After the recent passing of Black Designer, Virgil Abloh, we couldn’t wait any longer to write a blog highlighting some of the premier black designers and black clothing companies.
While growing up we remember and witnessed the growth and success of FUBU, Karl Kani, Wu-Wear, Rocawear, and Phat Farm amongst many others. In the 90’s, growing up in Long Island, close to Jamaica Ave, Queens, fashion was a trendy hobby. These days we’re still not experts in this subject, but after all the growth of influence from black designer and brands we did some research on some designers and brands we felt were interesting.
The Fashion industry over the past 10-20 years have been blessed with plenty of talented black designers. Some that went to school in Paris and New York and some that just learned the craft from family members at home or on their own and became successful.
Vigil Abloh, son of Ghanain parents, is a good start as he was the inspiration to research this topic. His work like many of the others here, have had work out there on music artists and on social media. Basically catapulting them into the main stream fashion world. You may already know Virgil was the creative director for menswear in the biggest luxury brand in the world, LV. We feel it is an honor to mention Virgil. He made it as one of the most influential young black clothing designers. Loosing a talented black man in any industry is tough, but it does hurt more when we lose one in an industry where there are less of us in the first place. His talent was great and his legacy is strong and will carry on through his inspiration and current projects still running.
Kerby Jean-Raymond is a Haitian American designer. Before founding his brand in 2013 he has worked with Theory, Marc Jacob, and Kenneth Cole. His brand, Pyer Moss has been know for a collection standing up against police brutality. His clothes had what looks like blood highlighting different features of the garments and footwear. Bringing to focus and highlighting the creativeness in expressing that political climate and abuse into his clothing designs. Kerby is also an advocate for metal health and found a way of incorporating that into some of his work. With these themes as some of Kerby’s style, we are interested in seeing more from his brand. He seems to have a blueprint to stay relevant with his clothing being able to reflect current American social expressions or movements.
Grace Wales Bonner is a young fashion designer from London, who was naturally inspired by her African and European culture as she has Jamaican and British decent. Since launching her brand in 2014 she has been receiving awards. That same year, she graduated art school and won an award for one of her collections at the L’Oreal Professional Talent Awards. Then she won at the Emerging Talent awards for her menswear collection at the 2015 British Fashion Awards. In 2016 she received the winning LVMH Prize for young fashion designers and in 2018 won the emerging design medal. Do you see the pattern here? From the start Grace has kept engaged and her hard work has paid off. Her brand is known for an academic and intellectually tailored presence, also known to have a Howard University influence. Definitely a brand to look into.