by As the female face of garage group So Solid Crew in the early 00s, Lisa Maffia felt the need to shift her style from tomboyish tracksuits to a more feminine look. She enlisted the help of ’90s designer Walé Adeyemi to recreate the black leather dress she wore in the 2001 music video for the group’s most enduring hit, 21 Seconds. The Christian Dior dress designed by John Galliano was a hobby she saw but couldn’t afford. Maffia, whose story is just one of the pop moments recounted in Garms, a new documentary about British fashion, has become an icon and an inspiration to a generation of black British women and girls.
In the film, host Ayishat Akanbi educates the audience in heritage Black fashion designers and stylists who have worn Black Britons for generations, along with the history of migration, resistance and rebellion. From pioneering Trinidadian textile designer Althea McNish to Nigerian Amechi Ihenacho, owner of The Original Pattern, a London fashion vintage, the documentary brings to the fore the names and voices of fashion innovators.
It doesn’t come a moment too soon, as Black British fashion is enjoying its moment in the sun, the landscape has transformed in recent years. London-based streetwear designer Clint419 and menswear designer Martine Rose worked with Nike on collections that sold out within seconds. Maximilian Davis, who was born into a Trinidadian-Jamaican family in Manchester, was named creative director of Salvatore Ferragamo in 2022 at the age of just 26. Although the stylist and editor Ib Kamara Usher should recently for the Super Bowl in Off-White, the label in which Kamara is the artistic and image director from 2022, after the death of its founder Virgil Abloh in 2021.
“Fashion is amazing now [is that] As designers we’re showing the next generation there’s a place to be,” says Bianca Saunders, 30, who launched her eponymous menswear brand in 2017 and also dressed Usher for the 2023 Met Gala. “When I started at first I was going down a creative path that didn’t need to exist. We had the likes of Ozwald Boateng,” she says, name-checking the heritage Ghanaian designer known for his versatile and eclectic outfits, “but there weren’t many examples of a woman owning a men’s brand.”
What Saunders says is most powerful about Black British designers is the “storytelling” woven into their fabrics. Garms traces much of that, exploring everything from the maximalist prints of west African migrants to the polished, immaculate tailoring of the Windrush aristocracy. It makes for a rich visual historical narrative.
Saunders, who grew up in Catford, south-east London, and is of Jamaican descent, cites her heritage as a major influence on her distinctive tailoring style, which involves asymmetric technical cuts, avant garde styles and ruched fabrics. “The balance between masculinity and femininity in Caribbean culture is interesting. Men are well-kept and women are sexy first, so I thought it would be interesting to flip that story a bit.”
The importance of such influences is shared by Foday Dumbuya of Labrum London, who won the Queen Elizabeth II award for British design last year and whose latest collection, shown at Tate Britain, was titled “Designed By An Immigrant: as part of London fashion week: The Color Tour”. The Sierra Leone-born designer incorporates the dynamic prints of everyday life in the capital city of Freetown and images of west African masks with classic, distinctive tailoring. His influences are as African and black as they are British: “My upbringing in a family where my parents blended British tailoring with an African flair greatly influenced my design sensibility,” he says. “Being a witness to the combination of these two distinct sartorial traditions has given me great respect for the power of fashion as a form of self-expression and cultural identity.” In Garms, Dumbuya shows off his range of T-shirts, speaking of his pride and enthusiasm to “celebrate the work of immigrants”.
Dumbuya’s autumn/winter 2023 collection, From Greener Pastures, was an ode to the hope and promise of the west African migration. It was shown in a location chosen for its symbolic importance to African and Afro-Caribbean migrants: “With its bustling stalls and diverse mix of people, the atmosphere of Brixton Village evokes a sense of nostalgia and a connection to one’s roots for many members of the Public. the African diaspora. The lively energy of the market, filled with smells, sounds and familiar languages, creates a familiar and welcoming setting that comes with a theme of homesickness amidst challenges.”
Black British designers are also relishing the opportunity to connect with the Black British icons they admire. Footballer Ian Wright’s Dumbuya was included in his spring/summer 2024 show. “Wright is a source of inspiration and sustenance, especially as a Black footballer from London,” he says. Meanwhile, designer Nicholas Daley, who has Scottish and Jamaican roots, is a long-term collaborator with Don Letts – the director and musician even walked in Daley’s graduation show in 2013. Letts talks in Garms about Black British identity that came ahead. on the displacement of coming from two different countries, and how his embrace of Rastafarianism and anti-establishment politics informed his punk styles and rasta caps.
What is clearest in Garms, and the investigation of the scale and evolution of the British fashion industry, is how indebted it is to the past and its followers. Last year, The Missing Thread, an exhibition at Somerset House, celebrated the best of Black British design and paid tribute to Joe Casely-Hayford, “the ancestor of Black British design”, who died in January 2019. In the program documentary, author Jason Jules speaking about the curation of the exhibition being beyond the constraints of linearity: “This was a timeline between the 70s and the early 00s but it wasn’t necessarily chronological or sequential – time collapsed into itself. ” The timelessness of Casely-Hayford’s designs has much in common with the referential nature of contemporary collections that combine past and present – British Black gardens are not only about specific moments of innovation, but with the thread that runs through us all.
• Garms: Black Culture’s Influence on British Fashion, a BET UK original documentary is available on My5.
