For Dior's Paris Fashion Week show, artist Mickalene Thomas brought forth the legacy of her idols to high fashion to highlight Black excellence…
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00:00The detail to this, the detail when you get up close, all hand, all done by hand, hand-woven,
00:07like it's just incredible. Hi Brute, I'm Mickalene Thomas and I'm going to show you
00:13the work I did for the Dior fashion show. For the fashion show, you can expect beauty,
00:25confidence, and talent. All of these women that are presented here, the 13 African-American women,
00:32are interconnected. You have Ophelia Devorah, who had her first agency, who represented
00:40black women like Helen Williams and Lena Horne. And then you have people like Dorothy Dandridge,
00:48who was the first to be noted for Academy Award. So many of these women, such as Josephine Baker,
00:56for me being the mother of them all, because she actually represents a lot of black women
01:02in America and also bringing black women to the forefront here in Paris. Some knew each other,
01:10some was very close, but that was the support that they had for each other at a time
01:16when the community or the environment around them didn't support them. So they saw
01:22a refuge of supporting themselves and each other.
01:31I think it's very important for brands like Dior to support artists like me because it sends a
01:35message to the world that we are creators and talented and that, you know, for Maria to see
01:43and me, the quality of my work and the impact that I have created in the world for many other
01:51artists and young black girls, it's just really precedent for her to want to celebrate that
01:57and bring that forward. You know, most times when you see in the media about black women or
02:05black culture, it's oftentimes people want to highlight trauma. They want to talk about and
02:12look at us in traumatic ways. I'm interested in highlighting and putting forth positive images
02:19that show the other side of us, that show the other side of joy, black excellence, black joy,
02:24black leisure, and what that means to luxuriate, what it means to rest, what it means to be adorned,
02:33all of the stuff that we also are a part of that we need to celebrate and put forth in the world.
02:39So new images, when you see them, when you google them, there's an understanding that we're a part
02:44of so many different things. We're not just about trauma. We're not just about our traumatic past.
02:51We understand that. We take care of that through self-care, but we also are a part of a lot of other things.