{ "article": { "title" : "Black Fashion: Revolution and the Somatics of Joy and Pleasure", "author" : "Sha’Mira Covington", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/black-fashion-revolution-and-the-somatics-of-joy-and-pleasure", "date" : "2023-07-06 15:33:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Slow-Journal---Thumb_ShaMira.jpg", "excerpt" : "A meditation", "content" : "A meditationFor Black folx, getting dressed is a powerful political act that transforms cultural and political landscapes. Take for instance, images from the 1960s and 70s of civil rights activists dressed in their Sunday Best at protests to combat white conceptions of Blackness; or the Black Panther Party’s use of all black clothing to emphasize Black pride. While there is often attention given to social movements that focus on policy issues, the fight to integrate public spaces, and big sociopolitical events, such as marches and protests, there are also everyday acts such as dressing our bodies that are integral to understanding how everyday people participate in revolution. Fashion and style connect people to global movements for Black liberation and this connection warrants inclusion in what’s considered a revolutionary act. Cultural discourses about Blackness often starts with the body. This is because Black bodies have always been a hegemonic obsession in the West (think slavery, labor, death, etc). This is also because Black fashion is an embodied language that Africana people use to rebuild our psyches and heal emotional and physical wounds from the imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. Wearing our natural hair, donning a dashiki, or highlighting our melanated skin, are all nods to the African continent and go against hegemonic white norms. Despite the violent environment in which Black fashion and embodied narratives are created, this cultural production is filled with joy and pleasure. Clothes are not just garments by which we adorn our bodies. Black fashion and dress are companions to Black struggle and liberation. They provide commentary about state-sanctioned violence and are historical markers associated with Black embodied practices. Therefore, Black fashion is situated in Black revolution; and Black revolution includes joy and pleasure. Joy and pleasure are acts of resistance because they are a form of “energy for change,” as Audre Lorde puts it. They counter and contrast the rigidity and control of hegemonic oppressive structures. Fashion serves as a tool for creating a culture of joy, pleasure, and play. Through dressing our bodies, the internalized dynamics of oppression that we absorb and learn are transgressed. Black folx often utilize narratives of the body to connect personal stories of oppression to collective historical stories and protest. The body then, acts as a release point with fashion serving to aesthetically articulate protest. At the same time, fashion is the “inner voice”, outwardly displayed in the quest for liberation. Black fashion also allows for play. This play is a way for us to daydream new realities for our bodies. Black fashion plays with color, patterns silhouette, and old vs new. There is a vibration of hope, enjoyment, and rejoice in how we adorn our bodies. This vibration offers a naming for radical Black praxis. As an intrusion on Black violence, degradation, and oppression, the aesthetic, has historically elucidated the somatics of joy and pleasure as resistance. Black fashion, across the diaspora, forms a theoretical framework for revolution, past and present. With this said, it’s important to note that fashion is not independent from structures of oppression. The fashion-industrial complex is one of the largest culprits of global capitalism and exploitation. The general development of it is intertwined with histories of Indigenous genocide, the transatlantic slave trade, and environmental warfare. Those legacies are still apparent today. Mainstream fashion feeds on Blackness, commodifying and exploiting it. “Sustainable” fashion, too, pilfers theory and praxis of Black and Indigenous folx, who have cared about and tended to the natural environment around us for centuries. If we look to Black fashion, we can see that the range of “sustainable” social and political practices are historically rooted in the experiences of Black and Indigenous folx. Thus, by centering Black bodies as sites of knowledge production, which is integral to the liberation from cultural, social, and historical oppressions enacted on them, we can challenge what it means to “do” revolution. If we look to Black fashion, with history in mind, as a tool for play that functions to satisfy one’s high-order desires, such as self-expression, having fun, and critiquing narratives of the body, fashion can serve as both an inward and outward gaze of revolution.Regarding Blackness and liberation, the only validation of personhood seems to come out of pain and struggle, but almost never through joy and pleasure. Black stories are typically told by positioning us as victims of tragic circumstances but rarely as agents of change in our personal lives or the world around us. Reclaiming fashion as a revolutionary tool imbues Black liberation with complexity, imagination, personal power, joy, and pleasure. Looking to Black fashion and dress as a primary somatic process, one that is tied to psychological and spiritual freedoms is to release it from the damaging and enmeshed systems of colonial visual exposure and corporeal violence. Fashion as a visual form of resistance allows Black folx to enact joy and pleasure on our own terms. AcknowledgementThank you to the amazing undergraduate students of HAUTE Creatives Agency at The University of Georgia for photo contributions. IG: @hauteuga, TikTok: @hauteuga" } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "Black Liberation Views on Palestine", "author" : "EIP Editors", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/black-liberation-on-palestine", "date" : "2025-10-17 09:01:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/mandela-keffiyeh.