◍◈ I Adorn Tings - Who Gets to Build Black Fashion?
- Kiing Curry
- 5 minutes ago
- 26 min read
I Adorn Tings studies what happens where the body meets what we place upon it. Clothing, hair, jewelry, beads, objects, texture, fit, fabrication and style become ways of reading care, culture, labor, access, memory and imagination.
Here, adornment is not decoration added after the body. It is relationship: between the body and the object, the maker and the wearer, what we inherit and what we choose, what fits and what was never built with us in mind.
◍◈ I Adorn Tings-Who Gets to Build Black Fashion?
The question is no longer whether Black fashion exists.
The question is who gets to build it.
Because if I am honest, I am tired.
Not tired of fashion.
Not tired of adornment.
Not tired of style.
I love how we drape our bodies.
I always will.
What I am tired of is becoming a private investigator every time I want to buy a garment.
A pair of shoes.
A piece of jewelry.
A single object.
I am tired of spending hundreds of dollars to discover that nobody tested the thing before they sold it.
I am tired of discovering that the branding received more attention than the construction.
I am tired of discovering that visibility has somehow become more important than craftsmanship.
And I am tired of pretending that naming these experiences is somehow disloyal.
Because if we cannot talk honestly about the things we build, then we are not building culture.
We are building marketing.
This is Us World
The Fabric Was Better Than the Garment
One of the garments that taught me this came from This Is Us.
On paper, it looked like the sort of thing I wanted to support.
Black-owned.
Beautiful fabric.
A brand explicitly situating itself inside Blackness and the African diaspora.
But honestly, the website should have been a warning.
Because even there, something feels unfinished.
It feels like a template loaded with expensive clothes and beautiful Black people without actually being built into a world.
And maybe that is part of what I missed the first time.
The minimalism is trying to communicate expense.
There is all this space.
All this restraint.
All this cleanliness.
Black models standing against flat backgrounds with flat faces.
Very little interruption.
Very little mess.
Very little evidence of the enormous emotional, geographic, material, spiritual, political, and aesthetic expanse of being Black across a diaspora.
Instead, all of that expansiveness gets compressed into the visual language European fashion has already taught us to recognize as expensive.
Minimal.
Restrained.
Serious.
Emotionally distant.
Sanitized.
The clothes are supposed to carry the Blackness while the architecture surrounding them performs luxury.
And that makes me wonder why Blackness has to become this quiet in order to become expensive.
Why does luxury keep requiring us to flatten ourselves?
Why does sophistication keep looking like the removal of information?
Why, when we have an entire diaspora of visual languages available to us, does becoming a serious fashion brand so often mean placing Black bodies inside European sanitation?
Because there is a difference between minimalism as an intentional Black design language and minimalism inherited as proof of legitimacy.
There is a difference between restraint and absence.
There is a difference between giving an object room to speak and simply not having much to say around it.
And looking at the website now, I can see the first version of the question I would eventually ask about everything else:
How much of this was actually built?
Because the website looks expensive before it looks considered.
And eventually I would discover that the garment had a similar problem.
But I didn’t know that yet.
I was curious.
Not only as a customer.
As an artist.
As a maker.
As somebody who has spent years thinking about clothing, bodies, adornment, Blackness, construction, and what becomes possible when Black creatives actually encounter one another.
I was hoping this purchase might become an introduction.
Maybe a conversation.
Maybe eventually a collaboration.
I didn’t know what that collaboration would be. I didn’t need to. Curiosity was enough. I was interested in what they were making, and I wanted to experience the work firsthand.
But this was my first experience purchasing from them, and it will likely be my last.
Because before I could even really get to the garment, there was the experience of getting it to me.
They made a mistake with the shipping.
And when I reached out about a mistake they made, the customer service was nasty.
What stayed with me wasn’t simply that a mistake happened.
Businesses make mistakes.
Makers make mistakes.
I make mistakes.
