By 1818, the forty-six-year-old Henry Sands Brooks had already made his name as a grocer and noted dandy. Given his experience in retail and his love of fashion, it is no surprise that on April 7 of that year he opened a men’s clothing emporium, H. & D. H. Brooks & Co. The original location was on the corner of Catherine and Cherry Streets in the neighbourhood that is often described today as ‘Two Bridges.’ The name comes from the fact that the neighbourhood is nestled between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Of course, in 1818, those bridges were not there; however, it was a bustling commercial district with a view of the East River.¹ The store was also near Catherine Slip, a manmade inlet that allowed for loading and unloading of cargo. The store’s waterfront location was conducive to international and domestic trade. It is also crucial to understanding the company’s connection to slavery. 

The company itself has passed through many hands and many corporate structures.  On Brooks’ death, the business was inherited by his four sons (the eponymous ‘Brooks Brothers’); it stayed in the family until Winthrop Holly Brooks retired in 1946, after which it was sold a number of times. It is currently organised as Brooks Brothers Group Inc., which is privately owned by the Italian magnate Claudio del Vecchio.²

Brooks Brothers’ clientele has always been illustrious. Abraham Lincoln famously wore a Brooks Brothers frock coat (custom-made for his 6’4” frame) the night he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre. On the day he was assassinated in Dallas, John F. Kennedy was wearing a white striped Brooks Brothers shirt. During the 2017 presidential inauguration, both President Trump and former-president Barack Obama wore Brooks Brothers coats during their greeting. In fact, Brooks Brothers has dressed forty of forty-five U.S. presidents since 1818.  

Brooks Brothers commemorated its bicentennial this April, hosting an Americana-themed, cocktail-fuelled fête at Jazz at Lincoln Center with performances by Wynton Marsalis and Paul Simon.³ There was much to celebrate. Today, Brooks Brothers has ‘more than two-hundred-and-fifty retail and factory stores in the United States, shops in airports and more than two-hundred-and-fifty locations internationally.’⁴ Though Brooks Brothers has been subject to the volatility of the retail landscape, the company has maintained its profitability under the helm of del Vecchio.⁵ But gone unmentioned is that this storied clothier, like most American companies and institutions that date back to the nineteenth century and earlier, is entangled in the complicated history of enslavement in the United States. The leadership at Brooks Brothers has yet to publicly acknowledge its connection to slavery. (My repeated requests to examine Brooks Brothers’ archives have been met with unresponsiveness.) Most generously one could speculate that this is due to ignorance of their own brand history. However, it could also be that there is a fear of hurting their bottom line.

Nonetheless, evidence shows that the national reach and different product lines of Brooks Brothers necessarily resulted in the company profiting from the slave economy. This evidence includes the structure of Brooks Brothers’ business, still-existing examples of Brooks Brothers-supplied clothing, and Brooks Brothers appeals to southern clients to pay outstanding bills.

Brooks Brothers profited from ‘servant’ clothing as well as the clothing designed for their masters. Brooks Brothers had a livery department, which provided garments for coachmen, footmen, chauffeurs, etc. in wealthy households, including those south of the Mason-Dixon Line.⁶ Before 1865, most of these servants were presumably enslaved. As symbols of their prosperity, moneyed slaveholders often outfitted their enslaved domestics in fine clothing as a display of their wealth. For example, Thomas Jefferson meticulously recorded the clothing distributed to each member of the enslaved community at Monticello, noting the quality and quantity of materials beside the name of each slave. Their clothing was a visual indicator of their age, gender and status. Curiously, it was not Jefferson’s concubine Sally Hemings who received the best allotment of clothing, but his manservant Jupiter.⁷ 

Misconceptions about enslaved people’s wardrobes may have prevented consideration of how northern commercial interests such as Brooks Brothers were necessarily linked to the day-to-day lives of commodified people of African descent. Though enslaved people’s clothing tended to be drab, shapeless and limited to a few pieces, there were opportunities to acquire more elaborate wardrobes. Enslaved peoples bought clothing and accessories with the small amounts of money from doing extra work for their slaveowners and others, raising vegetables and poultry, hunting, fishing and artisanal work. Enslaved people also bought, sold and bartered garments in the secondhand clothing market. Others were offered hand-me-downs from other slaves and their owners. Slaves most often received lengths of fabrics with which they were responsible for creating their own clothing.

