Garments, Accessories, and Stories

Activists often have used dress to express solidarity with Black resistance movements such as the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In our research, we built upon our own and previous scholars’ work by analyzing the intersections of activism, identity, and dress in a specific space, place, and context: twenty-first-century Black women college students during the Black Lives Matter movement from 2013 to 2019 who were attending land-grant, predominately white institutions in Iowa. We explored these women’s everyday “fashion activism” through analysis of objects, photographs, and stories. We found that dress practices historically used by Black women activists are being revived and repurposed in the twenty-first century at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement era. These women shared that they knowingly wore these styles to emulate both their own and previous Black women’s dress practices.