Why did you decide to start a fashion brand?

So, I have been in the industry for about 18 years designing and leading other brands and in a design director role, which basically means the creative director role for a fashion company. In my role that means that I had to lead the design team, come up with the number of styles, come up with the direction of the collection, and be able to present that to the company and our sales team and often time buyers; so part of my job was always to relay the message of the brand. I loved designing and I loved creating and also helping people develop their brand stories and I got really good at it. I wanted to be able to tell my own brand story and was always inspired to make a brand that was a little different from the type of brands that I was designing for, so that is pretty much the “why”, I wanted to be able to tell a different brand story and my own story.

 

 Why did you decide to make your brand sustainable and was it a challenge at first?

So I had tried to start up a couple of times before Oak & Acorn became Oak & Acorn, and I noticed in the industry that it was challenging to convince just the companies that I was working for to switch to sustainable fabrics, to switch to sustainable practices, it was a challenge because they often felt like firstly, it was more expensive to do, secondly, they felt like the customer didn’t understand [sustainability]. And when you understand very big corporations, they have whole systems in place and to make that shift it requires the entire company to shift, and so they weren’t willing to do that. Often, being in the role I was afforded me the opportunity to be directly on the ground at the factory level and to communicate directly with the mills, these are the people that actually make the fabrics and the factory workers and I got to see a lot of stuff. I saw the advances that were happening in fabrications that weren’t always selected by the companies that I was working for and so I always had an interest  in these alternate fabrics  that were often either organic cotton,or some other type of derivative whether it was recycled cotton, or hemp, or bamboo, whatever the fabric that seemed to be more circular in usage. It was a challenge at first, for me I was concerned: does the market understand this? Do they get it? But then I felt like it was bigger for me to really find my intuition. The product, I think that’s very important, but I had to ask myself, what does sustainability look like? And so for sustainability it meant not just the product level but how am I showing up in my community as a person that is talking about sustainability? Am I impacting my community in making this brand? I wanted to make a brand that represents the community that’s supposed to be born out of Harlem. How am I impacting my community? What can I do to make an impact in a big way, so it was important for me to really show up fully and align myself with an organization that was important to me. The organization that I have aligned myself with is called We Got Us Now which I’m an active part of, it’s an organization for children and young adults that have been impacted by parental incarceration, and apparently over 10 million children in the United States alone have had this life experience, including myself. And so I felt like that was really important for me to connect everything I was going to do through this brand to the organization, so a portion of the profits of my signature collection will go back to help build out the organization’s leaders and be used towards policy initiatives and stuff. So sustainability, what does that look like for me if I am going to look at it in a 360 approach, I feel like the more that we know and learn about where things come from or originated, that’s really important. And so to me, education is a big part of sustainability. For my brand it was about telling the origin story of indigo and denim, so I talk about how denim started on the plantations in the American south. Before it was called denim or jeans or anything else, it was called negro-cloth and it was relegated to the enslaved people. These were the first clothing that the people in the American south that were on the plantations were relegated to wear. That had been information that I had never known about, and so I felt like it was important, especially as a heritage denim brand, to share this. And that was so much a part of what sustainability looked like to me and it was a little challenging because to be very introspective and look at how I wanted to represent the brand and can I get support in this, so that’s how I had to show up as a sustainable designer.

 

Were you interested in sustainable fashion before your brand or is it something you came across after you started designing clothes?

