Shelby Ivey Christie is Writing the History of Black Fashion on Twitter
Every day, for two and a half years, Shelby Ivey Christie would get up, queue up some fashion history tweets on the subway ride to work, let them fly, then clock into her marketing job.
She’d plug her phone into her laptop, and a growing chorus, now 39k-strong, grew there. Her tweets gesture towards a sort of live archive, an exercise in crowdsourced memory. She posts about fashion, and Black people, and history, and the history that Black people have made in fashion: Foxy Brown was a Galliano muse; the big applique flower dress Carrie Bradshaw wore to open Sex And The City: The Movie was Whitney Houston’s first; early streetwear brands like WilliWear launched “alottttt” of higher-end fashion careers. She’s creating her own Black fashion journal, in the vernacular, one thread at a time. …
*Excerpt from “THE NEXT GREAT BLACK FASHION JOURNAL, ONE TWITTER THREAD AT A TIME” via SSENSE. Written and interviewed by Melvin Backman, art by Megan Tatem.
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