Lanre Adetola

ARTHI 5022-001: Social Chromaticism/Color Blk - Final Paper

History, media & the archive are riddled with examples of explicit consequence for: having
“a will toward rebellion itself”1, occupying a radically imaginative terrain, exercising a commitment
to disruption & refusal within an anti-black enclosure, “embrace of our terribleness”2, being
marked “deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong”3, being “just as committed to expression as to
freedom”.4 This consequence ranges from pejorative remarks to arrest, exile, social death. Black
women, those impacted by (trans)misogynoir, that exhibit a sexual freedom, provide numerous
examples of this commitment and are my focus for this project. I am invested in the lives we live
and particularly the role what we choose to wear plays in that active living.
This project is an effort to look beyond consequence in the archive and in fictional
narrative, beyond “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of
property, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history”.5 My entry
point of analysis for this effort is through fashion. I want to interrogate the ways that fashion
functions as an effort to distinguish oneself, experiment with freedom, express Black life in a
world where one is rendered fungible and perpetually condemned. I want to explore the
relationship between fashion and othering–what it means to dress like a “whore”6, a “scamp”,7 or
any other pejorative used for those that transgress the sartorial codes prescribed for a
respectable black gender opressed person. This project is a direct turn to the sartorial cues used
to make those judgements in the past in present. I am not interested using fashion design to craft
a respectable ideal that veers away from them. I am interested in using fashion design to
embrace them–to treat them as a potential site of power, survival, and affirmation while taking
into considerations the narratives and livelihoods that birth these aesthetics.
Further, this project is an attempt to illuminate the many ways in which the refusals of
those impacted by (trans)misogynoir is part of a long-standing practice, not isolated in our
present or disconnected from a past that created it. I highlight 3 figures: Sula–the protagonist of
the Toni Morrison’s Sula, Minnie Bradley–a black sex worker arrested in 1902, and Mary
Jones–one of America's first documented black trans women. I use their sartorial choices (I use
choices loosely) as a springboard for reimaging how we express ourselves, pay tribute to history,
or simply navigate an antiblack, (trans)misogynoiristic terrain, with the aforementioned
commitments in mind. This project is an effort to honor those highlighted through beauty &

1
Spillers, Hortense J. “A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love.” Feminist Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1983, pp.
293–323,
2
Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company,
2019
3
Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 114-123
4
Lubrin, Canisia (2020, September 8) Poetry is Not a Luxury: The Poetics of Abolition at Revolution is not
a one-time event [video] https://vimeo.com/456235563
5
Hartman, Saidiya. "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe, vol. 12 no. 2, 2008, p. 1-14
6
Morrison, Toni. Sula. Vintage, 1998 pp.44 (in Sula, Sula’s mother Hanna is called a whore by a
townsperson)
7
Taken from a newspaper article written about Mary Jones. It referred to her as a “scamp”, amongst other
pejeroatives.
 Lanre Adetola
ARTHI 5022-001: Social Chromaticism/Color Blk - Final Paper

narrative. I am invested in the ways we can be in commune with them, be in conversation with
them, & uptake their commitment to refusal in how we live and how we dress.

This Sula-inspired dress is look one among three looks in the collection. I use Sula, a
fictional text, and a fictional character, as an entry point into this way of thinking and creating in
this collection. I am interested in Sula as a text and character for a number of reasons: in the text,
“we do not see Sula in relationship to an “oppressor”, a “whitey”, a male, a dominant and
dominating being outside the self”, Sula as a character offers us an example of a “radical
amorality and consequently a radical freedom”, Sula offers us a glimpse of radical
self-preservation, and ultimately what could come forth as a critical emergence within [the]
instability of cisheteropatriarchy 8 9. Sula’s virtue (or lack thereof) is in that she lives for herself;
her “evil” is in her intentional nonconformity.
I want to explore intentionally her intentional nonconformity & the specific sartorial
choices that contribute to both her expression and her othering. Below, I will post excerpts from
the text that I feel speek to this:

8
Spillers, Hortense J. “A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love.” Feminist Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1983, pp.
293–323,
9
Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black : toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis :University
of Minnesota Press, 2004.
 Lanre Adetola
ARTHI 5022-001: Social Chromaticism/Color Blk - Final Paper

These are just a few examples of the ways fashion is present in her life and in the text (as
well as that of her mother’s, and grandmother’s). The decision to go to church with no underwear,
to wear a dress that “oozes with sex”, to reveal the calf, are just a few moments in which sartorial
choices are in alignment with her nonconformity, her black deviant expression. I do not think
these moments were intentionally spectacular. I do not believe Sula attempted to make a grand
statement when she got dressed to be in the city. I believe an anticipation of the gazes she would
attract were she to wear a revealing dress, no underwear to a formal setting, etc. may have
crossed her mind in its periphery. Ultimately however, I believe this was more about how what
was ordinary to wear for Sula, having been more expressive and more worldly than the members
of her town in the Bottom, was extraordinary and even transgressive for the townspeople. I relate
to Sula in this way. What is ordinary for me when I dress in the morning, what makes me feel
affirmed and sensual and harmonious in my black trans body, is transgressive, salacious, and
sensational to others.
I will be using these moments from the text as inspiration for the dress that I will make in
Sula’s (and her contemporaries’) honor: a brazen yellow wrap dress, reminiscent of a 1930’s
hooverette that Sula may have worn at the time, triple cinched at the waste, with ruffles placed to
accentuate the back’s curves. It will be made of a free flowing, opaque cotton gauze–one that will
indeed “emphasize everything the fabric covered” –and have printed roses and rattlesnakes (the
alleged forms of Sula’s ominous birthmark), along with quotes from the text that speak to Sula’s
character, (e.g “not my lonely”, “the whores..wholly incapable of jealousy”). Sketch and progress
pictures below:

Front and back sketches of the dress

 Lanre Adetola
ARTHI 5022-001: Social Chromaticism/Color Blk - Final Paper

print sample

prototypes of the dress in cotton muslin

 Lanre Adetola
ARTHI 5022-001: Social Chromaticism/Color Blk - Final Paper

And so ultimately, this dress is an effort to honor Sula, to be in conversation with her, to
uptake her commitment to self and refusal. Also, this dress and process of writing about/thinking
through her character, are an active analysis of power and the relationship between fashion,
transmisogynoir, and black (queer) expression.