Style Narrative Geographies: Black Women Making Harlem Through Fashion and Memory Work

Abstract

Black women’s spatialized subjectivities are produced through the social, esthetic, and material practices of fashioning the body, which includes the wardrobes the women curate and their dressed embodiment in daily life. Embodied fashion functions as a form of Black memory work, recording and spatializing personal and collective narratives across time. In this paper, we examine how middle-aged and elderly Black women engage in place-making through dress practices and spatial subjectivities, with a focus on Harlem, New York City—a site rich with layered memories and imagined futurities that center fashioned bodies. This critical inquiry is particularly urgent in light of ongoing processes of erasure, gentrification, and structural inequities that have reshaped the physical landscape of the neighborhood and the lived experiences of its residents. We argue that Black women are both place-makers and memory workers who assert and claim Harlem as a meaningful space through embodied fashion. As a form of memory work, fashion amplifies marginalized voices and challenges oppressive power structures. To analyze these dynamics, we introduce style narrative geographies as a new theoretical framework that illustrates and elucidates the complex, power-laden relationships between fashion, dress, spatial subjectivities, and place-making for women of the African Diaspora.

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