Some Starfires I’ve Drawn A Bit Over Time I Miss Her (i Refuse To Read Titans 2023)

Ono no Komachi, The Ink Dark Moon; from 'Sent to a man who seemed to have changed his mind', tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani

ELIE SAAB Couture Spring/Summer 2025 if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

Lloyd Yearwood, Photograph of a drag club in Harlem, 1960s

“I remember an incident from my own childhood, when a very close friend of mine and I, we were walking down the street. We were discussing whether God existed. And she said he did not. And I said he did. But then she said she had proof. She said, ‘I had been praying for two years for blue eyes, and he never gave me any.’ So, I just remember turning around and looking at her. She was very, very Black. And she was very, very, very, very beautiful. How painful. Can you imagine that kind of pain? About that, about color? So, I wanted to say you know, this kind of racism hurts. This is not lynchings, and murders, and drownings. This is interior pain. So deep. For an 11 year-old girl to believe that if she only had some characteristic of the white world, she would be okay. [Black girls] surrendered completely to the master narrative. I mean the whole notion of what is ugliness, what is worthlessness. She got it from her family, she got it from school, she got it from the movies — she got it everywhere; it’s white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction, history, it has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking: “This is beautiful. This is lovely, and you’re not it.”

Toni Morrison on what inspired her to write her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

RYAN BEATTY Ribbons

RYAN BEATTY Bruises Off The Peach (Live Performance)

Young, Gifted, & Black: HAPPY BLACK HISTORY MONTH!

BIBIAN BLUE 'Faylinn Blue' Dress if you want to support this blog consider donating to:ko-fi.com/fashionrunways