Before placing Africans in chains and trafficking them across the Atlantic into the unknown, colonizers stripped them naked. It was an early example of clothing being used to dehumanize Black people.
During slave auctions, sellers dressed enslaved men and women in European clothes to heighten their "appeal" to white buyers. On plantations, enslaved men were forced to wear coarse “Negro cloth.” Laws like South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1735 made it legal to confiscate “any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other of greater value than Negro cloth” from Black people.
Enslaved tailors and dressmakers kept discarded fabric, buttons, and ribbons, turning them into colorful and patterned clothes that they and their families sometimes wore to church—an early version of our “Sunday best.”
Male servants were forced into dandy wear, often made of the most expensive materials, to reflect the social status of their enslavers. Others stole their enslavers' finest garments to trade for food or evade capture by passing as free along the Underground Railroad. Dandyism was their key to survival.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the men of Harlem strutted the streets in zoot suits and fedoras. By then, dressing to the nines was an assertion of bodily autonomy, dignity, and pride that nothing could strip away. Black Dandyism allows us to rewrite narratives, stand in our power, and imagine possibilities outside of the colonial-created society we live in. Let’s continue using our creativity to imagine ourselves in a Black future where all is fine and dandy for our people.