This Fashion Show Just Made a Major Statement About Racism in America
A model at Pyer Moss’ spring 2016 runway show. Photo: Courtesy Pyer Moss.
Most runway shows open with a blast of loud electronic music and bright lights, designed to create an aura of glamor and excitement around the clothes. Last night, luxury sportswear label Pyer Moss opened its show with something more akin to a sermon, an accusation, and a rallying cry: a nearly ten-minute video about racism and police brutality in America, featuring the now sadly-familiar videos of Eric Garner being choked to death by a white police officer, and a police corporal body-slamming a 14 year-old girl in Texas during a pool party. Also featured in the video were the grieving relatives and loved ones of the Black men and women killed, some of whom also attended the show, sitting in the coveted front-row seats usually reserved for big-name fashion editors.
A model at Pyer Moss’ spring 2016 runway show. Photo: Courtesy Pyer Moss.
Pyer Moss creative director Kerby Jean-Raymond told The Guardian that up until a day before the show, he was considering only showing the video, not the clothes he’d spent months designing, and which include his first women’s collection: “I was making a collection [but] I didn’t know I was actually gonna show it. I was gonna kind of like hold up a mirror to the room with a video.”
A model at Pyer Moss’ spring 2016 runway show. Photo: Courtesy Pyer Moss.
But he did show his collection, which continued the conversation started in the video in a way that felt both powerful and un-forced (which can be difficult to do when translating politics to clothes). Many of the looks featured a simple band of cloth tied around the neck, over models’ hair, echoing the death by police chokehold that killed Garner and others. One of the models who didn’t wear the grimly aptly-named choker wore gun-like holsters under his arms. Like many other models, he had splotches of bright red blood on his shoes.
A model at Pyer Moss’ spring 2016 runway show. Photo: Courtesy Pyer Moss.
As the models walked the runway, a graffiti artist wove in and out, tagging them with legends like “Breathe breathe breathe.” Although it’d be easy to think of the clothes as an afterthought given the circumstances, they were as cool as the show’s tone was stark. Crisp suiting mixed with athletic staples like drapey sweatpants. There was a military influence in the flight jackets and olive-drab and khaki palette. Other looks featured mesh leggings, pants with a web of holes below the knee, sweatshirts that had been slashed, then stitched back together. Given the context of the show, it’s tempting to think of these as comments on the vulnerability and routine violation of Black bodies that the “Black Lives Matter” movement aims to counter.
Fashion editor Shiona Turini wears Pyer Moss’ They Have Names T-shirt. Photo: Instagram/@shionat.
This isn’t the first time Pyer Moss has tackled police brutality and racism. Last year, the label’s “They Have Names” T-Shirts featuring the names of 24 unarmed Black men and women killed by cops were so popular they crashed the label’s site four times the day they went on sale (they also earned thousands of dollars for the ACLU).
“I just hope that people will leave from it more aware, a little bit more open,” Jean-Raymond told Fashion United about the show. In an industry that too often exists in a depoliticized bubble, either unconscious of race, or excluding people of color altogether, it was thrilling and moving to use his art to extend the much-needed conversation around racism in America. We doubt we’ll see a more powerful show this season.
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