I am a confident, introspective artist who has finally stopped trying to fit my round self into a square peg hole. My work explores the black beauty we see everyday throughout the world. I utilize photography, videography, and fashion design to
capture the vibrant identities and experiences that often go unnoticed. Since my main focus is fashion design, I am able to capture personalities and emotions through a lens while creating unique clothing that showcases the talent we have throughout our community. Society has spent years creating a narrative of the African American community, often displaying grief, poverty and violence. I want to change that narrative and show that we can wear, be, and do whatever we want.

This look is titled Grief: An all consuming sadness. When I was initially came up with this concept it was after a few major deaths in the fashion industry all of which happened during covid and I wanted my garment to be a sort of funeral ode to all of the greats like Andre Leon, mugler, Virgil and all the loved one who’ve passed over these few years . That was still a very surface level idea though so I had to get more research so I could understand how this idea of grief personally connected to me and How I could translate that physically. Upon doing more research and reaching out to people to see what grief meant to them I came up with a lot of key sentences and words that I connected with that emotion. One thing that really stuck to me is when my mom said that grief is an all consuming sadness and as soon as I heard that it made me think of this sense of heaviness, being wrapped in something, and being unable to breathe. I wanted to translate that idea of being consumed by sadness and the distorted and distressed feelings that we get when we are experiencing grief. Unfortunately during the semester one of my high school friends passed away from an asthma attack so this garment was quite literally my transition through the complicated emotion and I really feel like I translated my idea of grief in the best way possible.