this snapshot of Baldwin and Toni Morrison in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France.

Artist David Antonio Cruz guides us through his immersive exhibition at Wave Hill Garden, a meditation on longing, chosen family, and queer belonging.

The retail floor of Metro Designs in I Love Boosters by Boots Riley reminded me of Lil' Kim's "Crush on You" video and the "The Color Is" sequence from The Wiz. What struck me was the audacious use of color and the way it playfully shifted from one hue to another.

Esteban Jefferson's Africa (National Museum of the American Indian) depicts a solitary figure approaching the former U.S. Custom House beneath Daniel Chester French's representation of Africa. Jefferson examines how monuments shape historical memory. On view in "Greater New York" at MoMA PS1.

Tomorrow's newsletter features my review of @tdwp2 and iloveboostersmovie. I loved both films, though for very different reasons. Subscribe to the newsletter to read more: fashioningtheself.com/newsletter And, if you saw either or both films, let me know what you think.

Four African American women pose for a studio portrait taken in St. John, Kansas around 1910–1912. They were likely members of one of Kansas’s Exoduster communities. They wear elegant Edwardian fashions, including high-collared white shirtwaists, long walking skirts, and oversized embellished hats.

In this photograph, four boys are dressed in a striking combination of European tailoring and wrapped cloth garments. We do not know who they are, precisely when the photograph was made, or where in Africa it was taken. The image appeared in "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style."

This 1912 photograph depicts the meeting room of the Negro Society for Historical Research in the Yonkers home of John and Florence Bruce. See related objects and photographs in "To Uncover and Reveal to the World: Arturo Schomburg’s Library" at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Beyoncé’s Met Gala look, created in collaboration with Olivier Rousteing (working independently following his departure from Balmain), engages the theme by returning to the body itself. The skeleton is one of art history’s most persistent motifs. It anchors the visual language of vanitas painting.

The Met Gala theme this year “Fashion is Art” comes into focus here. Musician Jon Batiste wears a custom look by Eli Russell Linnetz that draws directly from the visual language of artist Barkley L. Hendricks. Hendricks painted himself and other black figures in all-white ensembles.

Angela Bassett wears a gown by Prabal Gurung inspired by Laura Wheeler Waring’s "Girl in Pink Dress," which is in the Met's collection. Waring’s portrait of an unidentified young woman, defined by her bobbed hair and softly structured pink dress, offers a careful study in poise and self-fashioning.

And, relatedly, do you feel comfortable with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos helping bankroll the Met Gala?

In this 1579 painting, a young black servant stands holding an opened letter. He wears a black jerkin, an off-white doublet with gathered cuffs, and a small ruff at the neck. The presumed Domenico Giuliani wears a black jerkin and doublet with hanging sleeves, a larger ruff, and bombasted hose.

This photograph captures a cohort of black intellectuals at the center of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes anchors the group with a relaxed stance, with Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert T. Delaney lined up behind him.

Prince Alemayehu, an Ethiopian royal taken to Britain after the 1868 invasion of Maqdala, was orphaned and raised under Queen Victoria’s patronage. In this carte de visite, his velvet suit, stockings, and heeled boots signal elite Victorian boyhood, recasting him within British ideals of refinement.

A group of African American coeds pose on the steps of a building at Atlanta University. This photograph, included in the exhibit that Du Bois curated for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, remains one of my favorites. Their dress is striking, but it is their posture that animates the image.

This portrait depicts two young men of equal scale, one white and one of African descent. The black figure’s refined dress and placement in the foreground complicate assumptions of servitude. Long held at Penshurst Place, it is one of the 1st full-length depictions of a black figure in Britain.

This watercolor depicts a black woman holding a parasol and a pineapple. The pineapple functions as an accessory and a luxury item. It may also reference trade and plantation economies. She wears a white columnar gown, a madras headwrap, and jewelry that signal careful self-presentation.

"A Disappointment" (circa 1828) satirizes racial anxiety through a suitor’s shock on unveiling a black woman in fashionable dress. The joke depends on misrecognition, casting blackness as something concealed and therefore unsettling. Her elegant clothing complicates fixed ideas of race and class.

Long overlooked, his life of Adolf Ludvig Couschi Badin is now reexamined in an exhibition at the Nationalmuseum in Sweden that highlights his voice, resilience, and strategies of survival within a racially stratified society. www.nationalmuseum.se/en/exhibitions/badin-beyond-surface-and-mask

What does it mean for an exhibition to live beyond the gallery? In this conversation, Tyler Horne, Tour Programming Assistant at Winterthur, and I reflect on "Almost Unknown" and his work translating my exhibition into a tour of Winterthur’s historic house. www.journal18.org/nq/rhyme-not...

In this 1857 ambrotype, Cordelia Sanders Chew appears as a teenager. She wears a plaid dress with a fitted bodice and wide pagoda sleeves that reveal layered undersleeves. A lace collar frames the neckline, signaling modesty, while a brooch and dangling earrings add refinement.

Harlem rapper Cam'ron famously wore this pink mink fur jacket to the Baby Phat show during New York Fashion Week in 2003. Designed by luxury furrier Dennis Basso, the custom piece reportedly cost around $5,000 and was styled with a matching fuzzy hat and a pink flip phone.

