The Black in Fashion Council presented its Spring/Summer 2024 discovery showroom supporting ten emerging Black and African diaspora designers. The blooming New York Fashion Week fixture, founded by The Cut’s editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples and public relations specialist Sandrine Charles, ran for five days, amplifying the voice and businesses of underrepresented designers. The BIFC showcase is a hidden gem of Fashion Week. Teen Vogue spoke to three designers about their collections.
Khoi, a sculptural jewelry brand by Kayey Rida, is Rida’s latest in her long line of artistic mediums. With a full-time job, she launched three previous collections: The Icon, Nour, and A Masked Identity.
When she was laid off from her corporate job, Rida's latest collection, Rafia, was born. The pieces symbolize her bifocal vision of what was to come. Would it be a cage or would it be a nest in which she could grow? The perspective is a bit of both, hence the name Rafia, the raw material from which one can make either.
The nest portion of Rafia brings warmth with its organic softness and layered design. Like bangles, necklaces, and earrings, the imperfect, different-sized circle motif is particularly poignant and unique. On the other hand, the cage takes a more heavy-handed approach, is less delicate, and the larger structural pieces are more geometric and sculptural.
Every single piece Khoi makes is under $100. The bendable, solid, 18k gold-plated brass pieces make them easy to play with and customize. The Oona earring alone can be worn four ways and counting: full hoop, half hoop, ear cuff, and arm cuff. "I feel jewelry should be accessible, so I don't need to put a 10,000 profit margin on it," Rida says. "We'll do just enough to keep the business going and funding that creativity."
Korlekie was another standout in the Black In Fashion Council Discovery Showroom. Founded by British Ghanaian designer Beatrice Korlekie, the fashion label is known for its risqué yet sophisticated crocheted silken cord pieces. "Black in fashion inherently means to me being special, being unique, being different," Korlekie says. "We have something to offer, new, innovative ways of doing things that can help the world grow and become a better place."
Her clothing is a testament to this belief, yet the sentiment was not the same seven years prior. Raised with Western ideas, mentors and others had told her time and time again that "Black doesn't sell" and, sadly, she believed it.
While working as the fashion department head at the University of East London, she saw the bright faces of the young Black women who were making fashion and unwilling to compromise. Looking at the future generation, Korlekie could see the naked, damning nature of what she had been told.
Now, she is celebrating herself and her diaspora by paying tribute to their bodies. The silk cords are designed to emphasize each breast and butt cheek with their circular pattern. The lace-up backing capped with brass aglets resembles that of a spine vertebrae. It's all anatomical.
"America, quite literally, in the four days that I've just been here, is a land of opportunity," Korlekie says. "Being in a room full of other designers in the same diaspora, doing the same thing and at different levels of the business has inspired me because I can learn from them."
Also part of the London Fashion Week digital showcase was British Nigerian designer Michelle Adepoju who founded Kìléntár to highlight West Africa’s history and artistry. Adepoju’s first collection, Out of This World, is a textural, flavorful, patterned delight mixed with elegance and fun. The brand's name means “What are you selling?” in the Nigerian dialect of Yoruba and Adepoju's travels to Western Africa are the main inspiration.
Adepoju's sustainable designs use upcycled vintage fabrics from Southwestern Nigeria, including Ondo, Ogun, Oyo, and Osun State. Pieces like the Ajoyo shirt and Ajoyo dress take a more casual patchwork route. At the same time, handwoven cotton is shaped into a couture corset Ninu set (very reminiscent of Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel spring 1993).
Adepoju's work is all about the process. Working hand in hand with artisans to preserve the traditional dye method of adirè, Kìléntár highlights diverse patterns created with painstaking labor. The Ibukun Cowries top alone takes 16 hours to complete, with more than 100 shells hand-stitched into the open vest. The time invested is worth it, with each addictively smooth and cool cowrie shell softly clinking together.
Inspired by the ethereal water goddess Mami Watta, her pieces also pay homage to water's influence on different artistic movements. The Mami dress, in particular, is modeled after mermaids with its colorful printed chiffon in a fish scale-like pattern often compared to rainbow fish, Adepoju says.
