Artist Mickalene Thomas at Paris Fashion Week

For Dior's Paris Fashion Week show, artist Mickalene Thomas brought forth the legacy of her idols to high fashion to highlight Black excellence…

Transcript

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.