Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker

ABSTRACT

This article historicises Josephine Baker’s use of fashion in terms of contemporary black stage performers, particularly Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s evolving black feminist politics. It examines Beyoncé’s references to Baker as an inspiration for her own black feminist art and argues that they offer an opportunity to re-examine Baker’s legacy in our own contemporary moment. Using Beyoncé’s arguments about Baker as a starting point, the article examines Baker’s fashions and costumes and argues that she used them to manipulate her relationship to the models of white supremacy that attempted to structure her identity and relationship to the public sphere. Using contemporary black feminist criticisms of respectability politics, it argues that Baker’s fashions produced a politics of disrespectability, where clothing and body worked together to carve out space for black feminist experimentation. By constantly changing the terms through which her audiences and the public read her, Baker carved out a subjective space where she could become in relation to her clothes without restraining herself to the identity categories normatively allotted to black women.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion
• Josephine Baker
• Beyoncé
• black feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jennifer Sweeney-Risko received a PhD in English Literature from Binghamton University in 2016. Her research interests include fashion, material culture, modernism, and writing pedagogy. She has been published in literary journals including symploke, Present Tense, and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. She currently teaches in the Division of Literature at Bard Early College, Cleveland, where she also directs the Writing Center.

Notes

1 In Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image, Jules-Rosette argues that even though Baker eventually achieved a modicum of control over her image, her initial performances in Paris relied on and perpetuated the types of racial stereotyping the French had begun to associate with French femininity. She played up the ‘sexual savage’ stereotype to gain popularity in the French theatre scene (129). hooks (2014), in Black Looks: Race and Representation, explains that this type of stereotype harkens back to Sarah Baartman, the African ‘hottentot venus’ put on display in France as an oddity because of her large buttocks (123).

2 Even within the academic black feminist community, Beyoncé’s articulation of her style of feminism has set off some rather controversial debates. bell hooks for example, described her as a ‘terrorist’ and an ‘anti-feminist’ at a talk at the New School (quoted in Trier-Bieniek 2016, 1). hooks’s declaration of Beyoncé’s negative role in the fight for black feminist equality, in turn, caused other black feminists such as Hobson (2016) to defend Beyoncé, arguing that academic black feminists must evolve to embrace the more publicly minded articulations of the movement that might not be couched in academic language or packaged in respectable attire or actions (21). In either case, this debate signals to Beyoncé’s importance to the future of black feminism. Her voice and persona matters to the movement, even if, in the case of bell hooks, it might be considered detrimental.

3 For more information on Destiny’s Child and black feminism, see Weidhase (2015).

4 Beyoncé uses this line to most probably respond to the media’s relentless criticism of her daughter’s natural hair. As Eggert (2016) argues, the internet had teased the girl for her matted, unruly hair for years, even creating a change.org petition to encourage Beyoncé and Jay Z to comb it.

5 Rose (1989) explains that Baker’s recollection of the St. Louis race riots of 1917 propelled her to Europe – not only did she fear racial violence but choosing to leave gave her a feeling of control over her surroundings (15).

6 Jordan (1995) describes this time lag as a ‘turning away from modernity’ in order to shield oneself from the horrors it created (282). For Jordan, early twentieth century primitivism described Africa and its peoples as less evolved than the West because the West needed a space to hide in that did not get devastated by modern capitalism or the brutal warfare that defined World War I.

7 In a 2016 exhibition entitled ‘Flapper Style: 1920s Fashion’, The Kent State Fashion Museum argued that change social norms, encapsulated by a growing population of women who engaged in sports activities and more hands-on jobs ‘required simplified and streamlined fashions, whether dancing the night away or spending the day on the links. Generally, the fashion of the decade was a tubular silhouette enhanced with pleats, panels, and fringe’.

8 For more information on the design aspects of the French colonial expositions, see Finamore (2015).

9 In the early parts of the twentieth century, American fashion retailers still preferred to sell French designs because consumers considered them the height of fashionable attire. For more information about the relationship between French and American fashion, see Evans (2013).

10 For more information about Poiret’s orientalist fashions, see Pham (2013).

11 Kraut (2007) argues that, although Baker often worked with some of the best choreographers available to her, she would ‘forget her lines’ and come up with improvised, emotionally charged moves right on the spot.

12 Biographies, such as Jules-Rosette’s, debate whether or not Reagan introduced Baker to Poiret at all (2007, 142). There is some evidence that Paul Colins first took her to see the designer but much of that evidence is made up from quotes from Colins, who may have wanted to claim responsibility for their relationship.

13 For more information about Poiret’s work with up and coming designers, see Koda and Bolton (2007).