BY: ROSEMARY ELOISE REED MILLER
BOOK REVIEW: PAUL D. MILLER/ DJ SPOOKY
ver the last several years, Rosemary Eloise Reed Miller has done a tremendous amount of research and investigations into the role of African American women designers and has developed an extensive roster of profiles and archival photography to compliment her wonderful collection of essays and portraits of African American life through the lens of women. That’s what her book Threads of Time is about. Rosemary Eloise Reed Miller is my Mom. It’s not every day that you get to write a review of your mother’s first book, but hey... this is Origin Magazine, and we do things a bit differently. As a student in the 1970s, Rosemary traveled to various spots in the Caribbean as the Art Critic for the The Kingston Daily Gleaner, the Caribbean equivalent of The New York Times. It was during that time that she came to the realization that images of Black beauty simply were not reflected in mainstream American culture. Along with the likes of Melvin Van Peebles, Shirley Chisholm, and Angela Davis, Rosemary felt an implacable need to address this imbalance. In the course of her research, she discovered a wide range of primary source documents: from vintage “distinguished” ladies’ journals to clippings from historically black newspapers, to personal statements and other archival documents. This was the start of what would become her opus: Threads of Time. So many images of negativity surround African American culture—the image of an enslaved person, the eviscerated remains of a lynched victim, etc.—that these emblems of degradation seem to dominate the visual history of the AfricanAmerican experience. When there has been so much pain and hardship, it makes one wonder how to portray anything lyrical about the nature of Black beauty in design and contemporary fashion. That’s where Threads of Time is an antidote. It uses history to show that another world is possible. The full title is The Threads of Time, The Fabric of History: Profiles of African American Dressmakers and Designers from 1860 to the Present. It’s a book that has been needed for some time. It fills the gap that exists in the general public’s mind about what African American designers and dressmakers did before l960. Most people think that African American designers such as Patrick Kelly, Stephen Burrows and Willi Smith sprang up totally out of thin air in the l960’s and the 1970’s. Rosemary disagrees. She researched and highlighted the forgotten work of Elizabeth Keckley, who designed for Mary Todd Lincoln, and Ann Lowe, who designed the wedding dress for Jacqueline Kennedy. Rosemary also discovered the story of Zelda Wynn, who designed for Marian Anderson, Josephine Baker, Gladys Knight, Dorothy Dandridge, and the singer Joyce Bryant.
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Rosemary even discovered that Wynn designed the first Playboy costume! Now that’s research! Threads of Time covers a world many never knew existed. If you look in the rearview mirror at twentieth-century African American culture, historical subjects such as Frederic Douglas, Billie Holiday, and Josephine Baker embody the possibilities of the past; Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali reflect a world of possibility that takes us from the Civil Rights era to our current struggles between Tea Party fanatics and President Obama; other figures like Will Smith, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and Michelle Obama bridge the gap between eras, celebrating the beginnings of a new era of African American culture. You won’t find any of these figures in Threads of Time. Featuring the works of more than 38 major African designers in over two hundred pages, Threads of Time—like Deborah Willis’s Reflections in Black, and Posing Beauty, or Michael Cunningham’s Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats— celebrates the lives of under-appreciated female designers and captures the ebb and flow of our post-everything twenty-first-century culture. It’s a manifesto exploring some of our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be “beautiful.” Throughout the late 1960’s, Rosemary’s store at Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. was an important hub for the burgeoning local fashion scene and the international community that thrived in what George Clinton lovingly called “Chocolate City.” That essence of a local yet global community gets distilled into Rosemary’s work at every level. You can almost imagine that the book is a portrait of some of the dinner parties she used to throw. Threads of Time leads readers through a careful yet broad survey of beauty over the last couple of centuries. With every profile, on every page, Miller tracks changing social, political and aesthetic contexts, but she never allows them to overwhelm the subject at hand, which is simply a celebration of some of the forgotten women who made American fashion and design what it is today. I just wanted to say, I’m very happy to be around to review it.