When it comes to style, Black culture originates a lot of things. From the glamorous high fashion to the day-to-day streetwear, we have always been able to be just as fashionable as our White, Hispanic and Asian counterparts. Fashion has no color or race.
However according to French ELLE blogger Nathalie Dolivo, people of color were walking around completely void of any style until the Obamas took office.
Her take on Black fashion thus far is that we have only been adhering to the codes of streetwear.
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“In this America led for the first time a Black president, the chic has become a plausible option for a community so far pegged to its codes of streetwear,” Dolivo writes.
Dolivio writes as if she has never come across a person of color with great style. It’s almost as if no Black people work at French Elle or she didn’t have a job anywhere in fashion before the Obamas took office back in 2008, when the one of French Elle’s covers featured black model Jourdan Dunn (above).
According to Dolivio, blacks recently began dressing well because we have taken note of the “white uniform” and made it our own. She even has a word for blacks who have risen up from the street-wear mentality and it’s called “black-geoisie.” It’s another way of describing blacks that dress “white” but still maintain their ‘blackness.”
We wish that we were making this up.
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Dolivio writes:
But if in 2012 the “black-geoisie” has integrated all the white codes of fashion, they do so, not literally. There is always a classic twist, with a bourgeois ethnic reference (a batik-printed turban/robe, a shell necklace, a ‘créole de rappeur’) reminiscent of the roots. It has shifted; it is new, desirable, powerful.
God forbid we don’t mix our couture gowns and tailormade suits with shells and turbans, because according to Dolivio, this is what Blacks do to add their own flare to what they have “learned” from white culture.
To add insult to injury, the piece was called “Black Fashion Power.”
It has since been removed from French Elle’s blog but not before someone was able to screen grab it.
What do you think?
