Lifestyle
Black Style, Made to Measure
Once all the spilled champagne has been mopped up from this year’s Met Gala, the exhibition that it’s toasting, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” will examine Black dandies, bespoke suiting and the Black men who so often set the standard of what it means to be stylish.
Black fashion lovers may feel the celebration is long overdue, but the show provides an opportunity to consider all that “tailoring” can mean — especially to Black people in the United States.
Ahead of the Costume Institute show, Black craftspeople across the country — a milliner in South Carolina, men’s tailors in Chicago, a jeweler in Los Angeles — reflected on the power and joy that can be found in tailoring.
Custom Clothiers
Christopher Brackenridge and Milton Latrell
Two sons of seamstresses help men look their best at Agriculture, a boutique in Chicago.
Photographs and video by Nolis Anderson for The New York Times
“We’d both seen how confident the clients of our moms became when they wore custom clothing. They had confidence. They walked a certain way. Their posture changed. And we was like, ‘If that makes a Black man feel good, why not be a part of that?’” — Milton Latrell
The boutique’s clients include famous Black actors, pastors and musicians, as well as local students getting outfitted for prom.
Mr. Brackenridge said he especially loved working on pieces that clients have had in their families for generations and finding new ways of updating them so they feel modern. A 60-year-old jacket that once belonged to a client’s grandfather was a particular highlight.
“I love when a client is able to come in and bring a piece that their grandfather may have worn and we are able to update that style to now.” — Christopher Brackenridge
“We like to put things like hidden watch pockets and coin pockets” for a little surprise, Mr. Latrell said.
“When you’re wearing something custom or just customized to you, you feel debonair — extraordinary, even — like you can accomplish anything,” said Milton Latrell, co-founder of Agriculture, a Chicago boutique specializing in custom suiting and styling for men.
For many Black people, having a tailor is not an extravagance, but a necessity. The right tailor can take an ill-fitting pair of pants and make them flatter every contour of the body. The right tailor can transform scraps of fabric into a treasured dress, skirt or jacket — all while leaving customers looking and feeling their best. And when customers feel their best, they exude a swagger and confidence that feels like a natural part of being Black.
Tailor
Cheryl A. Lofton
A third-generation tailor in Washington initially wanted nothing to do with the family business.
“My niche in the business was alterations. I wanted to make sure that women knew that they could come in and have the same treatment that the men got in a tailoring business.”
Scissors originally belonging to JC Lofton, Ms. Lofton’s grandfather who started the business in 1939. Black Tailors
J.C. Lofton, left, in Washington D.C. in the 1940s, who founded Lofton Custom Tailoring in 1939.
“My mom dressed up to go to the grocery store. She did not go out of this house without a nice, well-fitted dress, her makeup done, and her high-heeled shoes. Never, ever did my mom go out without being dressed up, as did all of the grown-ups in our family. They were always well dressed.”
Cheryl A. Lofton and her grandfather, Joe Cephus (J.C.) in the 1970’s.
Like Ms. Lofton, I have family in the business. For most of my own childhood my mother was a tailor, making wedding gowns, bridesmaid dresses and suits in a room in the back of our house in Harare, Zimbabwe. Her customers, a mix of friends, family and strangers, always seemed to leave her de facto studio feeling joyful. It was in that back room that I found an affinity for tulle and feathers, and learned just how special clothes made just for you could make you feel.
When my family arrived in the United States, my mother stopped sewing professionally, but she always made time to ensure that my clothes — most of which were thrifted or hand-me-downs donated by our new community — felt one of a kind. She would swap out a plain black button for a fun mismatched pink one, extend a hem on pants that were a tad too short, use extra fabric on a skirt that was too big to create pleats and ruching. Even when my clothes weren’t new, they felt special.
Costumer
Laron Nelson
The owner of Opulent Designs in New Orleans says his goal is to make outfits that are “more costume than fashion.”
Photographs and video by Camille Lenain for The New York Times
“I use a lot of sequined fabrics — a lot of velvet, satins, lamés, lace, brocade, rhinestone fabrics — because for Mardi Gras, everything is all about the glitter and the shine. The glitz.”
Locally, Mr. Nelson is best known for his custom wire working and feather collars, worn by participants in New Orleans’s famed second lines and pageants.
“I started creating it so I wouldn’t have to spend the type of money it cost to buy from other people,” Mr. Nelson said.
Mr. Nelson’s mother and sister help with the business, whose studio is in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.
“A lot of men are deterred from wearing what they want to wear because they may feel like something is not masculine. But my thing is, if you’re masculine, it doesn’t matter who you are, what you are and what you wear.”
For Mr. Nelson, more is more.
