From the White House Sewing Room to the Oscars
Black Fashion as Freedom, Then and Now
*voice over done with AI technology
Ruth E. Carter and the History of Black Designers
When Ruth E. Carter became the most-nominated Black woman in Oscar history, it was seen as a moment of industry recognition…another milestone in a career that has reshaped how Black life, history, and imagination appear on screen. Her fifth nomination, for Sinners, places her in rare company in an industry with a long history of underrepresenting and misrepresenting Black women.
But Carter’s achievement isn’t just about the glamorous Hollywood spotlight. It’s also part of a much larger and longer story where Black women used clothing, style, and design as tools of survival, resistance, and self-definition. Because long before fashion became a red-carpet spectacle or a cinematic art form, it served as a powerful way to claim humanity in a society that insisted on denying it.
In the mid-1800s, Elizabeth Keckley essentially sewed her way into freedom. Born into slavery in Virginia in 1818, Keckley became a skilled dressmaker in St. Louis, Missouri, where her dresses not only clothed elite white women but also generated the money she used to buy her and her son’s freedom. By 1855, she secured her emancipation and moved to Washington, D.C., where her reputation as a seamstress brought her into the highest levels of political society… the White House, where she became First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln’s personal dressmaker and confidante.
Keckley’s story sits at a crucial intersection of fashion, power, and politics. She was a formerly enslaved woman who worked her way not only to success but also to proximity to power and influence. Yet, she never forgot her roots. Indeed, in 1862, during the Civil War, she founded the Contraband Relief Association to raise funds for those escaping slavery amid the chaos of war.
As scholar Rikki Byrd argues, Keckley’s life exemplifies an early use of fashion as a strategy for self-liberation. Dressmaking wasn’t just a profession for her; it was a way to take up space in a society that tried to erase her humanity.
Respectability, Resistance, and the Politics of Dress
In the decades following emancipation, clothing gained a new kind of political significance for Black Americans. Dress became a way to navigate what historians refer to as the “politics of respectability” — the idea that appearing morally upright, modest, and refined could serve as a shield against racist stereotypes and violent repression. This was especially evident during the civil rights movement.
Historian Tanisha C. Ford demonstrates how young women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) consciously chose clothing as a political tool. Early in the movement, many activists wore their “Sunday best”— ironed dresses, tidy hair, modest shoes—to project the image of respect and dignity they deserved despite facing racial hatred and police brutality. The well-groomed body became a form of protest. They were doubtless aware of the message this sent to the media: well-dressed, peaceful protesters being viciously attacked by white supremacists. Even before social media existed, young people understood that media could elicit sympathy or indifference.
By the early 1960s, they began changing their strategy. Many SNCC women abandoned respectability aesthetics for denim, natural hair, and work clothes. This shift wasn’t about fashion trends; it was ideological. Ford describes this new “SNCC skin” as a uniform that aligned activists with working-class Black communities and rejected middle-class standards imposed by white society and Black leadership. Clothing, in this context, became a way to envision a democracy based on solidarity rather than status. Fashion served as a language of protest. What you wore signaled who you were, the kind of world you aimed to build, and who would be allowed to build it.
If clothing could function as protest in the streets, what happens when it enters institutions built to exclude Black creators…the fashion industry, Hollywood, and the global stage?
Paid subscribers can scroll down to see how Black designers shifted from the margins to the spotlight, and how Ruth E. Carter made costume design a way of writing Black history into American cinema.
