, which she uses to educate people about the lives of enslaved people . In 2017, she staged a work of performance art in which she walked around Manhattan in historical dress, holding a sign that read “”; and last summer, she set up a roving booth called the Let’s Talk About Slavery table. Her everyday outfits combine her love of 19th-century silhouettes with fabrics common in contemporary Black culture, such as denim and Lycra. “I don’t see this as clothing of the past,” she says.
In her work as a historical interpreter, juxtaposing anachronistic silhouettes with familiar fabrics also helps McKnight to “jolt people out of the fantasy world a lot of historical sites are trying to build.” She’s found that some plantations use the splendor of the house and landscape to gloss over what life was like for Black people there. “When you walk in, you’re in a beautiful entry hall,” she says.
, which included not only wasp-waisted dresses and delicate hats, but also qipaos and Chinese brocade jackets from the 1920s.Look, I’m Chinese, and what are you gonna do about it? Guo says their everyday looks go largely unnoticed: “We blend into the city.” Still, there’s a transportative element to what they do. “With vintage clothing, especially my qipaos, I can’t just throw it on and forget that I am wearing it as I go about my day,” Du says. “I constantly feel it on my body, I’m always adjusting it and finessing it. I feel the tension of the tightly fitted stiff high collar. I need to undo the collar when I get into a car or simply to sit down to eat.
Bretaña’s Instagram is dotted with vintage, but not of the clearly-from-Depop variety. She wears a blue-and-yellow romper with mid-thigh-length shorts on a Mediterranean yacht; a purple opera coat and fascinator to the Easter Day parade; a crimson 1940s dress and black gloves from 1948 on a train. She finds that people interact with her outfits differently depending on the era.