What stayed with me was what their response communicated about relationship.
There was an importance surrounding the brand that seemed to make the customer secondary to the brand’s own sense of importance.
And I know that architecture.
I have encountered it across fashion, art, education, nonprofits, institutions, and all kinds of supposedly community-centered spaces.
The work becomes important.
The person making the work becomes important.
The visibility becomes important.
The press becomes important.
The proximity to the right people becomes important.
The image becomes important.
And somehow the actual people in relationship with the work become less important.
That raises questions for me far beyond whether somebody answered a customer-service email politely.
Because I am increasingly uninterested in separating the object somebody sells from the infrastructure that allows them to sell it.
Especially when we are talking about Black fashion.
Especially when we are talking about community.
Especially when so much of the language surrounding independent Black creative work asks Black people to support Black businesses precisely because we are supposed to understand that support as relational.
If you want my support because we are in relationship, then what happens when I actually arrive expecting relationship?
What happens when I am no longer an audience, a follower, a customer number, a sale, or evidence of your cultural importance?
What happens when something goes wrong and I need you to encounter me as a person?
You can have the coolest website in the world.
You can have beautiful photographs.
You can know exactly how to make a Black consumer stop scrolling.
You can know how to make a garment look like culture, community, experimentation, possibility.
But what happens when something goes wrong?
What happens when the customer needs you after the payment clears?
What happens when your own system makes the mistake?
How do you respond then?
Because that is part of the garment too.
The customer service is part of the garment.
The shipping infrastructure is part of the garment.
The possibility of relationship is part of the garment.
The way you repair a mistake is part of the garment.
And no matter how cool the website may look, their infrastructure raised a lot of questions for me before I even had enough time with the clothes to ask questions about the clothes themselves.
Then I got to the garment.
And the fabric itself was beautiful.
That is actually what makes the experience so frustrating.
Because the problem wasn’t the fabric.
The problem was the garment.
The construction told a different story.
The thread choices were poor.
The reinforcement was poor.
The execution was poor.
The garment felt unfinished.
Not unfinished aesthetically.
Unfinished structurally.
And there is a difference.
There is a difference between a raw edge that is an intentional design decision and a garment that has not been engineered to survive being a garment.
There is a difference between experimentation and poor construction.
There is a difference between rejecting the conventions of fashion and failing to understand why certain construction techniques exist in the first place.
As someone who makes things, my body immediately starts asking questions.
Did anybody test this?
Did anybody wear this repeatedly?
Did anybody stress this garment before selling it?
What happens at the seam when the body sits?
What happens when the body bends?
What happens when the fabric pulls against itself?
What happens after washing?
What happens after wearing?
What happens when this thing has to stop being an image on a website and become somebody’s actual clothes?
Eventually I stopped thinking about wearing it altogether.
The fabric was better than the garment.
And maybe that sentence holds more than I originally thought.
Because the website was better than the infrastructure too.
The presentation was better than the experience.
The promise was better than the practice.
And the possibility of collaboration disappeared somewhere inside that gap.
That matters.
Because who gets to build Black fashion cannot only be a question about who gets access to capital, production, visibility, press, or the cultural authority to call themselves a designer.
It also has to be a question of what we are building once we get there.
What kinds of relationships are we building?
What kinds of systems are we building?
What happens to other Black people when they enter those systems?
Does our infrastructure reproduce the same hierarchies we say our Black ownership is supposed to interrupt?
I am not interested in evaluating Black fashion solely through the question of whether a Black person owns the company.
Ownership tells me who possesses the business.
It does not tell me how the business has been built.
It does not tell me whether the garment is constructed well.
It does not tell me whether workers and collaborators are treated well.
It does not tell me whether customers are treated with care.
It does not tell me whether another Black artist approaching with curiosity will find an opening for relationship or another hierarchy they are expected to recognize.
It does not tell me whether there are systems for accountability when something goes wrong.
