When Aurora James was a child, she and her mother would make “seed bombs” out of wildflower seeds, clay and dirt. If they drove past an abandoned lot or grassy industrial area, they would yell “seed bomb” and throw one of their creations into the field, knowing that “a couple of weeks later, there would be a whole patch of really beautiful wildflowers,” the Brother Vellies designer and Fifteen Percent Pledge founder said in an interview. “My mom would always talk to me about making sure that you view anything that seems barren or forgotten as an opportunity for growth. And to always remember to bloom in unexpected places with reckless abandon.” Those memories are the inspiration for the title of her memoir, Wildflower, out now.
James started the project in 2020, when Libby Burton, an editor at Penguin Random House, reached out after an NPR appearance. “If it weren;t for having a really wonderful editor coax me into believing that my story was valuable enough to tell, I don’t know that it would have happened,” James said. For two years, she took one week off every month to write in her apartment in Brooklyn, her house in Los Angeles, and on vacations in the Caribbean, where she spent a dark chapter of her childhood. “There are some stories that were really difficult to tell,” she said. “So often in fashion, we spend a lot of time trying to maintain our own costume of identity, and make sure that our mask is on straight or everything’s buttoned up. I had to do a lot of unbuttoning and unraveling of things that have happened in my life in order to be honest and vulnerable.”
The resulting memoir covers everything from James’ wayward childhood to the early days of Brother Vellies, the founding of the Fifteen Percent Pledge and dressing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the Met Gala in 2021. With both Brother Vellies and the Fifteen Percent Pledge, she asked, “What does it mean to take these people who have been not just…
Read the full article here
