As we approach the official recognition of the day Union troops entered Galveston, Texas and informed some 200,000 enslaved Black people they were actually free, this moment in history is a crucial reminder of how we must continue to affirm our freedom and reclaim our contributions to this country.
Nowadays, the right to learn about our history, to have a child or not, or to vote for the policies and people that matter to us are under attack in the United States, a stark indication of how America’s pledge to sovereignty for all continues to come up short, and why it has a tendency to discredit the true origins of the Black contribution.
When it comes to the experiences of enslaved people, the sweat of their brows wasn’t always considered important enough to document for future reference and the world of fashion was no different. Any preservation of their sartorial influence on the industry was often written over by enslavers, but the true genesis of fashion actually rests in the unpaid labor that cultivated the raw materials, spun the textiles and assembled the garments.
Due to limitations in resources, the enslaved would typically consume the items they produced, but as it happens, they’d use imaginative details that didn’t always neatly align with white fashion. They were actually trendsetters on their own terms, rarely concerned with white onlookers’ approvals of how they presented themselves.
Traditional, white fashion history is attributed to the rule of a British monarchy that gave way to distinctive silhouettes such as Victorian hoop petticoats and Edwardian walking skirts, but interestingly, the enslaved would often choose not to fit into those fashion timelines. Hattie Thompson—she was born enslaved—insisted that “patching and darning” was in vogue in the late 1850s and 1860s, when she was just a child, challenging an aesthetic that dominated the fashion scene at that time.
Charlotte, an enslaved seamstress to Martha Washington at Mt. Vernon from 1786 to 1799, acquired her own style aesthetic by way of second-hand clothing. She repurposed European suiting and old military uniforms with the embellishment of African-origin headwraps and jewelry in a manner that unseated European fads. In fact, one of Marie Antoinette’s favorite outfits was the Gaulle (later called chemise à la reine), a white muslin shift dress that her dressmaker, Rose Bertin—a white dressmaker—acquired from white Creole women, who, in turn, appropriated items like the chemise, madras patterns and headwraps from women of color in West Africa and the Caribbean Basin, proof that Black people not only participated in the broader fashion system but also shaped it without much regard or acknowledgment.
In addition to the patchwork aesthetic, enslaved people had a fondness for vibrant, eye-catching colors in prints, those deemed discordant in the eyes of white bystanders. However, this so-called contradictory styling lives on as a popular style, currently enjoyed by many around the world.
Today, our struggle for freedom in all forms continues on many fronts. Our colorful, centuries-old relationship with fashion underscores how freedom delayed can be freedom denied, one of the many reasons why Juneteenth is an important way to acknowledge and preserve our history.
