From ballroom voguers in major runway shows to Janelle Monáe and Billy Porter featured in high-profile magazine spreads, the fashion industry is apt to tune into the power of Black queer culture — yet the stories of Black LGBTQ+ designers themselves too often go untold and underrepresented.
Black queer designers have long been among the fashion industry’s most forward-thinking and exciting creatives, despite facing oppression, racism, lack of financial resources, erasure, and more. These designers often lead fashion into new creative territory, and as the industry continues to push for more inclusivity and equality, it’s doubly important to give them the recognition they’ve lacked for far too long. Below, you’ll find 10 designers who have made a major impact in fashion, and whose creative excellence is well worth your time and attention.
Shayne Oliver
In 2006, after dropping out of both NYU and the Fashion Institute of Technology, Shayne Oliver co-founded Hood by Air alongside fellow designer Raul Lopez. Drawing inspiration from New York City’s nightlife and ballroom culture — Oliver is a former voguer and resident DJ for the party GHE20G0TH1K, whose universe of club kids both served as collaborators and muses for the brand — Hood By Air’s genderless, streetwear-inspired designs and rollicking shows shocked the era’s somewhat sedate fashion industry. The rest is history: the brand went on to practically invent the luxury streetwear category, inspiring brands and designers like Virgil Abloh’s Off-White and Demna Gvasalia’s Vetements, and became one of the biggest success stories seen in fashion over the past two decades. After winning the CFDA’s Swarovski Award for Menswear and a special award for the LVMH Prize in 2014, Oliver put the label on hiatus in 2017 — but announced just last week that he will soon relaunch it with two original collaborators.
Patrick Kelly
Patrick Kelly was born in Mississippi in 1954, and escaped his upbringing in a small town in the Jim Crow South for New York City when he was 18. There, he was allegedly denied a promised scholarship to Parsons once the school discovered he wasn’t Irish, then dropped out after one semester. To survive, he sold vintage Louis Vuitton luggage and his own designs — then, after griping about a lack of opportunity in the city to his friend and supermodel Pat Cleveland, she anonymously bought him a one-way ticket to Paris, and his life changed forever.
Kelly went on to become one of the few Black fashion designers to take Paris by storm. With whimsical designs that referenced pop culture and Black folklore, his work unapologetically grappled with race and its role in the fashion industry long before such conversations were commonplace. He was shown alongside the likes of established fashion houses like Sonia Rykiel and Yves Saint Laurent, and his collections bewitched celebrities like Iman, Grace Jones, Bette Davis and Madonna.
The first American to join the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter (the governing body of the prestigious French ready-to-wear industry), Kelly passed away in 1990 from AIDS. His legacy has lived on in retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where his sketches and drawings are housed.
Dorian Corey
Dorian Corey was a popular dressmaker and designer long before her iconic appearance in Paris Is Burning. Born and raised on a farm in Buffalo, New York, Corey worked as a department store window dresser and began performing in drag before moving to New York to study art at Parsons in the 50s. By the 60s, she had begun transitioning, and toured the country as a snake dancer in a drag cabaret act called the Pearl Box Revue.
Corey’s flair for performance and fashion made her a fixture in the Harlem ball scene, and she was the founder of her own house, House of Corey, as well as a house mother to Angie Xtravaganza, another performer made famous by Paris Is Burning. She ran her own clothing line, Corey Design, and often modeled her garments in performances. After her death in 1993 from AIDS-related complications, her lavish wardrobe was bestowed to a confidant, who tried to sell it — and then discovered the mummified body of a man named Robert Worley in a garment bag in Corey’s apartment. Detectives determined that the body, which showed evidence of a gunshot wound to the head, must have been dead for over 20 years; friends of Corey’s speculated that Worley was Dorian’s lover. The story served as inspiration for a murder mystery musical, Dorian’s Closet, and influenced an episode in Season Two of FX’s Pose.
Christopher John Rogers
Christopher John Rogers may have only made his New York Fashion Week debut in 2018, but his rise in the short time since has been nothing short of stratospheric. With his vividly colorful, fanciful approach to eveningwear, the young designer draws from a wide array of inspirations — the women of his church growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; French Pierrot clowns from vintage cinema; even trash bags — to create stunning designs that shock and delight on the runway. At 26, Rogers is young, but he’s already been awarded the CFDA’s Fashion Fund Award and has dressed Lizzo, Lil Nas X, Rihanna and Michelle Obama in his feminine and voluminous looks, proving his nascent career has much higher heights to climb.
