DRESSED IN DREAMS

A professor and pop-culture observer finds insight behind the statement, “clothes are never just garments.”

For Ford (African Studies and History/Univ. of Delaware; Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul, 2015, etc.) and her generation of black women who came of age in the 1980s and ’90s, born to parents who embraced the civil rights and Black Is Beautiful movements, certain garments carried cultural import. In a narrative that progresses by discrete, chronological chapters, the author presents a kind of memoir of her life through certain iconic looks that she incorporated over the years, creating through hairstyle, clothes, and accessories a “powerful social skin.” Her topics include the dashiki, baggy jeans, “coochie cutters,” knee-high boots (“according to the churchgoing adults in our young lives, knee-high boots were…for club-hopping women, street walkers, strippers, and drug dealers’ girlfriends”), bamboo earrings, the afro puff, and the hoodie. Each of these, she asserts, was a black innovation that encapsulated “rich, textured stories of our lives.” The dashiki was adopted by black militants in the late 1960s as a symbol of pan-African struggle. In a humorous section, Ford describes the Jheri curl craze of the 1980s, sported by Michael Jackson and others. “Hands down,” she writes, “the Jheri curl is the most maligned hairstyle in black history” as well as “the messiest…smelliest hairstyle ever invented.” As the author delineates, many of the looks were inspired by urban culture and the emergent genre of hip-hop. As Ford moved from high school to college, where she majored in English literature and African studies, she continued to experiment with her look as a reflection of her inner self. Later, “with three degrees behind my name,” she championed the hoodie look as a form of protest and sympathy with the Black Lives Matter movement.

An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from “a proud dashiki daughter, dressed in my own dreams.”