In 1962, at the Purple Manor, a night club in Harlem, a group of women gathered to appear in an event called “Naturally ’62: The Original African Coiffure and Fashion Extravaganza Designed to Restore Our Racial Pride and Standards.” The models, who were Black, wore their hair unstraightened, with full, natural volume, and many accessorized with African-influenced jewelry such as large hoop earrings and chunky bracelets. American fashion was not accustomed to any of it.
One of the organizers of “Naturally ’62” was the photographer Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2023). Brathwaite is sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Black is beautiful” (he didn’t, but he helped popularize it), and he was instrumental in realizing that making fashion more reflective of Black culture was as integral to racial equity as was more explicit social activism. “We said, ‘We’ve got to do something to make the women feel proud of their hair, proud of their blackness,’ ” he told Aperture magazine, in 2017. “Naturally ’62” had a titanic impact on fashion and identity.
Brathwaite and one of his brothers, Elombe Brath, established a group of models called Grandassa, from the term “Grandassaland,” which the Black nationalist Carlos Cooks had used to refer to Africa. Brathwaite’s images of the models became some of the most iconic of the Black Is Beautiful movement.
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