At 18, I moved to Rome for school, and within days of arriving, found myself wandering through the Termini neighborhood in search of a barber and a tailor. I was tight on cash, but I wouldn’t be caught in clothes that were too tight or too loose. I found a student tailor who shared a studio space with other young designers.
Years later, as a graduate student in New York, I often hauled a bag of thrifted clothes to a Harlem dry cleaner for alterations. The store was next to my barbershop and a few blocks away from the market where I bought fabric for scarves and head wraps — which, of course, was walking distance from my cobbler. In my late 20s in Atlanta, I made sure to find a tailor, a barber and a jeweler to repair my most beloved pieces before I signed an apartment lease.
Jewelry Designer
Maggi Simpkins
A Los Angeles artist who doesn’t want to make earrings or bracelets “just for the sake of making pretty things.”
Photographs and video by Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times
“We’re creating these pieces with the intention that they’ll be passed down throughout generations and continue to tell the stories of the people that once wore these pieces.”
“I used to have a locket growing up and I loved it and I thought it was magic because you would open up and there’d be a little photo inside of it,” Ms. Simpkins said, “but I never understood why the photos were hidden.”
“My earliest memory of jewelry is my mom going through her jewelry box and taking out pieces and telling me stories about ‘Your grandfather gave this to your grandmother on their 25th wedding anniversary,’ or ‘Your grandfather got this when he was 16 years old during communion.’ So I grew up hearing stories about family members that were no longer alive.”
Ms. Simpkins in her Los Angeles studio.
Although Ms. Simpkins makes all kinds of jewelry, she’s best known for her nontraditional engagement rings.
“From an early age, jewelry was just magic to me because it had the ability to hold these stories from past loved ones.”
You can find Black artisans almost anywhere: on main streets in the bustling part of town, or tucked away in studios in basements, attics, spare bedrooms or even garages. In these spaces, they are constantly experimenting and creating.
I first met Natalie Simmons, a hat maker born and raised in Charleston, S.C., at her store in the West Ashley district of the city in 2019. I explained to her that I was in town for a wedding that called for a hat, but I didn’t know what to get. Days later, she handed me a fascinator with a long black and white feather.
Milliner
Natalie Simmons
A hat maker in Charleston, S.C., who sources materials from Italy and parts of Africa.
Photographs and video by Donaven Doughty for The New York Times
Molds and a measuring tool that Ms. Simmons uses to make all types of hats: fedoras, cloches, boaters, bowlers, sun hats and more.
“My grandmother had hats in every color. If you walked into her closet, her closet was just lined with hat boxes. There were hat boxes up on the shelves. There were hat boxes on the floor. They were just her coveted thing. She had a hat that matched every outfit. She had gloves and handbags, but the hats were something to be cherished.”
“We don’t just take a hat off the rack and just plop it down on our heads,” Ms. Simmons said. “We add a curious little tilt or a feather, or add a pin, or a special detail that just makes it stand out.”
“A hat that perfectly fits your face and fits the structure of your body can bring something to life. It’s the one thing that can really make an outfit stand out and really tell a story.”
In her Charleston studio, Ms. Simmons makes custom hats in addition to restoring older ones.
Designers shared similar early memories of falling in love with their craft at home, where they were surrounded by moms, aunts and grandmothers. Their work allows them to continue to tell their family’s stories.
Western Wear Designer
Dymond Taylor
Dating a cowboy opened her eyes to an opportunity in Houston.
Photographs by Arturo Olmos for The New York Times
“It’s really easy to design for our people because they don’t want to look like anybody else.”
Ms. Taylor loves to design with leather, denim and — of course — fringe.
“When I started this brand, I wasn’t seeing what I wanted in stores. We always set the trends. We always create uniqueness. It’s just deeply rooted in us to do that.”
Sometime around her rodeo-going days, Ms. Taylor realized that the disproportionately white images of cowboys and western life that she encountered weren’t reflective of what she knew to be cowboy culture and history. B Stone was born out of that frustration.
“People might not instantly associate Western wear with suiting and tailoring, but when you go back to the root of it, Western wear has always been presented as a suit — the pant, the hat, the boot and the guitar.”
Ms. Taylor describes her brand as melding “cowboy style and urban style, mixing streetwear with country.”
In shops and studios scattered across the country, the American designers and tailors I spoke with represented exactly what this year’s Met exhibition and gala hope to honor. Each one takes some element of an outfit and elevates it, empowering their Black clients and celebrating their collective history in the process.
Rhea Seehorn plays a misanthropic romance writer in the Apple TV series Pluribus.
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Rhea Seehorn says she’s on “Team Carol.”
In the Apple TV series Pluribus, actor Rhea Seehorn stars as Carol, a bestselling romance author who suddenly finds herself living in a world where everyone around her is bound together by a “psychic glue.” They share memories and knowledge and they are happy and peaceful. The only problem: Carol’s not interested in joining them — especially if it means losing her own sense of self.