The trade Brooks Brothers engaged in was separate from and parallel to the localised market described above. Brooks Brothers responded to the need of slave masters to adorn their human ‘property.’ In the wealthiest households, enslaved peoples were dressed in garments that ostentatiously reflected the privilege of their owners. A case in point are two Brook Brothers coats that are currently held in the permanent collection of The Historic New Orleans Collection. Given the size and style of the coats, they were most likely made for young male enslaved domestics. The coats were used in the household of Dr. William Newton Mercer.

Mercer was born in Maryland, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army before setting up a private practice in Natchez, Mississippi. In Natchez, he married into a family of cotton planters. When both his father-in-law and wife died, he inherited many of the family’s properties and became extraordinarily wealthy. He eventually retired from plantation life and settled on the toney Canal Street in New Orleans. He even served as the president of the Bank of Louisiana. His obituary extols his virtues.

[The] excellent sense, firmness and consistency of character and thoughtful sagacity of Dr. Mercer rendered him a most successful administrator of a large estate. He not only preserved the estate inherited from his wife, who died not many years after their marriage, but quadrupled its value, and has continued to retain and enlarge it, so that his succession, despite the enormous losses of the war, is estimated at a million and a half of dollars.⁸ 

Upon his death in 1874, Mercer had made his name as a real-estate investor and philanthropist and had become a fixture of New Orleans high society.⁹ Mercer owned hundreds of slaves who worked his many cotton plantations in Mississippi. He also owned slaves who cared for his palatial home on Canal Street. As reflections of his plantocratic wealth, these slaves were styled to represent his power and importance. The elegant Brooks Brothers coats were adorned with silver buttons that bear the falcon crest of the Mercer family, fitting the image of a wealthy planter, real estate mogul and philanthropist.¹⁰ 

Slaves, like fashion and luxury goods, were commodities. Mercer treated his slaves as possessions the same way as finery in his home. Just as he provided his manservants with Brooks Brothers coats with buttons emblazoned with his family crest, the accoutrement of wealth in his home was also adorned with symbols of his dynastic prosperity. For example, the Historic New Orleans Collection holds one of Mercer’s silver trays that also features an engraved falcon and a capital ‘M’ below it.¹¹ 

The coats bring to light the symbiotic relationship between manufacturers and retailers in centres of commerce in the North and producers of raw materials and consumers in the South. Brooks Brothers was decidedly located in lower Manhattan, walking distance from ports linked to Southern entrepots. The company serviced residents of New York City as well as many clients in the American South (as the provenance of the coats reveals).

Brooks Brothers itself acknowledged its engagement in the slave economy in its attempts to get payments from its Southern ‘work employers’ (a euphemism for slave owners). In 1853, Brooks Brothers was among a group of businesses that published ‘The Tailor’s Appeal,’ a complaint about unpaid bills from Southern merchants. It reads:

Gentlemen: Whereas, a number of the ‘Southern’ work employers, refuse to give us a fair remuneration for our labor, and as it is utterly impossible, for us, working for them, to earn bread for ourselves and families, and as we wish you to fully understand who are the friends of the workingmen, we subjoin a list of employers who have signed a bill of prices, and earnestly call upon you to patronize only those employers who have acted so honorably…¹² 

The companies complained that Southern merchants employed their service, but they were not recompensed fairly or at all. Number twenty-nine on the list of employers is Brooks Brothers. Here Brooks Brothers publicly acknowledges that it included ‘Southern work employers’ among its customers. Given its lower Manhattan location within walking distance from ports linked to Southern entrepots, it would have been surprising if Brooks Brothers had not been deeply entangled in the American ‘peculiar institution’ even as it established itself as the go-to menswear emporium for Northern elites.  

