Slaves to Fashion

Abstract

Stylin' outI begin with two seemingly disparate images: one an eighteenth-century oil painting of an unnamed black boy dressed in a bright red jacket, gold collar, and padlock about his neck, and the other, that of the flamboyantly attired, stylistic maverick hip-hop artist Andre 3000.Can the depiction of the enslaved boy, whose life was defined by service to an eighteenthcentury European gentleman, reveal anything about the magnetic appeal of this contemporary celebrity, known for his leadership of the African American Gentlemen's Movement, a recent fashion trend?1 How has the representation of black people been transformed from images of dandified "luxury" slavery to that of self-fashioning black dandies whose likenesses are now ubiquitous on the stage and on the streets?It is this transformation in black style-from costumed object designed to trumpet the wealth, status, and power of white masters to self-styling subjects who use immaculate clothing, arch wit, and pointed gesture to announce their often controversial presence-that this book seeks to elucidate.The history of black dandyism in the Atlantic diaspora is the story of how and why black people became arbiters of style and how they use clothing and dress to define their identity in different and changing political and cultural contexts.In this cultural history, which examines moments in which black people style their way from slaves to selves in Enlightenment London to present-day Afro-cosmopolitan New York, I show the ways in which Africans dispersed across and around the Atlantic in the slave trade-once slaves to fashion-make fashion their slave.Black people are known for "stylin' out," dressing to the nines, showing their sartorial stuff, especially when the occasion calls for it and, more tellingly, often when it does not.In contemporary culture, stylin' out takes a number of forms and happens in multiple locations, from the 1.

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