“I would absolutely be Team Carol as far as arguing the necessity and the positives of individual thinking,” Seehorn says. If the world were taken over by group think, she explains, “There’s never going to be a joke that you haven’t heard. There’s never going to be a surprise behavior that makes you laugh. And that’s just such a source of joy for me that I just can’t imagine that contentment is the same as happiness.”
Seehorn previously played Kim Wexler in AMC’s Better Call Saul, co-created by Vince Gilligan. He is also the creator of Pluribus. Seehorn says Carol’s character was originally imagined as a male protagonist, but was rewritten for her to take the starring role. Gilligan “wanted to play with tone and take wild swings as far as [the series] could be darkly comedic, or it could be darkly psychological … and he was impressed at my ability to do those things,” Seehorn says. “I’m certainly very thankful for it.”
Interview highlights
On playing angry characters in Pluribus and in Better Call Saul
There’s this idea [that] anger can be a miasma almost, that can spread. And we’ve all seen horrible things can happen when you just are riling people up. … But at the same time, it is a necessary emotion, which, I think, is one of the arguments in the show that I side with — the idea that all of the emotions are important, not just happiness. …
Because I’m a woman playing the role … it felt as though I was taught that anger was unpalatable, specifically from females, and that I should find a way to make it palatable. … When I was much younger, I would scream. As a teenager, you know, screaming, yelling, like the typical arguments you have over hairspray and idiotic things as a teenager. … My parents were divorced, and so it was a household of three women, my mom, and my sister and I. … But, you know, you kind of grow out of this. …
I don’t think it’s OK to scream and yell in someone’s face, but I think I have become conflict avoidant in the suppression of that anger to a degree that’s not healthy. I will stand up for somebody else, though, in a heartbeat. If somebody else is being mistreated next to me, I’m in there. I’ll take you to the mat. But if it’s at me, I tend to swallow it and try to figure out how I can make it better.
On how she prepared to play the role of a romance novelist
I went to The Ripped Bodice, which is an amazing romance novel store. … And I just slipped in and looked around. And I have to tell you, one of the first things that struck me is the amount of sub-genres and the specificity of these sub-genres. … I watched a couple of people do readings from their books, and I was really surprised at the breadth of people, of fans, listening. There was a lot of people dressed like early Stevie Nicks, in a beautiful way. But then there was also … [a] couple that looked like they came straight from a corporate job. … People younger than me, people older than me. It definitely widened me to how huge this genre is and how much it encapsulates all the different novels it has.
On changing her name from Deborah, which was her first name, to Rhea, which was her middle name
I got a little chunky in puberty, and kids started yelling at me, “Hey, fat Debbie, do you want some more Little Debbie’s?” (which are snack cakes.) … I was just like … I just need a fresh start. And I think I identify more with my middle name. And weirdly, there was no issue with kids that had known me forever. Everybody just sort of was like, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
On her father being a counterintelligence agent
I knew he was investigating things and I knew that they were secretive, but I didn’t have a lot more details than that. And I am loathe to say that my head was too far up my butt as a teenager to actually be interested in what my parents actually do. And then he died when I was 18, so I didn’t get to ask a lot of the questions that I wish I had asked. …
My Dad’s favorite answer to everything was, “What are you, writing a book?” If you even just said, like, “Where are you going?” … And I thought I was so brilliant when I was 15 that I finally had a comeback. And I said, “Yeah, I am.” And he said, “Well, then leave this chapter out.”
On her father’s drinking
Apparently he was a heavy drinker for most of his adult life, but it just didn’t get labeled as alcoholism, you know? And my dad was the life of the party and very, very smart, very, very funny, with a super dry wit. … The idea that he was in the Tet Offensive and, as far as I know, never talked to anybody about it, and that you would have a life built of a lot of secrets. … I don’t remember him ever saying that he had anybody to talk to about it. So I just bring that up because I think self-medicating was going on for quite a while before it physically became a full-blown issue and then full-blown disease.
On how she became an actor
I was obsessed with television, film, and as a kid in the suburbs in Virginia, I’d never known anybody that had even the loosest association with the entertainment business and thought it was just an impossible dream. And then, in my first year at George Mason University, you had to take an elective in the arts that was not your major, and my major was fine arts. And so I took an acting class. … It was not an emotional, ooey-gooey class — I took plenty of those later — but this was a hardcore, do-your-homework, script-analysis class using practical aesthetics that was developed out of the Atlantic Theater. And I just was in love with the fact that if you work really hard and study, you can incrementally get closer and closer to being good at this and hopefully one day great at this. …
And then I started going to D.C. theater, which I think is some of the world’s best theater … and [I] was just like: Immediately, I have to do this for my life. I don’t know how many day jobs I’m going to have to have. It was not about being famous. I knew that I had to be an actor and I’d support myself, however I had to.