What lesson are we to take from this evidence of profiteering from human servitude in the foundational years of Brooks Brothers? This is a question that other American institutions are being asked recently. Perhaps due to their nature as loci of inquiry and self-reflection, many universities have been on the forefront of exploring their connections to slavery and atoning for the ways in which they profited from the labour and sale of enslaved peoples. In 2003, Brown University President Ruth Simmons appointed a steering committee to unearth the university’s connection to slavery and the slave trade. A group of Harvard’s faculty members and students launched the ongoing Harvard and Slavery project, which examine the history and legacy of slavery at Harvard.¹³ In 1838, Jesuit priests of Georgetown University sold two hundred and seventy two of its slaves to save the school from potential financial ruin. Georgetown is now offering preferential admissions to descendants of those slaves.

Though many universities have started atoning for their connection to slavery and the slave trade, Brooks Brothers, and other for-profit entities, have not. Many such entities have avoided scrutiny by ceasing to exist. Very few of the signatories on the ‘Tailors Appeal’ still exist. Those that do include Hewitt Lees & Company (now investment banking and brokerage firm Laidlaw & Company) and bank Brown Brothers (now Brown Brothers Harriman & Company). While many others American corporations and families have roots in American slavery, few have maintained a continuous brand identity over two centuries. Brooks Brothers has survived in part due to the glacial shifts in menswear trends that protect it from the vagaries of a mercurial fashion industry. Over the course of two centuries, Brooks Brothers has fashioned itself as an American institution, solidifying its status as the go-to purveyor of respectable suiting and preppy wear.

But it is reasonable to ask Brooks Brothers to acknowledge and reflect upon its roots in the trade with slaveowners. Its longevity is also due to the fact that its early profits came in part from selling clothing to slave masters. Brooks Brother is often credited for introducing ready-to-wear suiting to the clothing market in 1849. ‘The ready-made suit was a turning point for the garment industry and for the American population, making fine clothing more accessible to all,’ wrote the company recently in its online magazine.¹⁴ What has not been examined is how much this innovation might have been based on its outfitting of free and enslaved servants who did not have the time or luxury to be fitted for bespoke garments.

The success and longevity of Brooks Brothers is due, in part, to its connection to slavery and the profits it gained from selling clothing to planters in the South. In the end, by counting slaveholders among its clientele, Brooks Brothers directly benefited from the buying and selling of enslaved men, women and children. It is in its best interest to fully acknowledge its part—even if small—in propping up the institution of slavery, rather than remaining silent and sweeping it under the rug. The company, which is considered the epitome of preppy all-American style, is also a benefactor of slavery. But what is more American than slavery?

Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is a writer, historian and curator specializing in Afro-Diasporic fashion and visual culture. He holds a PhD in history from New York University and teaches at Harvard University. He also founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.  

1. E G Burrows and M Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 437. ↩

2. E White, ‘Retail Brand Buys Brooks Brothers from Marks & Spencer for $225 Million,’ Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2001. del Vecchio, whose family owns Ray Ban and the Italian producer of eyeglasses Luxottica SpA, bought the company in 2001 for $225 million from Britain’s Marks & Spencer. ↩

3. Z Weiss, ‘Brooks Brothers Rings In 200 Years with a Jazz-Filled Celebration,’ Vogue, April 26, 2018, https://www.vogue.com/article/brooks-brothers-200-birthday-celebration-yara-shahidi-katie-holmes-christina-hendricks ↩

4. ‘Stores, Emails & Catalogs,’ Brooks Brothers, accessed June 20, 2018, https://www.brooksbrothers.com/Stores,-Emails-Catalogs/help-stores,default,pg.html ↩

5. As a privately-owned entity, the figures on the company’s success can only be gleaned from what the company chooses to divulge. A recent New York Times article credits del Vecchio for posting ‘profits for thirteen of the last seventeen years.’ T Agins, ‘With a Glance Backward, Brooks Brothers Looks to the Future,’ The New York Times, April 21, 2018 ↩