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "In understanding global politics, it is important to look at Black liberation struggles as one important source of moral perspective. So, when looking at Palestine, we look to Black leaders to see how they perceived the Palestinian struggle in relation to theirs, from the 1960’s to today.Why must we understand where the injustice lies? Because, as Desmond Tutu famously said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”{% for person in site.data.quotes-black-liberation-palestine %}{{ person.name }}{% for quote in person.quotes %}“{{ quote.text }}”{% if quote.source %}— {{ quote.source }}{% endif %}{% endfor %}{% endfor %}" } , { "title" : "First Anniversary Celebration of EIP", "author" : "EIP Editors", "category" : "events", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/1st-anniversary-of-eip", "date" : "2025-10-14 18:01:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/WSA_EIP_Launch_Cover.jpg", "excerpt" : "Celebrating One Year of Independent Publishing", "content" : "Celebrating One Year of Independent PublishingJoin Everything is Political on November 21st for the launch of our End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine.This members-only evening will feature a benefit dinner, cocktails, and live performances in celebration of a year of independent media, critical voices, and collective resistance.The EventNovember 21, 2025, 7-11pmLower Manhattan, New YorkLaunching our End-of-Year Special Edition MagazineSpecial appearances and performancesFood & Drink includedTickets are extremely limited, reserve yours now!Become an annual print member: get x back issues of EIP, receive the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine, and come to the Anniversary Celebration.$470Already a member? Sign in to get your special offer. Buy Ticket $150 Just $50 ! and get the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine Buy ticket $150 and get the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine " } , { "title" : "Miu Miu Transforms the Apron From Trad Wife to Boss Lady: The sexiest thing in Paris was a work garment", "author" : "Khaoula Ghanem", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/miu-miu-transforms-the-apron-from-trad-wife-to-boss-lady", "date" : "2025-10-14 13:05:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_MiuMiu_Apron.jpg", "excerpt" : "Miuccia Prada has a habit of taking the least “fashion” thing in the room and making it the argument. For Spring 2026 at Miu Miu, the argument is the apron; staged not as a coy retro flourish but as a total system. The show’s mise-en-scène read like a canteen or factory floor with melamine-like tables, rationalist severity, a whiff of cleaning fluid. In other words, a runway designed to force a conversation about labor before any sparkle could distract us.", "content" : "Miuccia Prada has a habit of taking the least “fashion” thing in the room and making it the argument. For Spring 2026 at Miu Miu, the argument is the apron; staged not as a coy retro flourish but as a total system. The show’s mise-en-scène read like a canteen or factory floor with melamine-like tables, rationalist severity, a whiff of cleaning fluid. In other words, a runway designed to force a conversation about labor before any sparkle could distract us.From the opening look—German actress Sandra Hüller in a utilitarian deep-blue apron layered over a barn jacket and neat blue shirting—the thesis was loud: the “cover” becomes the thing itself. As silhouettes marched on, aprons multiplied and mutated—industrial drill cotton with front pockets, raw canvas, taffeta and cloqué silk, lace-edged versions that flirted with lingerie, even black leather and crystal-studded incarnations that reframed function as ornament. What the apron traditionally shields (clothes, bodies, “the good dress”) was inverted; the protection became the prized surface. Prada herself spelled it out: “The apron is my favorite piece of clothing… it symbolizes women, from factories through to serving to the home.”Miu Miu Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear. SuppliedThis inversion matters historically. The apron’s earliest fashion-adjacent life was industrial. It served as a barrier against grease, heat, stain. It was a token of paid and unpaid care. Miu Miu tapped that lineage directly (canvas, work belts, D-ring hardware), then sliced it against domestic codes (florals, ruffles, crochet), and finally pushed into nightlife with bejeweled and leather bibs. The garment’s migration across materials made its social migrations visible. It is a kitchen apron, yes, but also one for labs, hospitals, and factories; the set and styling insisted on that plurality.What makes the apron such a loaded emblem is not just what it covers, but what it reveals about who has