How Enslaved People Helped Shape Fashion History

I have spent my entire academic career analyzing images of enslaved people, with a particular interest in their dress. This research led me to found a digital humanities project called “Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom”, which uses fashion to explore the creative ingenuity of people of African descent. Yet, I often know frustratingly little about the lives and identities of the individuals who populate the project’s Facebook and Instagram feeds. The experiences of enslaved people were not always deemed important enough to record for posterity, and the glimpses that have been preserved are often distorted by interventions of enslavers. We are left to wonder: Who are they? What were their names? What were their favorite colors? Why did they choose to be photographed on these particular occasions? Why did they style themselves in these ways?

One thing we do know is that incorporating black people into fashion history can disrupt easy when she was a child, even though the dominant style in the late 1850 and 1860s would have consisted of Victorian gowns and suiting—styles that certainly did not use a patchwork aesthetic or darned fabrics.