The Rainbow Coalition

Clearly, none of this has anything to do with the streets of south Los Angeles--which suits these designers fine. "We are not 'black' designers but American designers, the way Bill Blass is an American designer," says Arthur McGee, who has been designing dresses since the 1950s and still sells his clothes from a small shop in Manhattan. "As soon as you categorize us, you can erase us." "When people talk about black designers, there's an assumption that everyone is working with a street-based vocabulary," says Gaskins, adding, "That's a total misconception." Gaskins, who was raised in rural Massachusetts and graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio, knows little of urban streets. "But black people love to look good," he says. "I remember going to family parties as a child, and all the women were dressed beautifully, carefully with great individualistic flair. They all took great pride in how they looked, and that probably taught me to love beautiful clothes."

Quota system:

Of course, they are aware, like blacks anywhere, of the heritage of discrimination they must overcome. In 1956, when McGee was a student at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, the dean advised him that he'd be better off looking for a job as a presser. Twenty-five years later, Patrick Kelly had to take his button-studded tube mini-dresses, black baby-doll pins and watermelon motifs to Paris before he was taken seriously in the United States. Ask Lars if he's ever encountered racism on Seventh Avenue, and he flashes one of his megawatt smiles and says he's standing on the shoulders of the black designers who came before him. He worries, though, that Seventh Avenue has a kind of informal quota system-allowing only a few black designers to make it at a time. "Now that Willi Smith and Patrick Kelly are dead, it's like a void, so it's hip to be a black designer," Lars says. "In the '70s designers were known for their work; they weren't as much celebrities as they are today. Now it's a media circus. People want to know the designer's face, and when that face is black, race becomes an issue."

For Lars, it is also a challenge he acknowledges and accepts. "In general terms, black people don't have as much as white people, so early on, you have to learn how to get a lot more out of a lot less," he says. You have to push the limits and try harder." Maybe that's what gives these new designers their cutting edge.

© 1992