good afternoon to THEE bronze_bombSHEL 💫 WhatIsFashionNow
Growing up, Shelby remembers being the kid that devoured fashion magazines and put flamboyant outfits together, but also having a real love for history, specifically Black history. So, she decided to pursue both.
With an already-established love for fashion, Shelby began her undergraduate journey at North Carolina A&T State University, the largest HBCU in the nation, majoring in fashion merchandising but then switching to studying race, class, and culture, allowing herself to fulfill her desires within the history discipline. To get her fashion fix, she took time off to complete various magazine internships, including at. “I intended to become a fashion journalist, but that’s when print publications were a little shaky and starting to close. So I thought, Maybe marketing. That looks a little bit more stable. It’s a little more corporate over there and the coin looks a little different!” she remembers.. Being in an environment with an ongoing exposure to high fashion aided her in flexing her fashion-history muscles, so much so that she often left her coworkers in shock. She attended the firstForces of Fashion conference, in 2017, where she saw John Galliano wearing his famous white atelier coat. “Anyone who follows my content knows that I’m obsessed with the white atelier code in the vein of Christian Dior,” she gushes. “Because, of course he worked at the house, but I was freaking out because he was in that white affiliate coat and I felt like it was a nod to his time at Dior and paying respects to that house. I was freaking out and my coworkers really didn’t understand. That kind of put the light bulb in my head, like, maybe this is a real [gift] because other people don’t really know this.” And so the spark to take her vast knowledge public began., Twitter became the perfect platform as her marketing eye recognized that blogs were on the way out and no one was looking to long-form content like they were in the past. “I know marketing and I know social, so I’m well-versed in the demand for ‘snack-able’ content,” she says. “It needs to be able to capture their attention span very quickly, and social is a great platform for that. It’s a few characters, and if people want to dive deeper, they can open the thread and read it, but if they want to just get this snack-able gist of it, then they have that option too.” Now, in addition to crafting detailed Twitter threads breaking down little-known fashion moments throughout history, Shelby is completing her master’s degree in costume studies at New York University. Her time in grad school has helped sharpen her research skills and provided her with databases to access papers and past editions of certain publications. “I also really want to highlight using colloquialism and casual language. I think a goal of mine as a historian is to make more despairing, academic information more accessible — and if it is [currently] accessible, the format isn’t entertaining or engaging.” Throughout her feed, she makes a point to speak in colloquialisms and use AAVE , challenging the idea that a certain way of speaking can only be used in certain spaces that don’t typically include academia. Shelby speaks candidly about her experience as the only Black student in her class, where so much of what she is studying is still being taught by white professors, through a white lens, which is something she strives to combat in her own work. “Art is still viewed as very European and Western, so that’s part of the reason why I’m trying to get this degree. If you want to intern as a curator, most of those programs require you to be in some kind of graduate program. I use it as more of a key to unlock certain opportunities because that is where the change and the impact lie. As far as you know, who is dictating what art gets put into a gallery? Who dictates why that has value?”She added, “There’s been a collective up-skilling amongst Black people to reposition how we look at Black art and how we approach Black publications. Should we be striving to get our work ininstead? We’re even changing the way we look at awards shows. We’re trying to strip away the lens of whiteness to decide what we value and why.” An occurring theme that weaves itself throughout Shelby’s Twitter threads is the idea of giving Black creatives and tastemakers their flowers, which she collectively attributes to the influence of Black Twitter. According to her, it was Black Twitter that helped Dapper Dan get his just due at Gucci. “A lot of this isn’t just one effort; it’s a community effort to have more of these conversations on platforms where people can share them,” she says. At the moment, Shelby continues to create her own lane within the work that she does online, but her aspirations extend much farther than that. Her love of fashion comes from costuming in television and film, so she’s working towards research opportunities alongside a costume designer. She envisions this would lead to working as a costume designer on her own projects and building a team around that. As far as fashion’s future, it’s hard to qualify exactly what the industry will look like once we are released from the restrictions of COVID-19, but Shelby has hope. “I imagine there’s going to be a pivot in how fashion functions at its core. We’re seeing it on the runway: Fashion shows aren’t ending, but they’re having to adjust to the climate. I think across the board, the creative aspects are going to get more love. Hopefully, we’ll see a shift back to prioritizing the art, the creative, and the voice.”
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