Even when I was younger than you, I had always been interested in sustainable fashion. Sustainability meant to me at that point was taking old clothes and being able to repurpose them, going to vintage stores. What I would do when I was about 15 or 16 years old was I would go to these stores like army navy surplus stores that had vintage denim and like vintage military or whatever and I would buy it. Some stuff I would leave alone and wear or some stuff I would totally deconstruct and reconstruct. So sustainable fashion had kinda been how I started in the industry, I was doing that all the time, I was always remixing my clothes and was kinda like the kid that everyone was like “oh, she’s very unique but she’s kinda weird, what is she doing now?” so, I definitely stood out a lot, it wasn’t always positive responses from my peers but I felt like I was being honest about where I was as an artist. My dad saw from when I was a kid and was sketching in my little notebook with colored pencils, he bought me my first magazine subscription which was like Vogue and W Magazine. I had always been doing that, but I didn’t pursue it in college. I actually went on to be a pre-med major in cell biology, so I thought I was going to become a doctor, that was the plan. I actually worked for doctors for a really long time, from ages 16 to maybe like 25, it was about 8 years I worked for doctors and had really succeeded; I had all types of certifications, really was thinking about becoming a doctor. But I just kept bumping into creatives, and had always been more creative. It was back in ‘97, the music group TLC, one of the biggest girl groups in the ‘90s or 2000s, they were very good friends with my sister. My sister had invited me to a birthday party for the lead singer, T-Boz, and I had not known what I wanted to wear and I was like “oh my god what am I going to wear,” we had gone shopping, I didn’t find anything I really liked in the store. I wanted to have a really cute top that really stood out. My sister had this old leather bag and I was like “what are you doing with that bag, can I take that bag, can I use it?” and she was like “yea, take it I was going to throw it out!” So I took the leather bag and I made a leather top and that top, this is basically how I started my career, that top was noticed by T-Boz of TLC and she flipped out. She was like “oh my god I love this top,” and my sister was like “you know, she made it” and I was just like “oh, no” because I wasn’t sure if I could ever recreate it again. But pretty much, I started making really cool items for her, cool tops and stuff and I moved on to do stuff for other celebrity stylists with directly making custom, one-of-a-kind pieces for artists and entertainers: Ludacris and on. I was doing a lot of music videos, MTV and VT, I was doing a lot of stuff, I was in a bunch of magazines, not me personally but my work was in all these magazines. So, to answer your question, that’s how I started repurposing and remixing things. They would give me, I remember being on set and they would give me big mens t-shirts, and they would say “we have a budget for you, but we don’t really have one to clothe all the girls can you do something for us?” So I would take the mens tees, and I would remix them and cut them up, restitch them, and create these one of a kind tee shirts for every single girl on set. Each shirt would have a completely different look, so I would be on set with my sewing machine and just make a shirt for every girl; they would all have a very different look, they all worked together though because they all had a similar attitude and whatever. I started as a sustainable designer, it wasn’t until I started my career of working in fashion that it became this fast fashion vehicle where we are just kinda throwing away, and I never felt really comfortable with it. I feel like so much of my time was getting back to being the designer I was born into, the designer that would look into old vintage stuff and figure out ways I could reuse and repurpose it or even take inspiration from it, the functionality of it, the fabrications that I take from it, and can use now. And today, I design, I’m always looking at inspiration, and constantly finding pieces, my whole house has turned into an archive. So sustainability has always been how I have designed.

 

I wasn’t aware of the history of denim, and I know that the history is what inspired your 2021 seasonless collection, do you have any other things that inspire you while designing?

There’s a lot of things that inspire me. I’m inspired by the innovation that is happening in the fashion space, but I am inspired a lot by the fabrics: they inform how I will use them and how I will design into them. Denim has always been my canvas. Also socially what is happening in the world, it feels like when I’m designing I am having a conversation. There are certain things I maybe can’t actually say, so I really look at designing as a way of an art form and a way to express what I feel is important and needs to be heard. Obviously the history of fashion is super inspirational to me, especially unearthing the fashion stories that we don’t get to hear and the history of this country. I feel like in this country we have so much history that we have not been privy to and I want to continue to unearth and share it and express it and find ways to make it functional through my clothing. So that’s what I have done so far, and I would like to continue to do that. Sometimes inspiration is just seeing someone who is super creative, I know a lot of artists that go to museums and they look at other people’s art. I try not to do that, I try not to look at other people’s stuff. I really try to go inside myself and nature; nature informs me a lot. I try to just utilize what I already have because I have a lot of things that have already inspired me and that’s why they are in my environment. So I just try to grab from what is already around me and inside me as a source of inspiration.

 

What kind of choices do you consider when sourcing your denim?

 

I always look at the content of the fabric first. I want to know what it is, where it comes from, where it’s made. I work with a really big mill and they make all their stuff which is nice. Sometimes what happens with designers is they’re working at the third level, they aren’t working directly with mill or they have someone that’s working with the mill that’s giving them many different types of fabrics. I’m fortunate enough to have this great relationship with the mill where I get to get first hand information around the fabrication I’m using. They also make a lot of my clothes so that’s good. A lot of time mills are just mills that do fabric making, they don’t often manufacture and make the clothing for you, but I have that. I like to first and foremost look at where my fabric is coming from and what the content is and can it be reused. Is it circular, is it regenerative. Those are really important.

 

If you could give any advice to people on creating a sustainable wardrobe, what would it be?

Go into your mom or dad’s closet, there’s a lot of goodies in there that they are just like “oh really you like that? I was just going to throw that out!” There’s a lot of goodies in there, there’s stuff that can be mixed and matched. The other thing I say is that if you do buy fast fashion, because a lot of sustainable brands are falling under the luxury category because of the special hand details that go in it, what you can do is if you are going to buy H&M, Zara, or any of those, when you wash your clothing that care can be very sustainable. Don’t put your stuff in the dryer, really look at your tags on how to wash it. Maybe wash it in cold so the temperature doesn’t shrink your fabric, watch the detergents you’re using when caring for it. Hang dry, the best thing to do is hang dry. You can make your fabrics last so much longer with just the care of your goods. You don’t have to spend a lot of money, you can just get a really cool t-shirt, or a cool pair of jeans, cool pants or dress or whatever it is, but how you care for it will actually extend the life of the product.