It does not tell me whether the infrastructure underneath all that beautiful branding can actually hold weight.
And maybe that is another kind of stress test.
Pull on the seam.
Wash the fabric.
Wear the garment.
Make a shipping mistake.
Receive a complaint.
Encounter another Black maker.
See what holds.
Because eventually, everything gets worn.
And when it does, the construction tells the truth.
The garment told me something.
The customer service told me something.
The infrastructure told me something.
The distance between the language of community and the practice of relationship told me something too.
I came to This Is Us wondering what we might be able to build together.
I left wondering something much simpler:
If this is us, is it actually for us?
Kkerelè
Shoes Are Engineering
The same thing happened with Kkerelè.
I purchased a pair of shoes.
The design was beautiful.
The concept was beautiful.
The story was beautiful.
The shoes broke almost immediately.
Not after years.
Not after heavy use.
Immediately.
And what makes that experience more complicated is that Kkerelè eventually changed aspects of the shoe.
They knew something about the original construction was off.
They knew enough to alter the design moving forward.
But as far as my experience went, there was no reaching backward.
No communication saying:
We realized there was a problem with this shoe.
No acknowledgment that some of the people who supported the original release had purchased the version with the construction issue.
Not even an offer of a discounted replacement once the shoe had been redesigned.
And that matters to me because correcting a product moving forward and repairing your relationship with the people who already purchased it are two different things.
One is product development.
The other is accountability.
I was an early customer.
My body became part of the research whether anybody intended for it to or not.
I wore the shoe.
The shoe failed.
And then I fixed it.
I didn’t even take it to a cobbler.
I have enough knowledge from jewelry making to understand how that kind of construction works, and I have watched enough shoe repair over the years to understand what needed to happen.
So I repaired the shoe myself.
That detail matters.
Because my ability to fix the shoe can make the failure disappear.
I can put it back together.
I can keep wearing it.
I can make the purchase feel less wasteful because I have enough material knowledge to intervene when the construction fails.
But my skill does not make the original construction better.
And my ability to repair something should not be confused with the thing having been adequately built in the first place.
What happens to the customer who doesn’t know how to fix it?
What happens to the person who has to find a cobbler?
What happens when the cost of repair gets added to the cost of a shoe that broke almost immediately?
What happens when somebody simply throws it away?
That means I wasn’t only wearing the early version of the shoe.
I became part of its aftercare infrastructure.
My body tested it.
My making knowledge diagnosed it.
My hands repaired it.
And none of that labor belonged to the company.
That failure produced information.
And if information gathered through customers’ bodies eventually helps you make a better product, what responsibility do you have to the people whose purchases helped expose the problem in the first place?
I am not saying a small Black-owned company has to have the replacement infrastructure of Nike.
I am asking whether there is any infrastructure for repair at all.
An email.
An acknowledgment.
A discount.
An invitation to try the corrected version.
Something that recognizes that the improved shoe exists, in part, because earlier shoes taught you what wasn’t working.
Because otherwise the customer absorbs the cost of your research and development.
And sometimes, apparently, the repair labor too.
You get the improved product.
We keep the prototype we didn’t know we were buying.
That failure produced information.
And if information gathered through customers’ bodies eventually helps you make a better product, what responsibility do you have to the people whose purchases helped expose the problem in the first place?
And that is the thing I cannot stop thinking about.
Not that mistakes were made.
Mistakes happen.
Design requires iteration.
The question is what happens to the people who encounter the design before the iteration is finished.
How many bodies tested these shoes before they were sold?
How many people walked in them?
How much research and development happened before they entered the market?
And when the market itself revealed the problem, what happened to the people whose bodies revealed it?
Because shoes are not graphics.
Shoes are engineering.
Shoes have consequences.
And I found myself wondering whether some of these companies are building products or building concepts.
Because those are not the same thing.
And the frustrating part is that I love these shoes.