6. Evidence of Brooks Brothers livery department include this sixteen-page livery catalog from 1900. ‘Brooks Brothers Livery Department,’ accessed on June 23, 2018, https://www.abebooks.com/Brooks-Brothers-Livery-Department/22684247331/bd ↩

7. Farm Book, 1774-1824, page 41, by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003. Original manuscript from the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society. ↩

8. ‘William Newton Mercer,’ The Times-Picayune, August 18, 1874, 4. ↩

9. Mercer makes a cameo in historian Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach, which explores the legal battle of the formerly enslaved woman Rose Herera when her former owners the De Hart family kidnapped her five children and fled to Havana during the Yankee occupation of New Orleans. It was the well-heeled Mercer who financed the purchase of Rose Herera and her children for his friend and dentist James Andrew De Hart. For a man of his wealth, the cost of this chattel was small price compared to his vast holdings. A Rothman, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015, 48-68. ↩

10. There was no Brooks Brothers store in New Orleans in the nineteenth century, but Mercer was well travelled and may have purchased the coats during one of his trips up north. These coats were acquired by the Historic New Orleans Collection after they were discovered by descendants of the Mercer family in an attic of a former plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. ↩

11. Classical Institute of the South and The Historic New Orleans Collection, silver tray, CIS-2011-0175, http://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/hnoc-p16313coll17%3A7342 ↩

12. P S Foner, Business & Slavery: The New York Merchants & the Irrepressible Conflict, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1941, 1-2; New-York Tribune, August 19, 1853. ↩

13. See http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice and https://www.harvard.edu/slavery ↩

14. The company claims that it began creating ready-to-wear suits for pioneers headed West towards the California gold rush. “A Ready-to-Wear Revolution,” Brooks Brothers, accessed July 8, 2018. http://magazine.brooksbrothers.com/ready-to-wear/ ↩

WE MEET TWICE TO talk. Once in New York, at the Mercer Hotel where he is staying, and then again at his temporary Paris showroom a few days before his seventh womenswear fashion show in the city. He is affable and eager to please, the kind of person you can imagine getting along with everybody. He is constantly asked for pictures: by teenagers outside the hotel in SoHo, by professionals at his showroom, and by fashionistas when I bump into him in line for the Dior show. He acquiesces every time, and seems to enjoy the process. Later, I see his fashion show and the space is buzzing with starlets and fashion glitterati. There’s a party atmosphere and again cameras go off everywhere, constantly. When he comes out to take his bow, on the arm of the model Naomi Campbell, he looks happy, a little bashful and very proud.

I was born in 1980 and until I was seventeen I didn’t know all that much. I was my most authentic self – I was just a sponge. I’m trying to revert to that point, that point is what I call the ‘authentically real.’ When you make decisions without a context. Like when you’re with your contemporaries and you just go, ‘Let’s skateboard. Let’s sit on a bench for hours.’ The aesthetic of skateboarding comes from not being too informed, and that, to me, is authenticity. I added ‘real’ because I like to use words to paint with – they evoke feelings. The ‘authentically real’ is something that’s real, like there’s no gloss, just culture. Think of a homeless person, or someone in Uganda that’s never seen ‘fashion.’ You know, like a Jackie Nickerson photograph. She’s capturing something that is both authentic and real. Luxury fashion sells an image: that’s what we do. It’s neither authentic or inauthentic; a designer is sifting through images so that people can buy into an idea. That’s why I love fashion; it’s like a petri dish where all these different ideas converge.

My parents are from West Africa, both immigrants. They came to the States to have what they thought of as ‘a better life.’ My upbringing included zero art. I was into music and skateboarding and fashion, but I practically didn’t even know fine art existed: I thought it was just something rich people put on their walls. My parents were very practical. They came from a Third World country and a ‘better life’ to them meant that their children would become doctors or lawyers. So that’s what I did. I just thought a job is a job, and I’ll be one of those people that goes home after work to do what I’m really passionate about. My dad picked my first course at university and it was engineering. I didn’t care, it could have been anything – it could have been rocket science. So I was mindlessly taking these classes and putting fifty percent effort into them, and as much into hanging out with my friends and DJing at parties. Then something happened that changed everything for me. I was four years into a five-year engineering degree, and about to go into structural engineering when I took an art history class that blew my mind.

