The Black Fashion Museum

A determined quest to save sartorial history

This week, a new experiment. I played producer for my fashionable friend, Enya Hennings, on a story that she had been wanting to explore. So she’s your main host for this episode! But it was so fun to tag along and chime in now and then.

Our intrepid reporter does research on the way to DC! (She’s going to kill me for posting this)

Enya reported on the story of how one woman single-handedly saved the history of Black fashion. Which is the history of American fashion.

Lois K Alexander Lane

The tricky thing about fashion is that to preserve its history, you need to preserve physical garments. And, alas, closet space is finite, cloth gets sun-bleached and eaten by moths, and Americans notoriously do not give a shit about their fashion heritage. So this is why one woman decided to put a call out across the country and make a scrappy archive all by herself.

Thanks to decades of Lane’s dedication and hard work, we know about so many designers and artists who might have otherwise been lost to history. Including… Rosa Parks. This is what she was sewing at home on the day she was arrested:

Special special shout out to the one, the only, Enya Hennings. Thanks for doing this story with me, bud. Check out Enya’s beautiful art/clothing project, Armscye.

Other Articles of Interest

• Speaking of art/clothing, my friend Camilla has a few shows in NYC right now and their gallery is dropping some limited edition art/clothes. I just bought a pair of their glittery extended basketball shorts and let me tell you they are a real crowd pleaser.

• I just officiated my friends’ beautiful wedding (congratulations Anna and Vika!!!!) and I just had to share that Anna made a fabric out of her and her wife’s love letters… and then took it to queer tailor Thuy, who turned it into suit lining. How lovely is that?

  

• btw Anna also sends out romantic missives on her substack.

• My friend Bethel informed me that the shoes that I used to blithely call jelly shoes actually have a rich backstory in Eritrea. So much so, that there’s a Claes Oldenburg-looking sculpture of them in Asmara

• I spied Take Ivy on the desk of a designer at Buck Mason…. (for a future story)

• Thanks to everyone who came out to the Tribeca Festival last week, and congratulations to the winners! I thought I was hot shit when I had my red carpet moment and then I was swiftly brought down to earth by the random, silly name that Getty Images gave me (although arguably less silly and random than my actual Ellis Island-ass name). The kind folks at Tribeca have since corrected this but I sort of wish they hadn’t because I’m still cracking up about it.

Stay humble out there.

Yours,

Kasey Burger