They are a pair I will fucking love forever.
Loveeeeeeeee.
I took them to Hom(e)ie Summer Camp.
The moment I wore them, somebody asked me about them.
Of course they did.
They are beautiful shoes.
They do exactly what a beautiful object can do.
They interrupt the visual field.
They make somebody look.
They make somebody curious.
They make somebody ask:
Where did you get those?
And I love that about them.
But wearing them requires focus.
Not the ordinary awareness that comes with wearing a platform or an unusual shoe.
Focus.
The way the shoe is built requires me to continually pay attention to the relationship between my foot and the ground.
The platform creates height without giving my body enough information about what is happening underneath it.
The base does not move with the foot in a way that lets me forget about the shoe and simply walk.
Every change in terrain becomes something I have to calculate.
A crack.
A slope.
A curb.
An uneven sidewalk.
Grass.
A transition between one surface and another.
I have to see it before my foot encounters it.
It reminds me of my mom telling me about learning to walk in platforms.
Because that tumble and fall, baby.
That possibility lives inside these shoes.
Not necessarily:
I am going to fall.
But:
I need to make sure I don’t.
And those are two very different experiences for the body.
One allows the shoe to become part of the body.
The other requires the body to continually manage the shoe.
And the more I wear them, the more I wonder whether they were actually designed to be worn in.
Because they are incredible objects.
As sculpture?
Absolutely.
As an art piece?
Absolutely.
As something that transforms an outfit and interrupts a room?
Absolutely.
But a shoe has another responsibility.
A shoe has to move.
A shoe has to encounter terrain.
A shoe has to negotiate gravity.
A shoe has to receive the body over and over and over again.
And if all of the work required to make the object visually extraordinary results in the body having to become hypervigilant just to move safely inside it, then I have to ask what the design is actually prioritizing.
I don’t want less art.
I don’t want a safer, flatter, more boring shoe.
I don’t want Black designers to stop making strange shit.
I want the opposite.
I want the sculpture.
I want the impossible silhouette.
I want the shoe that makes somebody stop me the first time I wear it.
But why does my body have to pay for that imagination?
Why does accessibility so often enter the conversation as though it requires sacrificing experimentation, beauty, strangeness, or art?
Can the engineering be as imaginative as the silhouette?
Can the relationship with the foot be as considered as the relationship with the eye?
Can I not have fashion and art that is accessible to my body?
Spunge and the Difference Between Design and Comfort
And Then There Is Spunge
And then there is Spunge.
Which is actually a different story altogether.
Because if you had asked me when I first got them whether I would buy another pair of Spunge sneakers, the answer would have been yes.
Immediately yes.
Without hesitation yes.
The design is dope.
The shoes look like water.
They look like octopi (don't care if its not a word).
They look like bubbles.
They look like something from an Afro-future where footwear is allowed to be strange and playful and alive.
They are visually interesting in a way that most sneakers are not.
They tell a story.
And I think that matters.
But I’ve lived with them longer now.
And the body has given me more information.
If you ask me whether they are comfortable?
No.
Point blank.
No.
The shoes have hella structure.
The shoes have caryophyllene energy.
Grounding.
Stable.
Protective.
Present.
What they do not have is myrcene.
They do not have softness.
They do not have squish.
They do not have the kind of give that allows a body to settle into them.
Which is funny because the company uses the phrase:
Squish Tech.
And “Squish Tech” is hella dope.
I love saying it.
Squish Tech.
That phrase sounds like somebody invented the future in a laboratory.
The only problem is there isn’t much squish.
And now I have another problem.
There isn’t much air either.
These shoes do not breathe.
And I don’t think I’ve ever owned a pair of sneakers that I have had to declare a fall or winter sneaker because my feet literally cannot tolerate them when it is hot outside.
There is no real breathable access.
My feet get hot.
Then hotter.
Then my whole body starts registering the heat.
I overheat in them.
