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Black in style: Trendsetting, dark-skinned lovelies are nothing new to fashion

Today, the most admired runway and red carpet looks are often those launched by black beauties like Rihanna or Beyoncé — and former First Lady Michelle Obama’s impeccable taste also leads. But the fashion power of dark skin goes back further than many might imagine.

For over 40 years the modeling industry has produced many a black style icon. Stars Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Diahann Carroll and Eartha Kitt had already broken race barriers in their professions as well as demonstrated the trendsetting potential of black women, but it was a French-American fashion competition held at the Palace of Versailles in 1973 that made black models a mainstay on the world’s catwalks.

Josephine Baker

“Of the 36 American models hired for Versailles, 10 were black,” writes Washington Post fashion columnist Robin Givhan in her new book The Battle of Versailles. “The American designers — Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Klein, Halston and Stephen Burrows — didn’t have much money for models, and many of the biggest names in the business, such as Lauren Hutton, were out of their price range.”

Pat Cleveland

Black to the rescue As black models were just gaining acceptance, they weren’t able to command the high salaries of their white confreres, and Blass and the others snatched them up. But what started as a way to cut corners ended in a fashion coup. The brown-skinned models – including Halston muse Pat Cleveland, discovered just a few years earlier by New York Times fashion editor Carrie Donovan – were a hit. Paris tried to ignore America’s designers but the city went mad for their ebony emissaries. Drama critic Clive Barnes remembered that practically overnight it was “apparent that the black model had become paramount.”

It was certainly a far cry from the days following World War II when a few “Negresses” were used in Paris shows merely as “a novelty, a frisson.” But after the Versailles extravaganza, black mattered in fashion, turning heads and selling clothes, and some stunning careers are the result of that moment in fashion. Beverly Johnson became the first black model to appear on the cover of Vogue, and soon she was joined by Iman, Naomi Campbell, Alek Wek, Tyra Banks.

African American models might be a fairly recent advent, but black performing arts celebrities whose looks and fashion sense influenced clothes worn by white women have been a cultural fact since the 1920s. Witness the sensation that dancer Josephine Baker made in Europe with her athletic limbs, spit curls and Patou dresses. Moreover, it was her golden brownness, many believe, that started the white fad for tanning.

As fashion photographer and chronicler extraordinaire Cecil Beaton wondered, “Could it have been Josephine Baker, alighting on the stage of the Folies-Bergere in her bananas and diamonds, who was the inspiration for the far-flung use of the sun-ray lamp, for dusky makeup, and even such extremes as iodine baths?” Whether or not the trend began with Baker, she expedited it. Ever since her 1925 appearance in Paris, Vogue insisted, “smart women began furling their parasols and deciding it would be amusing to be brown.”

Josephine Baker

Enter Josephine Baker From the concurrent Harlem Renaissance, other sleek, stylish black women emerged, actress Florence Mills and aviator Bessie Coleman among them. But it was Josephine Baker who thrilled and astonished the Parisian fashion scene. Style correspondent John McMullin recalled the “great seductive allure” of Baker’s entrance at her namesake nightclub in 1927. Accompanied by her maid, chauffeur and a big white dog, she exited her Voisin town car. He said she “came in without a wrap, and the length of her graceful body was swathed in a blue tulle frock with a bodice of blue snakeskin, worn with slippers to match.” McMullin described her hair as “plastered close to her head” and looking “as if it were painted on.” The distinctive look was imitated by black and white flappers alike; singer Billie Holiday’s trademark up-do and gardenia would make a similar fashion mark in the 1940s.

Billie Holiday

While Baker is the best known early example of a black woman of sufficient fame to impact international style, there’s evidence that brown-skinned beauties were catered to privately by the leading French couturiers of an even earlier era. In his research, Daniel Milford-Cottam, Victoria & Albert Museum cataloger and author of Edwardian Fashion, has discovered drawings from the house of Paquin, dating to the turn of the 20th century, that are clearly painted with dark faces.

Blackbird One of these illustrates a 1902 Paquin suit called Zorab, a reference to an Islamic scholar nicknamed “Blackbird” for his dark skin. Instead of the pink-cheeked faces seen in other sketches in the V&A’s Paquin archive, this design was obviously intended for a foreign client, the artist carefully emulating the unidentified lady’s coloring so she might see how it looked against her own skin tone.

1911 Paquin design

Other Paquin drawings, from 1911 and 1912, reveal similar dark faces, indicating they were geared to non-Caucasian patrons, perhaps an Indian princess, as Milford-Cottam theorizes, or a Brazilian noblewoman.

“Although some simply look like tan models, when you compare them to other designs from the same year, the skin tones really stand out as having been deliberately done darker,” says Milford-Cottam.

This 100-year-old evidence that couture hasn’t always been designed with white women in mind is surprising, yet it confirms what modern fashion decrees – that beauty and style respect no boundaries of race. “We all knew black was beautiful,” Clive Barnes opined, “but it took fashion to show us how beautiful.”


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