This studio portrait shows an African American couple in fashionable dress of the late 1860s. The woman wears an embroidered jacket over a "Garibaldi shirt" with a full embroidered skirt supported by hoops. The man wears a striped waistcoat and bow tie, his left hand tucked into his sack coat.

"Dave: All My Relations" at Gagosian marks a moment in which artist Theaster Gates gifts his own David Drake jar to the descendants of Drake. The exhibition stages a handoff from an artistic heir to Drake’s literal heirs, while situating Gates’s own ceramic practice within Drake’s legacy.

When the painting was acquired by the @agotoronto.bsky.social i 2020, the sitter, artist, and date were unknown. Since then, there have been important developments. After 6 years of research, the sitter has now been identified as Eleonora Susette. She was an enslaved woman born in modern-day Guyana.

Nancy Phillips was perhaps one of the 1st black women to vote in the United States in 1870. Likely born into slavery, she moved west with her husband after the Civil War and lived in South Pass, Bryan, and Green River, WY. A midwife and seamstress, her fashionabilty is evident in this 1890 portrait.

In this 1837 "Colored American" article, the newspaper's editor Samuel Cornish treats “dandyism” as a threat, not because it was trivial, but because it was visible. Black men using dress to claim dignity, pleasure, and presence unsettled Presbyterian moralists like Cornish.

Lissen, I still have a lot to say about the quarter-zip. I shared a few of those thoughts on NPR's Code Switch this week. The interview happened over Zoom, and—purely coincidentally, I promise—I was wearing a quarter-zip at the time 🤣

I teach the foundational undergraduate course "History of Fashion" each semester. This semester, I'm also teaching the graduate seminar "Black Visuality in the Digital Age" for the first time since Fall 2020.

Wifredo Lam painted "The Jungle" just two years after leaving Europe and returning to his native Cuba. Often deemed his magnum opus, the work brings together masked figures, elongated bodies, and Surrealist distortion to invoke Afro-Cuban spiritual knowledge, particularly Santería.

People are posting photos from 2016 to harken back to the halcyon pre-MAGA Obama years. I started Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom in early 2016 as an underemployed PhD student, , but certain that I needed a space to experiment and think publicly. Here’s to the next ten years of posts.

Painter Wifredo Lam widened the scope of modernism, but his personal style deserves equal attention. This man consistently served! In photographs throughout his life, Lam appears impeccably dressed, favoring tailored looks with zoot-suit proportions with rakishly bohemian flair.

Wifredo Lam understood the Caribbean as an interconnected intellectual world. He maintained close relationships in Martinique, especially with Aimé Césaire, and a sustained engagement with Haiti. These inter-island dialogues helped him imagine a modernism grounded in the Caribbean rather than Europe

I studied John Gast’s "American Progress" as an image that recasts settler colonialism as “heritage,” masking violence behind Manifest Destiny. In an unfortunate turn, this image has been repurposed as propaganda by the Trump administration to justify ICE raids and predations on the U.S.’s residents

Francis "Frank" Barber, born enslaved in Jamaica and later freed in England, is the most convincing subject of this portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Stripped of social markers, Barber is rendered with calm dignity, emphasizing interior life over servility or exoticism.

In "Two Women" (1950), Loïs Mailou Jones employs saturated color, patterned surfaces, and a compressed composition to situate black female subjects firmly within modernist aesthetics. The flattened space and chromatic harmony reflect Jones’s engagement with African and Afro-Diasporic modernisms.

Winslow Homer’s "After the Hurricane, Bahamas" frames blackness against natural disaster. A lone black figure lies beside a wrecked boat, underscoring the unequal stakes of nature’s violence in the Caribbean, where black life was shaped by the afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade.

In "Afric-American Picture Gallery," Wilson describes a Picture XII as "Two Portraits That Ought to Be Hung Up," one of which is a "Slave Holder." In my exhibition, The “Slave Holder” here is represented by this 1769 self-portrait by painter John Singleton Copley, who less known as an enslaver.

This is the final week of my exhibition "Almost Unknown, The Afric-American Picture Gallery" at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. In homage to the exhibition as it comes to a close, all posts this week will focus on individual objects and stories that brought them into the gallery.

Honorable mention goes to that viral quarter-zip moment

The devil is in the details. In the original typeset version of "Afric-American Picture Gallery," the "m" in calm was mistakenly set on its side (pg. 246). Though it was a printing error, it holds symbolic weight for me. I insisted the misaligned "m" remain in the wall text. bit.ly/4pR7Njq

Studio Museum archive book haul 📚 December 17-21 + December 24 11:00 am-1:00 pm | 3:30-5:30 pm

I designed a Christmas tree inspired by Almost Unknown, on view near the gallery entrance. Made with secondhand clothing, antique skeleton keys, a candlelit lamp, and stars, it reflects themes of freedom, American identity, and the North Star that helped shape the exhibition.

"Visitors will instead get free entry on President Trump’s birthday, which coincides with Flag Day."

Edward Williams Clay’s cartoon contrasts black domestic labor with caricatured displays of fashionable dress to ridicule their social mobility. "At Home" depicts a humbly dressed African American couple engaged in domestic work while "Abroad" exaggerates their style to suggest pretension and excess.