Culture Melding
1.
In real life you can’t a job as an executive unless you have the educational background and the opportunity. Now the fact that you are not an executive is merely because of the social standing of life. Black people have a hard time getting anywhere and those that do are usually straight.
In a ballroom, you can be anything you want. You’re not really an executive, but you’re looking like an executive and therefore you are showing the straight world that I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity, I could be one because I can look like one. And that is like a fulfillment. Your peers, your friends are telling you, ‘Oh, you’d make a wonderful executive.’
Black drag queen character in Paris is Burning which I blogged about earlier here. (1990)
2.
AT the after-party for his first runway show here on Saturday night, Kanye West, even before the reviews came out, made an obscenity-laced speech in which he complained about people treating his aspiration to be a serious fashion designer as a joke, and said he had taken out loans to hire the best models, designers and location.
“I gave you everything that I had,” he said, one of his few printable remarks.
Carine Roitfeld, the former French Vogue editor, said that for a first show it was not all that bad. “I’m sure he knows what he did wrong and what he did right,” she said. “He tried hard, and he wants to learn.”
Anna Wintour said, “Ask someone else.”
Here, the Olsen twins were seated in the same row as Lindsay Lohan, and that was disturbing. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, through their Elizabeth and James and Row collections, have established themselves as credible designers without making spectacles of themselves.
- NYTimes (2011)
3.
His show proved that undiluted black culture, expressed unapologetically, will become mainstream.
NPR piece on Don Cornelius, founder of Soultrain (2012)