Studying the Renaissance completely rewired my brain. I learnt that Caravaggio had invented a new technique of painting, chiaroscuro, and it helped me see art as something that wasn’t just for rich people. That class made me look at my own life differently, and it spurred me into architecture. It was the only creative thing I could do without wasting the five years I’d spent in engineering. I found this three-year program that added a masters in architecture to my undergrad in engineering, so that made my dad happy. He was like, ‘Great, now I have a son that’s an engineer and an architect.’ But I always had in my mind that an architect with a capital A or a designer with a capital D was somebody other than me. Those kind of people never looked like me. Take the ten biggest architects of all time, not too many of them are black and from Illinois. I just felt I was out of my… like I had no role model in this career path.

I used to be just a consumer, admiring people like Hedi Slimane, Raf Simons and Rick Owens. So the challenge was almost unbelievable in hindsight. When I started my first brand, I bought hooded sweatshirts on sale from Champion and Ralph Lauren, and I added my logo on top. I made one collection and called it ‘Pyrex,’ which is a drug reference. Imagine that kid on Prince and Mercer screen-printing over Ralph Lauren graduating to show on the same schedule as Comme des Garçons and Céline – it’s crazy when you think about it. I will probably always have a chip on my shoulder though, thinking I have to defend myself against non-believers who think my work isn’t valid. Doing it anyway is one of my main motivations. Sometimes I still feel like the seventeen-year-old version of myself who didn’t believe I could be a designer with a capital D. Like what are the chances of my name resonating like Rei Kawakubo’s?

People like me were marginalised in the fashion establishment when I started four years ago. I was on the fringe because what I was doing was too new, the attitude was like, ‘This is not even fashion.’ What are you doing, putting jeans on the runway? That’s why I have that chip on my shoulder. Like, I’m an American black kid in fashion, making ‘streetwear’ – that streetwear label is put on me. At first I rejected it, and then I sort of owned it because I realised that I could redefine the term. Being a black American in Paris fashion, there’s no context for someone like me, no path to follow. If I was Japanese, I’d know how I’d fit into the system, same if I was Belgian or even American and white. But I don’t know any other black kid who designs clothes and shows in Paris, do you?

I’m always mindful of how I’m being judged in the fashion system. Buyers, editors, I follow them all: I follow like four thousand people. I used to try and prove myself to the naysayers, the critics, to the people who said that Off-White wasn’t valid or whatever, but then I realised that those people are powerless when it comes to the community I’m speaking to. Now I focus on the legacy I’ll leave behind. Like, how will people see Off-White in thirty years’ time? Ultimately, the consumer is more important than the gatekeeper: that’s why streetwear has become so popular even in high fashion. I mean the critics and editors at their magazines are not gonna go anywhere, but underneath them is a vast set of people who vote with their money. Those consumers have a taste that is discerning enough to be in the conversation, and as a designer I have to appeal to both. I don’t want to ignore the real world and just focus on fashion people. You know what the crazy part is? There are so many consumers who know what’s happening in high fashion, but high fashion looks down at them for not being worthy. I’ve experienced this myself – did you read the Business of Fashion review of my show in Florence during Pitti? I collaborated with Jenny Holtzer on a collection meant to comment on the refugee crisis in Europe. I think that fashion should be politically aware, and anyway I can’t make something that doesn’t mean something. So I used the exhibition and collection to combine these political messages with streetwear and tailoring. Afterwards I was doing a press conference with, like, forty Italian journalists asking me about the collection. And one of them pointed to a suit jacket with a zip on the back and the only thing he had to say was, ‘Yohji has been doing that jacket for ten years.’ I was totally taken aback. First of all, I had like thirty reasons for doing that jacket – reasons to do with bringing tailoring back to young people who today wear hoodies and T-shirts, with wanting to incorporate tailoring into my own work as a nod to the importance of the tradition in Italy, with working with a larger political message – and second of all, I didn’t even know about that Yohji jacket so how could I copy it? We were having this exchange in front of all the other journalists. I was like, ‘Newsflash: a T-shirt has two armholes, and designers have been making them like that since forever. Does that mean that I can’t make a T-shirt with two armholes without copying someone else?’ I felt that he looked at me like a black designer who doesn’t belong in this environment and must be stealing all his good ideas. I mean, a fashion show isn’t an Apple keynote where you deliver the newest, thinnest laptop.