And suddenly something as basic as air becomes part of the design conversation.
Because a foot does not exist outside of atmosphere.
A shoe doesn’t either.
The foot sweats.
The temperature changes.
The body heats.
The body cools.
We move between indoors and outdoors.
Concrete and grass.
Air conditioning and summer heat.
Train platforms and train cars.
Cities and climates.
A sneaker has to negotiate all of that.
I learned exactly how much that mattered when I was preparing for my train trip to and from North Carolina.
I took the Spunge sneakers.
And then I decided not to wear them.
They weren’t comfortable enough for that much movement.
They weren’t easy enough to take on and off.
And I knew I was going to be moving through too many different atmospheres, including extreme heat.
My feet needed to breathe.
So I wore my classic.
Tevas, sandals, and socks.
They met the need.
That decision told me something.
Because I have been thinking about what parts of my wardrobe become my uniform.
Not a uniform because I want to wear the same exact thing every day.
A uniform because certain objects become trustworthy.
A uniform because when the cosmos pops out I want what I am wearing to tell a story.
I know what they do.
I know where they can go.
I know how long my body can live inside them.
I know what weather they can handle.
I know what happens when I have to walk farther than I expected.
I know what happens when a day changes shape.
And I don’t know how realistically these shoes can become part of that uniform.
Not yet.
The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
As I look as their newest colorway Jollof and drool just a lil.
Because eventually I have to ask what I am receiving for the amount of accommodation my body has to make for the shoe.
And at the price I paid, that question gets even sharper.
I have Nikes I paid around the same amount for.
Reeboks.
Name the pitiful, horrible brand.
And those sneakers can move through my life year-round.
That comparison frustrates me because I don’t want the lesson to be that the giant corporation makes the better shoe.
I want Black design to have room to experiment.
I want the weird shoe.
I want the watery shoe.
I want the octopus-bubble-Afro-future shoe.
I want Spunge to keep making that shoe.
But I also want to ask what conditions determine what the first version of that shoe is allowed to be.
Because this is where the colonial system enters the construction process again.
The system does not necessarily give a small Black company the conditions to spend years proving that it can make the most solid product possible.
It demands proof that you can make money.
First.
Can you sell it?
Can you create demand?
Can you generate attention?
Can you prove there is a market?
Can you scale?
Can you survive?
And only after you prove the business is viable might you gain access to better materials, better manufacturing, more prototyping, more testing, more research and development, more opportunities to refine what the body actually experiences.
So when I say the shoe doesn’t breathe, I am not simply asking:
Why didn’t you use better material?
I am asking:
What material were you able to use?
What manufacturer would work with you?
What were the minimums?
What did better materials cost?
How many prototypes could you afford?
How many bodies could test them?
How much time could you spend researching breathability before somebody needed you to prove that this idea could make money?
Because those are design questions too.
And I don’t want to confuse understanding those conditions with lowering the standard.
The foot still gets hot.
My body still overheats.
The shoe still isn’t comfortable for long periods.
Material conditions can explain a design compromise.
They do not erase what that compromise does to the body.
That is why Squish Tech keeps making me laugh and making me think.
Squish Tech.
The language promises a bodily experience.
And the shoe gives me something else.
Structure.
Protection.
Form.
Caryophyllene.
But not enough myrcene.
Not enough air.
Not enough give.
And maybe that is where my relationship with Spunge actually sits now.
I still love these shoes.
I love looking at them.
I love what they imagine.
I love that somebody made a sneaker that looks like water and bubbles and an octopus instead of making another fucking sneaker that looks like every other sneaker.
But I no longer know if loving them means I would immediately buy another pair.
I need to see what Spunge learns.
I need to see what happens with the next iteration.
Does Squish Tech get squishier?
Does the shoe learn how to breathe?
Does all that incredible visual imagination begin to extend further into the internal environment of the foot?
Because eventually the body enters the conversation.
