Where do we go from here?” activist Elaine Brown asked the crowd gathered around the runway. She was quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but Brown, the one of the female leaders of the Black Panthers, also seemed to be reflecting on the history being made at that moment. Kerby Jean-Raymond, the founder and creator of Pyer Moss, became the first black designer to officially show on the couture schedule.
At a Saturday presentation delayed two days by Hurricane Elsa, Jean-Raymond debuted 25 looks that, breaking from the traditional couture experience, highlighted inventions by Black people. “The concept is layered, there’s no central theme,” Jean-Raymond said in an interview after the show. “The general concept is that these are inventions by Black people and I wanted to re-introduce them to Black people and reverse any erasure that may exist.”
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