Black Fashion and Dress Cultures

A cultural history of Black fashion and dress, this course examines the power of clothing as a strategic tool for self-representation, resistance, and liberation. We will examine how fashion and dress express social, political, and aesthetic realities and ambitions of Black people in diaspora, especially as they transition from enslavement to freedom, rural to urban, from colonized to liberated, and visualize a sense of cosmopolitanism on and with their adorned bodies. 

In fall of 2026, the class will focus on 10 fashion objects that represent singular, transformative moments in Afrodiasporic history. Combining material history with cultural, social, and political context, this course analyzes the impact of fashion/dress makers and wearers, offering a window onto Black history through a familiar, yet contested and consequential mode of identity formation– clothing and style.