Eventually your feet enter the conversation.
Eventually the weather enters the conversation.
Eventually the atmosphere enters the conversation.
And once again the body becomes the final reviewer.
The first release showed me that Spunge knows how to imagine a shoe I want to look at.
The next question is whether they can make one my body wants to live in.
Because the future cannot only look different.
It has to feel different too.
Like a Spunge absorbing accessibility.
Telfar and the Scarcity Scan
And then there is Telfar.
This one can be short.
Maybe the shortness tells the truth too.
Because the bags were never it.
The bag became a cultural emblem almost overnight, but the object itself never held the weight of what we made it mean.
The vegan leather, plastic, whatever we want to call it, feels cheap.
It scuffs easily.
It weathers easily.
The strap is horrible.
It hurts the body instead of helping the body support the bag.
And I know because I participated.
I had a few.
I participated in the drops.
I participated in the waiting.
I participated in the scarcity.
I knew what having that bag could do for me inside the culture.
Recognition.
Legibility.
Belonging.
I knew somebody would see it and know.
And for a while, that knowing was enough to make the object feel more valuable than the object actually was.
That is what makes Telfar interesting to me now.
Not as Black legacy.
As Black scarcity.
As a demonstration of how quickly the colonial system can teach us to confuse access with value.
Make it difficult to get.
Make everybody want it at once.
Make possession communicate belonging.
Make the people who get one feel like they got inside.
And watch our eyes turn it into mountains of gold.
That doesn’t mean Telfar has never made good clothes. Some of the fashion collaborations have been much stronger. We still own pieces I expect I will keep for a very long time.
But the bag?
The bag taught me something else.
Sometimes the product isn’t the thing being sold.
Sometimes belonging is.
And we will make almost anything precious if we believe possessing it proves we belong.
Hanifa: Expanded Sizing Is Not the Same as Knowing Fat Bodies
Hanifa is another brand that I truly enjoy.
And I think Hanifa is particularly interesting right now because the owner has taken a break from production.
I actually hope the break creates room.
Room to take stock.
Room to receive new information.
Room to ask what the brand has learned from the bodies that have already been wearing these clothes.
And if Hanifa returns to full production, I hope some of that information gets integrated not only into the garments, but into the infrastructure around them.
Because this keeps being one of my questions throughout Black fashion:
How do we build infrastructure outside of colonial infrastructure?
Not just put Black people inside the same systems.
Not just make Black luxury.
Not just make Black versions of fashion institutions that already exist.
How do we build different relationships between designer, garment, customer, and body?
Because sometimes we end up situating one another exactly the way white people have situated one another.
And Hanifa makes me think about that through sizing.
I am plus size.
But one thing I have learned from dressing my body for my entire life is that saying “plus size” actually tells you very little about how a garment needs to fit me.
And I know there is now all this language about small fat, medium fat, super fat.
I think that shit is absurd.
We’re still trying to organize fat bodies against one another as though finding increasingly specific names for the size of somebody’s fatness means we have actually studied the body.
My body is composed differently.
I don’t have what fashion has decided is the stereotypical plus-size body: more hip, more thigh, smaller chest, smaller shoulders.
My body is pretty consistently stacked.
I also have a very, very short torso and long limbs.
That changes everything.
It changes where a waist lands.
It changes where a hem lands.
It changes how a dress hangs.
It changes what happens through the shoulders.
It changes how much fabric I need in one place and how much fabric becomes excess somewhere else.
That is why some brands have surprised me.
Ivy Park’s plus sizing, for example, fit my body much better because it didn’t seem to follow that same Lane Bryant sizing logic I had learned to negotiate for years.
And negotiation is the word.
Because fat people become experts at making clothes fit that were never actually designed to understand us.
We learn fabric.
We learn stretch.
We learn which silhouettes forgive bad grading.
We learn when to size up.
We learn when sizing up will actually make the garment fit worse.
