(Un)Dressing the Black Male Body

Undress, the discarding of the oppressive weight of sartorial convention, is a means of transformative empowerment. Disrupting dress-code conventions and advancing a reconstruction of black male identity, the two-dimensional complexity of dress and undress underscores the rhetorical and political power of sartorial expression. In American culture, undress typically marks heathenistic behavior and "otherness." It stands in opposition to "civility" and "decorum." Undress is subversive. It is the unpacking of oppressive sartorial codes through dress. Putting it on and taking it off, dressing and undressing, are both equally important, both political and rhetorical—a statement that challenges an orthodoxy of exclusion, and a powerful expression of a self-determined identity.

In the fall of 1994, the Whitney Museum of New York showcased "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art," a landmark exhibit (November 10, 1994– March 5, 1995) curated by Thelma Golden. Groundbreaking in its work to deconstruct stereotypical representations of African American men, "Black Male" is the defining exhibition that shaped cultural conversations around contemporary art and identity, and representation, in particular, the politics of the black male body. The Whitney's provocative exhibit (which included visual art, mainstream cinema, and independent video) challenged already contested discourses around the black male body, and highlighted the use of museum space to shape public dialogues. In this exhibit, artists expressed their concerns and the anxieties of the time about what black maleness was and what it embodied, and pushed back against negative popular notions of the black body, and what it meant to be a black male.

The Whitney exhibit also functioned as a pioneering space for artists and viewers to begin the sartorial defrocking or unpacking of contemporary conceptualizations of the black male body. Both the men who fashion themselves and the artists who create often ideological works put on the vast expressive coat of maleness, and dress to meet and dismantle stereotypical depictions of the black male body and maleness. Their rejection of bestiality, brute crudeness, and oppressed subordination, by artists and men who dress, is a testament to the power of dress. There is a powerful duality to dressing—dress expresses the broad possibilities of a distinct black masculinity, and it takes off, or undresses, the oppressive attire of a narrow black male body.

The twentieth anniversary of "Black Male" was commemorated in 2014, and continues to generate prominent questions; specifically, how the deconstructive power of expression (or dress) is even more profound today with the societal portrayal of black males as menaces and perpetrators of violence. Twenty plus years later, we reframe questions around our (society's) conception of the black male: how do we see the black male body; how do we put pressure on what is black and what is male; and how have traditional understandings of black male representations been seen over the last twenty years? It is important to conceptualize the black body, to have an exhibit like "Black Male," which is itself a form of dress.

Monica Miller's 2009 Slaves to Fashion charts the story of black dandyism in the Atlantic diaspora, arguing for "styling" as a representational act of contemporary identity formation. She suggests that ". . . like any performative act, dandyism is contingent and unstable, a liminal art. . . ."¹ Such performance is often contingent on what they want it to mean. With a slight difference, curator and author Shantrelle P. Lewis's recent travelling photo exhibit, "Dandy Lion; (RE)Articulating Black Masculine Identity," which opened to much acclaim at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago during spring 2015, argues for the reclamation and redefinition of black male power. The "Dandy Lion" exhibit, followed by the 2017 publication of Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, is indeed a counternarrative to constructed representations of black masculinity typically seen in media—film, television, newspapers, advertising, sports. Lewis defines "dandy lion" as "a new statement on black masculinity within a contemporary context. He is a man of elegance, an individual who remixes a Victorian-era fashion and aesthetic with traditional African sensibilities and swagger."² The black dandy adopts Western fashion, menswear in particular, and fuses...