Photographed by Kwame Brathwaite, Lois K. Alexander-Lane is positioned on a golden-striped chaise in a floor-caressing black dress. As her smile widens for the camera, her earrings shimmer as she faces forward, grasping her prolific 1982 textbook, Blacks in the History of Fashion. Capturing her in all her splendor, she is enveloped by her life’s work on all sides as a predecessor of one of the original Black fashion archives.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1916, Alexander-Lane yearned for a life of fashion, daydreaming in department store windows and sketching their designs. After graduating in 1938 from Hampton University, she relocated to Washington, D.C., and worked in the Department of Housing and Urban Development for three decades. Her unyielded love for fashion led her to pursue a master’s degree in retailing, fashion, and merchandising at New York University, titling her thesis, “The Role of the Negro in Retailing in New York City from 1863 to the Present.” In it, she countered limiting beliefs on the Black experience within the New York fashion landscape, referencing Alice A. Casneau’s 1895 book, Casneau’s Guide for Artistic Dress Cutting and Making as a pivotal text in marking the history of tailoring and pattern making by Black designers. While navigating Washington, D.C., and New York, Alexander-Lane opened clothing boutiques in both cities marketed towards the Black bourgeois and their desire for custom clothing.
By 1966, Alexander-Lane founded the Harlem Institute of Fashion to provide a community for people to prepare themselves for jobs in the fashion industry, per the Monterey Herald. Impressively, the designer was also the majority investor in the institution. Students who attended completed two semesters of courses and were able to specialize in dressmaking,…
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