Lauren Krenzel and Nico Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Instagram/@eltonjohn
The pop icon, Elton John, has revealed the astonishing news about a forthcoming graphic novel called ‘The Lost Lands,’ in which he has provided the foreword that is originally meant as the first chapter of the Ultimate OZ Universe. This animation ushers in the extinction of L. Frank Baum’s original Oz tales, which John retells were his sources of inspiration during lonely childhood days in Pinner, England. However, the good news was soon getting mixed with thousands of comments that blamed the artwork connected with it for being done by a machine, thus triggering a heated debate about the meaning of art in the digital age.
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In his announcement, Elton John shared his personal tie to the Land of Oz. He described himself as a “very lonely” boy when he discovered Baum’s stories and the stories “multiplied” his own imagination and gave him “a wonderful life of storytelling, imagination, and creativity.” He expressed his wish that the public would be as fond of “The Lost Lands” as he is, presenting it as a great inheritance of Baum’s legacy declaring “the triumph of good.”
The comments were anything but pleasing. The very next hour the comments section had turned into a battlefield discussing whether the paintings had been created by human hands or AI. The detractors were pointing out anatomical errors that they were confident had come from AI and thus gave away its production. One person said, “Just take a look at the hands with your own eyes in the second image. One of them has 7 fingers and some of them have none.” Another person remarked, “In the second slide notice how short the guy’s arm is, he’s at the bottom in the middle. It’s AI.”
A few of the netizens were sorry for the situation, recognized John’s talent and help but were aware of the fact that he might be backing AI art. One user expressed, “It’s unfortunate that my favorite artist resorts to technology that is taking away jobs from other artists,” and added a crying emoji. Another user commented, “If you can’t afford AI, hire artists.” Also, some users shared their worries about the planet and one of them referred to it as “the water-wasting resource-burning climate-changing planet-warming AI slop.”
The discussion was getting hotter and at the same time, the defenders of the artwork were coming forward. A lot of comments were mentioning that the artist Mike Deodato was credited in the project. “The artist is literally mentioned in the post this isn’t AI!” a user insisted. Another said, “Those who see this as AI-generated are presumably the ones without brains THE ARTIST IS LITERALLY TAGGED IN THE POST and if you had more than two brain cells you would recognize that this is the work of a very talented artist.”
The skeptics responding to the defense right away argued that the use of AI by established artists raises an even bigger ethical question. “It’s not right when non-artists make ‘art’ with AI, but it’s even worse when established artists are doing that in their works,” one person said. Another remarked, “A name attached to it doesn’t change that. Just take a look at the hands in the second photo.”
The whole issue was ringing a bell of a very serious ethical question regarding disclosure and consumer rights. One enlightened user wondered, “If it is the case, is that at least being disclosed to buyers? People should know if what they are purchasing was made by AI or not, regardless of their opinion. The consumers should be able to make informed choices.” This point illustrated that the AI art debate is actually about the purity of art versus the legitimacy of the market.
Amidst the arguments, some supporters were rejoicing the project. The official Ultimate OZ Universe account posted, “It’s incredible and an honor to have Elton John be a part of our Ultimate OZ Universe graphic novel.” Another admirer commented, “I adored this book SO much, what a fantastic new take on Oz, which has always been my personal and preferred mythology.” John himself humorously questioned if anyone noticed “familiar faces in the artwork,” tagging his husband, David Furnish. This project also brings to mind his most ornate album cover ever.
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The magnitude of the reaction has highlighted the societal concerns about the impact of AI on the creative fields. What started as a sincere homage of Elton John to a character that inspired him during his childhood turned into an unintended battleground in the discussion about technology, art, and authenticity that is still going on. As the AI devices become more skilled and easier to access, the matter of distinguishing between human creativity and machine production becomes more complex. The passionate responses from both sides show that the separation is of utmost importance to many, whether they are pointing out the mistakes in a tin man’s hands or debating the very existence of art as we know it. This situation is reminiscent of Big Boi’s behind-the-scenes moment with Elton John and Janelle Monae, showing how artists collaborate across genres. The discussion also brings to mind Ozzy Osbourne’s final memoir and its success. Fans of Elton John’s retro Captain Fantastic ad will appreciate this new creative direction. Finally, Elton John’s reflections on his early career with Bernie Taupin show his long-standing commitment to artistic collaboration.
Andrew Lincoln in Love Actually.
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‘Tis the season you’ll find plenty of good holiday movies – films that can be counted upon to deliver warmth and cheer. And bad holiday movies? They can be fun in their own way. So we’re debating: what’s the worst Christmas movie of all time? We’ll talk about Love Actually, Jingle All The Way, I Believe In Santa, and Scrooge & Marley.
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