Yeah okay, I’m a snob. I’m discerning but that’s not a bad thing. People who are not laypeople, they have premises, they can argue. This is healthy. Critical discourse is important, I love critics. That encounter with the journalist at Pitti was difficult, but it was meaningful. Making the work is important obviously, but communicating the work is just as important. It’s how you make people believe in what you do. Look, I’ll draw you a diagram. In this circle you find artists, designers and provocateurs. In this one you have the critics and the gatekeepers. They control how things are disseminated in institutions and mainstream media, but what they think changes with time. In the last circle is everybody else, the real world – they’re receptive to ideas from both the critics and the artists. I belong in each one of those circles. Think of how tricks spread in skateboarding. New tricks are invented every day, and they spread through YouTube. You might know that technically there’s a trick that’s a three-sixty flip up a stair with a kink in it, but have no idea how to do it. But then you see that someone’s done it and uploaded it to the internet, and all of a sudden kids in ten different countries have learned the same trick because they’ve seen it actually happen. I’m that kid doing the trick and showing others that it can be done.

The first interview I had when I was nominated for the LVMH prize was with Marc Jacobs. I was like, I’m gonna wear something Supreme because I feel like it speaks to this crowd. I was thinking about me in this crowd, and that in every photo people see of me they’ll be like, ‘Damn he kept it real, he didn’t pretend.’ I could have worn all black, tucked my shirt in, but I was like, ‘No, I’m wearing Supreme to say where I come from.’ I’d never met Marc Jacobs before so it was really something big to me. I was nervous. I was trying to win. I was explaining that I’m from Chicago and inspired by streetwear, and that this is one of my favourite brands. He said, ‘Stop,’ like ‘I already get it.’ Boom. Done.

Showing on schedule in Paris is beyond. It’s the biggest milestone for me as an artist, as a designer or whatever. I want the recording system of time to know that I existed. I want my work acknowledged in an institution, or a publication, or on fashion week. Maybe in thirty years what I’ve managed to achieve will finally hit me. You know, I’m in Paris on the same schedule as Comme des Garçons, Dries van Noten, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, and it’s changed the way people perceive the brand one hundred percent. There are designers with twenty years more experience than me, and yet a narrow door opened to allow me to contribute to the same calendar. I’m not naive, so I know that that requires me to make leaps. I’m working on a vocabulary, an ethos, I’m not just creating an aesthetic.

We’re over just dressing plain again, we want to go back to logos. Logos give you a feeling; they add something to the object. Put a logo on a white T-shirt and that shirt becomes something else. Think of Supreme – when was the last time you saw a line outside an LVMH or Kering Group fashion house? My own entry point into fashion, the thing that made me want to get into it was when Nicolas Ghesquière did that rock n’ roll T-shirt two seasons in a row at Balenciaga. It was a totally commercial item, and to me, it was like discovering Caravaggio all over again. I think they realised in luxury fashion that sales increase if you put graphics on clothes. But guess what? Streetwear has been doing that since forever. I could go to Supreme and buy a $30 skate tee because it had the logo on – it’s not some big corporate brand, it’s just for those in the know. Now even fashion editors with the most discerning taste wear Supreme or Thrasher with really prominent logos. Something happened there, and Off-White found its footing with the fashion crowd finally. Now they think my concept is valid.

