Ms. Badu is taking her talents to fashion week.
According to Paper Magazine, Erykah Badu is teaming up with designer Kerby Jean-Raymond to style the AW16 Pyer Moss show.
The show will be a continuation of last season’s ode to the Black Lives Matter movement and will explore the Black experience in contemporary America.
“[Kerby and I] were a match made in fashion heaven. We share an eye for truth through art. Though risky at times, he stands in his truth. And the strength of that truth lies in the belief of his vision. I’m inspired by the bold statements he makes in this, sometimes, fickle industry”
Last season, Jean-Raymond took race relations in America head on with a presentation that featured a short film with footage from police killings of Eric Garner and Walter Scott, with appearances from Nicole Bell (widow of Sean Bell) and Wanda Johnson (the mother of Oscar Grant).
This season, the brand plans to tackle the issue once again. “The presentation is a meditation on the tension and mental anguish that exists when conflicting demands are placed on an individual, thereby resulting in confusion in thinking and communication,” reads a statement from the brand. “In the 1950s, anthropologist George Bateson coined the term ‘Double Bind’; which he found to be a common occurrence in the childhoods of adults patients diagnosed as schizophrenic.
The black experience in America is the ultimate double bind; a place where natural born citizens live an immigrant experience in the only land they’ve known as home. A place where black culture is praised, commodified, and appropriated, while black people are criticized, vilified, and hunted for sport. A certain functional schizophrenia has to exist to cope with the dissonance of having a black man in the White House while a black body lies for four hours in the streets of Ferguson.”
We’re looking forward to how these two creative minds bring the collection to life.