Lois Alexander and the Black Fashion Museum

Most fashion museums focus on the works of famous designers and the clothes of the well-off women who supported them.  The Black Fashion Museum, which existed from 1979 to 2007, had a different mission.  Under the leadership of the visionary Lois Alexander (1916-2007) the museum aimed to highlight all the work of all Black sewers, from the humblest slave dress to haute couture creations.

Lois Alexander was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1916 and learned to sew from her mother.  She studied to be a teacher but instead moved to Washington DC and worked for the Federal Government.  While in Washington, she opened a dress store, moving into the fashion field.  In the early 1960s, she moved to New York to get a Master’s Degree in retailing.  While writing her thesis on Black store owners, she came up with the idea to accumulate the often forgotten work of Black sewers and designers.  Funded by two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, she began accumulating clothes anywhere she could find them.  A decade later, the Black Fashion Museum opened in Harlem next door to a school she also founded, the Harlem Institute of Fashion.

Alexander’s project examined all levels of the fashion field, from the high fashion of well-known designers like Ann Lowe, to Rosa Park’s homemade flowered dress that she wore to start the bus boycott in 1955, to a hand sewn apron by a child slave.  She was an archivist in the textile field, scouring private sales and auctions to rescue objects that might have otherwise been destroyed. 

Photos show that Alexander favored colorful clothes.  You can see that in the bright purple dress featured in the Ebony article, as well as the multicolored top in the picture above.  The black and white photo made in 1987, when she was 71, reveals that she didn’t give up on bold designs even as she aged.  Did she make her clothes herself?  She certainly had the skills.

The Black Fashion Museum moved to Washington DC in 1994, with Alexander’s daughter, Joyce Bailey, taking on more responsibility.  When Alexander died in 2007, her daughter donated the entire collection to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.  Read the fascinating story of the collection’s journey to the national museum here.

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One Response to Lois Alexander and the Black Fashion Museum

  1. Trish S says:

    That’s so heartening to learn that this one lady managed to do so much to secure the history of black sewing in the USA. I do wish that sewing and garment making received more interest in other countries such as mine, as it is also the history of women that is involved, and we have little enough representation.

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