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February 1, 2022 by Staff
in Women at the Center
The Great Migration and Fashion Shows in Black Communities

In 1925, almost 2,000 New Yorkers poured into the Manhattan Casino in Harlem for
a charity fashion show hosted by the Citizens’ Christmas Cheer Committee. The
display of colorful gowns, hats, and wraps included a hand-painted Spanish shawl
by the famed Harlem Renaissance artist Augusta Savage. A year earlier, The
Pittsburgh Courier reported that nearly 10,000 people came out to Madison Square
Garden for a fashion show held to benefit “a child helping and recreation center
for colored children” in Harlem. Black models displayed the latest fashionable
silhouettes with elaborate hats, luxurious furs, and jewelry. (Watch an example
of one Harlem fashion show here!) These kinds of events weren't unique: African
American newspapers of the 1920s frequently reported on fashion shows in Black
communities of major urban centers, both North and South. The shows had the dual
purpose of benefiting local charities and celebrating feminine beauty and
artistic performances. In honor of Black History Month, the Center for Women’s
History looks back at how fashion shows became central to African American
social life and fundraising in 1920s cities.

Jeanne Lanvin, Robe de Style, 1922. Collection of LACMA.The French couturier
Jeanne Lanvin is created for this fashionable style of dress, inspired by an
18th-century silhouette. While many African Americans in the 1920s had more
disposable income than ever before, department stores remained inhospitable
spaces to them. It is likely that fashionable garments worn in Black fashion
shows were reproduced by Black dressmakers for their own middle-class and elite
clientele.

The popularity of these community-organized fashion shows was spurred by
profound changes in fashion consumption. In the early 19th-century, fashion was
mainly distributed via toy dolls and fashion plates, and women received
dressmakers at home to commission various styles. By the 1880s however, this
shifted. In Paris, the capital of fashion, women now favored visiting showrooms
where they would spend a whole afternoon looking at new designs and sipping tea.
It was then that “human mannequins” (models) became essential for the
presentation of new collections. Now, women entering couture salons expected to
see new styles on live models. The jump to fashion shows with their parade of
new clothes for crowds of spectators was not far off. 

The late 19th century was also a time in which fashion was drawn out from
private spaces into public view. Promenades, parks, racetracks, and other public
venues became stages to display fashion irrespective of social class. As fashion
shows were exported from France to U.S. department stores in the early 20th
century, they morphed from exclusive, by-invitation-only events into extravagant
celebrations of consumer culture and entertainment with elaborate sets and
performances. By the 1920s, the formula for American fashion shows was
well-established and included dance, music, and theater.

James Van Der Zee, Billy, best known for documenting the Harlem renaissance.
1926. This fashionable woman is modeling a robe de style (pronounced de-still),
a dress that would have been worn in fashion shows, parades, and revues during
the 1920s. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Black fashion shows were also shaped by massive changes in the segregated urban
communities where many Black people lived. The Great Migration transformed the
fabric of established African American neighborhoods as well as the geography of
many major cities. During the 1910s and 1920s, a new class of African Americans
gained elite status by accumulating substantial wealth, especially from the
beauty and entertainment industries. Madam C.J. Walker, who reigned over a
hair-products empire, is perhaps the most widely known. 

Yet despite Walker's success and Black women's vital contributions to household
income, African American organizations such as the Freemasons of Prince Hall and
Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) relied on
dominant conceptions of gender differences. Masculinity was linked to production
and engagement with the marketplace. Respectable women were imagined as
belonging solely in the realm of the home and family. As a result, much of
women's political work was conducted under the guise of “motherly care”  and
“respectable femininity.” This included organizing social events, banquets, and
eventually fashion shows—allowing elite and middle-class women to do political
work normally associated with masculinity without compromising their femininity
and respectability. These events raised substantial funds for organizations,
making the work of women not just a public representation of the given
organization’s values but also crucial to its preservation. 

Fashion shows were a very different kind of entertainment than the minstrel
shows popular at the same time, which utilized exaggerated, stereotypical bodily
movements that white audiences associated with African Americans. In contrast,
the new form of "fashion walk," characterized by an erect body and gliding
movements, radiated aristocracy and good taste. Like African American women’s
magazines and nationalist organizations, the fashion show celebrated racial
pride and more diverse visions of Black beauty, not in relation to white
standards, but despite them. 

Blanche Thompson, star of “Brown Skin Models.” February 25, 1939, the Norfolk
Journal and Guide. Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American
Newspapers.

For example, the actor Irvin C. Miller offered Black audiences an alternative to
the elite white entertainment spaces from which they were barred by directing a
series of successful traveling shows, including Red Hot Mama, Desires of 1927,
and Gay Harlem. He grossed an average of $6,000 weekly—more than $90,000
adjusted to contemporary values—and employed 160 performers. His wife, Blanche
Thompson, starred in his show Brown Skin Models when it opened in 1924 and
traveled to several cities including New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. The
performance was modeled after the formula of the famed Ziegfeld Follies to blend
fine art with commercial entertainment, featuring dance, music, and beautiful
women sporting the latest fashions. Thompson was known for her taste and
exquisite costumes, which she herself reproduced from Parisian couture designs.
She was not simply a burlesque dancer—she was the embodiment of a new model. Her
performance glorified African American beauty and provided the blueprint for
charity fashion shows, in which the female body was at once commodified and
celebrated for embodying political ideas. 

Brown Skin Models poster, 1939. Black Quotidian: Everyday History in
African-American Newspapers.

These shows’ enormous popularity legitimized “fashion walking” for middle class
audiences and opened up a path for staging fashion shows for respectable
establishments to use for fundraising purposes for myriad community needs,
including the support of churches, hospitals, and other philanthropic causes.
Elite and middle-class African Americans—including debutantes and society
women—participated in the fashion shows and modeled respectable appearance,
deportment, and sociability to the working-class, poor, and recent migrants. In
turn, African American newspapers reporting on the shows legitimized the women
organizers as important economic engines and sources of activism in their
communities. This legacy of women's political work reverberated through the
decades into the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Written by Keren Ben-Horin, Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in Women’s
History and Public History, Center for Women’s History.

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