The best thing with Off-White is that no two seasons have to look the same; there’s no linear continuity. I removed that from the DNA. When you look at most designer’s work, everything is like iterating on one idea, but my work is like whatever I feel at the moment. My brand is super fluid like that. I think we’re at a point of saturation. I grew up during a time of recycling, earth and over-consumption, you know like put your can in the recycling not the trash, don’t eat McDonald’s. Do we actually need more clothes? I like ready-mades, I make things out of other things. I like that it forces you to think about the context of an object, not just the object itself. That’s what I do when I put streetwear on the catwalk; I reference what you already have in your closet.

When I read designer interviews, of course they’re not telling my story. But maybe some kid will pick this up and be like, ‘Oh, shit.’ I thought I was entering an industry where everyone had approachable ideas, designs rooted in reality, things that I could relate to. Like I was always thinking about the product. I can relate to that. But nowadays if I read what other designers describe as the inspiration or rationale behind their products, it’s like there’s nothing there. I did a collection called ‘Seeing Things,’ and the whole set was a response to the realisation that I have been consuming a façade this whole time, not realising that there’s nothing behind it. It’s like looking at this starry industry called ‘fashion’ and being seduced into buying loads of things from some designer only to realise, later, that there is nothing behind the façade. It’s not based on anything real. Ultimately consumers financially support designers by buying their designs, and as a consumer I want to know that these designs are based on something real. Like when I look at Warhol, I connect to his ideas about contemporary culture and fame. You know, I want to see the work and hear the rationale, and know that they match.

I did a fashion show recently called ‘Nothing New.’ It was based on criticism I got from another designer. So I took that statement and tried to unravel it and make it into a question. Does fashion have to be new? What is new anyway? Does fashion have to be new to be valid and relevant and important? People often lob ‘it’s been done before’ as a critique but without asking themselves those questions. ‘Newness’ has become the barometer by which we judge things in fashion. Does your jacket have three armholes? I changed the concept of the show three weeks before the presentation to address those questions, and the show was a sort of epiphany for me. I was like, why does the fashion industry use this ‘newness’ to rate whether something is good or not? Is that the only standard? I used that show to work through those questions for myself, and I realised that I’m not concerned with ‘new.’ ‘New’ is a farce to me. It’s a critique intended to keep people like me out. I’m not trying to pretend that I’m inventing something that’s never been seen before. My work exists because I’m inspired by the work of others. I’m inspired by the work of Raf Simons. This whole concept based on youth culture is what turned me and my generation on to high fashion in the first place. My archive collection of Raf is insanely personal and big. In the end I took his criticism half seriously, though ten times motivational. But we’ve talked since then so it’s cool.

Some designers want to stay almost reclusive; I think that’s a device. Like, ‘Oh, my work is more valuable than promoting myself.’ With the pace I want to work at, I can’t afford that attitude. Another thing that’s still common in fashion is pretending that you’ve never referenced someone else’s work, hiding your inspirations so that people will think that it all came from you. Or pretending that you did all the work by yourself, like there are no assistants in the background. To me, those are all old ways of thinking. I’m this African kid, born in a suburban white neighbourhood outside of Chicago, inspired by Guns n’ Roses and NWA at the same time. I’ve realised that being contradictory is more authentic than being consistent. Being too consistent is a sham, it’s fairytale, it’s not real. Human beings are naturally at odds with themselves. We say one thing, we feel and do something else. Understanding that has been super liberating. You asked me earlier about diversity. ‘Diversity’ brings to mind people from different backgrounds holding hands – I say fuck that. It’s too small minded. I’m not even into the construct of race – it’s a dead-end for me. Screw skin colour. My generation is all about irony, about humour and piss-taking. With Off-White I want to tap into that. I love being… kind of paradoxical. I contradict myself all the time; I’ll say something and then say the opposite. Like I go, ‘Hey, I’m a black designer,’ and then I go, ‘Hey, I don’t believe in colour.’ Newsflash: you can hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind at once. It’s human nature to say, ‘I’m on a diet, I’ll have a green juice, nah fuck that I’m going to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger.’ But too often we want to uphold this façade of consistency – it’s not real though. I want to promote fluidity.

Anja Aronowsky-Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder.

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Authenticity, available for purchase here.