We learn which part of our body gets to determine the size on the tag.
We learn which measurements on the size chart are telling the truth and which ones we can ignore.
We learn how much discrepancy we can survive.
We learn the game.
I’ve been playing it my entire life.
My favorite Hanifa dress is the Jax Knit Gown.
I fucking love that dress.
I feel dope in it.
I bought it in a 3X when my body was much, much bigger.
And now my body has changed considerably.
The dress still fits.
That sounds wonderful—and in some ways it is.
But it also tells me that the 3X doesn’t necessarily mean what we think a 3X means.
The sizing is a misnomer.
To successfully buy that garment, you have to know more than your size.
You have to know your fat body.
You have to know stretch.
You have to understand knit.
You have to understand how this particular silhouette is going to interact with where your body carries itself.
And I have that literacy.
But that’s the accessibility question.
What happens to the person who doesn’t?
I am glad Hanifa offers expanded sizing.
I want to make that clear.
But expanded sizing and understanding fat bodies are not necessarily the same practice.
Putting a 3X on a size chart does not automatically mean the garment has been researched across the enormous variety of bodies that might arrive at 3X.
Where is the weight?
Where is the length?
Where is the width?
Where are the breasts?
Where is the stomach?
Where are the shoulders?
How long is the torso?
How long are the arms?
How does the body actually occupy space?
Because two people can inhabit the same numerical size and require profoundly different things from a garment.
That is the information I want fashion to become curious about.
And my own body is shifting now. I don’t expect to encounter this sizing problem in exactly the same way moving forward.
But accessibility doesn’t stop being my question simply because my own body no longer needs the same access.
I know how to get through the door.
I want to know what happens to the bigger body coming behind me.
Can they wear the Jax Knit Gown?
Can they trust the size chart?
How much prior knowledge do they need before purchasing?
How much of the successful fit is being produced by the garment, and how much is being produced by a fat person’s lifetime of learning how to compensate for fashion?
Because compensation can look a whole lot like accessibility when the person compensating has gotten really fucking good at it.
And there is another layer.
The Jax Knit Gown makes me feel incredible.
But I can also see very clearly what body story the garment expects to tell.
Hanifa is deeply invested in hyperfemininity.
There is a particular kind of womanhood being imagined.
A particular relationship between curve, exposure, glamour, sexiness, elegance, and body.
And I can take that garment and tell another story with it.
I do.
But I am bringing that story to the garment.
The line itself doesn’t necessarily seem curious about what happens when somebody uses these clothes outside of that boring binary knowing.
What happens when the body wearing the dress isn’t interested in performing womanhood?
What happens when femininity becomes material rather than identity?
What happens when somebody takes this hyperfeminine garment and glitches it?
What happens when the garment becomes part of a trans story, a nonbinary story, a masculine story, an undefinable story?
The clothes are capable of more stories than the brand seems interested in telling.
And I know that because I am already telling them.
I have a black Samaria Hanifa skirt too.
I love that fucking skirt.
It has a slit.
It moves beautifully.
And it is made extremely well.
I bought it when my body was much bigger.
Technically, my body is around the size now that the skirt was supposedly designed to fit then.
And yet something about the waistband is still weird.
I get this is part of the aesthetic design when looking at the stock images of the skirt.
But something about the way that waist was engineered doesn’t quite make sense to me.
Likey it’s because i’m not hippy enough.
Am I going to stop wearing it?
Hell no.
Because this is where Hanifa becomes different from some of the other brands I am writing about.
The garment holds.
The construction holds.
The material holds.
The design holds.
The skirt has already moved into something closer to legacy for me.
It will likely stay in my wardrobe for a very long time.
And maybe that is why I want more from Hanifa.
Not because the work is disposable.
Because it isn’t.
Not because the designers don’t know how to make clothes.
They clearly fucking do.
I want more because the garments have already demonstrated that they can survive long enough to become part of somebody’s life.
