The Will to Adorn

Zora Neale Hurston was an author, folklorist, anthropologist, and exemplar of style.

Photo by Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, LC-DIG-VAN-5A52142

The Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, produces an annual spring fashion show featuring millinery collections modeled by members of the congregation.

Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Scurlock Studio Records, 1905–1994, Archives Center

This artisan of style creates and sells unique Afrocentric, artsy designs that are both contemporary and “throwback” made from recycled items.

Photo by Jade Banks

Tribe NYC is a young group inspired by an earlier era of hip-hop style and dress.

Photo by Kanaiah Nicole

Zora Neale Hurston, the renowned author and anthropologist, observed in 1934 that “the will to adorn” is one of the primary characteristics of African American expression. Like orature, quilting, and musical forms such as the blues, African American dress and body adornment are creative expressions grounded in the history of African-descended populations in the United States.

They have been shaped by the legacies of slavery, the civil rights movement, and more recent African diasporas. They reveal continuities of ideas, values, skills, and knowledge rooted on the African continent and in the American experience. Most importantly, dress and body adornment are “cultural markers”—aspects of visual culture through which people communicate their self-definitions, the communities with which they identify, their creativity, and their style.