always been working. Before industrialization formalized labor into factory shifts and wages, women were already performing invisible labour, the kind that doesn’t exist on payrolls but sits at the foundation of every functioning society. They were cooking, cleaning, raising children, nursing the ill. These tasks were foundational to every economy and yet absent from every ledger. Even when women entered the industrial workforce, from textile plants to wartime assembly lines, their domestic responsibilities did not disappear, they doubled. In that context, the apron here is a quiet manifesto for the strength that goes unrecorded, unthanked, and yet keeps civilization running.The algorithmic rise of the “tradwife,” the influencer economy that packages domesticity as soft power, is the contemporary cultural shadow here. Miu Miu’s apron refuses that rehearsal. In fact, it’s intentionally awkward—oversized, undone, worn over bikinis or with sturdy shoes—so the viewer can’t flatten it into Pinterest-ready nostalgia. Critics noted the collection as a reclamation, a rebuttal to the flattening forces of the feed: the apron as a uniform for endurance rather than submission. The show notes framed it simply as “a consideration of the work of women,” a reminder that the invisible economies of effort—paid, unpaid, emotional—still structure daily life.If that sounds unusually explicit for a luxury runway, consider the designer. Prada trained as a mime at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, earned a PhD in political science, joined the Italian Communist Party, and was active in the women’s rights movement in 1970s Milan. Those facts are not trivia; they are the grammar of her clothes. Decades of “ugly chic” were, essentially, a slow campaign against easy consumption and default beauty. In 2026, the apron becomes the newest dialect. An emblem drawn from leftist feminist history, recoded into a product that still has to sell. That tension—belief versus business—is the Miuccia paradox, and it’s precisely why these aprons read as statements, not trends.The runway narrative traced a journey from function to fetish. Early looks were squarely utilitarian—thick cottons, pocketed bibs—before migrating toward fragility and sparkle. Lace aprons laid transparently over swimmers; crystal-studded aprons slipped across cocktail territory; leather apron-dresses stiffened posture into armor. The sequencing proposed the same silhouette can encode labor, intimacy, and spectacle depending on fabrication. If most brands smuggle “workwear” in as set dressing, Miu Miu forced it onto the body as the central garment and an unmissable reminder that the feminine is often asked to be both shield and display at once.It’s instructive to read this collection against the house’s last mega-viral object: the micro-mini of Spring 2022, a pleated, raw-hem wafer that colonized timelines and magazine covers. That skirt’s thesis was exposure—hip bones and hemlines as post-lockdown spectacle, Y2K nostalgia framed as liberation-lite. The apron, ironically, covers. Where the micro-mini trafficked in the optics of freedom (and the speed of virality), the apron asks about the conditions that make freedom possible: who launders, who cooks, who cares? To move from “look at me” to “who is working here?” is a pivot from optics to ethics, without abandoning desire. (The aprons are, after all, deeply covetable.) In a platform economy that still rewards the shortest hemline with the biggest click-through, this is a sophisticated counter-program.Yet the designer is not romanticizing toil. There’s wit in the ruffles and perversity in the crystals; neither negate labor, they metabolize it. The most striking image is the apron treated as couture-adjacent. Traditionally, an apron protects the precious thing beneath; here, the apron is the precious thing. You could call that hypocrisy—luxurizing the uniform of workers. Or, strategy, insisting that the symbols of care and effort deserve visibility and investment.Of course, none of this exists in a vacuum. The “tradwife” script thrives because it is aesthetically legible and commercially scalable. It packages gender ideology as moodboard. Miu Miu counters with garments whose legibility flickers. The collection’s best looks ask viewers to reconcile tenderness with toughness, convenience with care, which is exactly the mental choreography demanded of women in every context from office to home to online.If you wanted a season-defining “It” item, you’ll still find it. The apron is poised to proliferate across fast-fashion and luxury alike. But the deeper success is structural: Miu Miu re-centered labor as an aesthetic category. That’s rarer than a viral skirt. It’s a reminder that clothes don’t merely decorate life, they describe and negotiate it. In making the apron the subject rather than the prop, Prada turned a garment of service into a platform for agency. It’s precisely the kind of cultural recursion you’d expect from a designer shaped by feminist politics, who never stopped treating fashion as an instrument of thought as much as style.The last image to hold onto is deceptively simple: a woman in an apron, neither fetishized nor infantilized, striding, hands free. Not a costume for nostalgia, not a meme for the feed, but a working uniform reframed, respected, and suddenly, undeniably beautiful. That is Miu Miu’s provocation for Spring 2026: the work behind the work, made visible at last." } ] }