So now I want the infrastructure and imagination surrounding those garments to become just as expansive.
Study the fat body beyond the size chart.
Study proportion instead of only circumference.
Study the bodies already wearing the clothes.
Study what happens when femininity leaves womanhood.
Study how people transform these garments after they leave the photograph.
Study the stories your customers are already telling that you never imagined for them.
Because if the garment is built well enough to become legacy, then the world around the garment should be built well enough to let more of us into it.
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Apparently, this essay became too long for platform to continue editing on a single page.
Cosmos Watershed
This essay asks what happens after representation succeeds at making Black fashion visible but fails to transform the infrastructure underneath it. Moving through garments, shoes, sizing, customer service, construction, repair, scarcity, fat embodiment, and the colonial inheritances embedded in fashion systems, it treats the body as both archive and stress test. Black ownership matters, but ownership alone cannot produce relationship, craftsmanship, accessibility, or accountability. The garment tells the truth because eventually every beautiful story has to survive contact with an actual body.
Cosmos Watershed
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | Adornment as Infrastructure |
Relationship | Black fashion, embodiment, craftsmanship, customer relationship, accountability, accessibility, repair |
Hom(e)ie | |
Origin | Living with Black-designed garments and objects long enough for the distance between their branding, construction, bodily experience, and customer infrastructure to become visible. |
Expansion | Moves beyond representation and Black ownership to ask who receives the training, capital, manufacturing knowledge, apprenticeship, experimentation, repair systems, and institutional support required to actually build Black fashion differently. |
Application | Invites consumers, designers, makers, and cultural workers to evaluate fashion through the entire ecology surrounding an object: material, construction, fit, body, customer care, repair, infrastructure, and long-term relationship. |
Lineage | Black adornment, African fashion, fat embodiment, trans and nonbinary styling, craft knowledge, garment construction, shoe engineering, repair practices, Black consumer culture, apprenticeship, material literacy. |
Counter Currents | Representation without infrastructure, branding without craft, scarcity as value, colonial sizing systems, European bodily standards, hyperfemininity as default, consumer silence, visibility without accountability, customers as unpaid quality control. |
Cosmos Coordinates
Field | Entry |
Planetary Body | The Wata(ring) W(hole) |
Planet of Origin | I Adorn Tings |
Primary Water | Deep Water |
Secondary Water | Flowing Water |
Movement | Following an object beyond acquisition and allowing repeated wear, movement, weather, failure, repair, and time to reveal what its construction actually holds. |
Portal | The garment as evidence. |
Primary Technology | Embodied observation, material literacy, wear testing, repair, comparison, critique, long-term relationship. |
Cosmological Function | Repositions fashion as an ecosystem in which design, infrastructure, body, material, labor, customer care, access, and accountability cannot be separated from one another. |
Core Inquiry | Who gets to build Black fashion—and what are we actually building when we get access to do so? |
Threshold | Recognizing that representation and Black ownership can interrupt exclusion without necessarily interrupting the colonial infrastructures underneath fashion. |
Black Ecological Orientation | Black fashion becomes an ecology rather than an identity category: bodies, materials, makers, customers, knowledge, labor, resources, repair, and cultural memory exist in relationship and must be tended accordingly. |
Calabash Relationship | Every garment carries more than material: the knowledge that constructed it, the body that tests it, the money exchanged for it, the labor required to maintain it, the failures repaired within it, and the memories accumulated through wear. |
Wata(ring) W(hole) Relationship | Fashion enters the Wata(ring) W(hole) as an embodied environment. Garments regulate heat, movement, pressure, exposure, identity, sensory experience, and belonging; the body continually returns information to the system through use. |
Return Practice | When encountering an object you want to bring into your life, ask: What relationship is this object asking my body, labor, money, and attention to maintain? |
◍◈ I Adorn Tings-Who Gets to Build Black Fashion?
