My Mom Going Black
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My Mom Going Black
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The author's sister (left) and mother
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Rick Owens, fashion’s dark knight, would love my mom. Or rather, he would enjoy her thoroughly colorless wardrobe. For as long as I can ever remember, my mom has always worn head-to-toe black. It’s a bit of a running joke in our family; we often call her Morticia Addams. She owns countless black tops that are all the same, yet “different,” in her eyes—meaning there are extremely subtle variations of necklines, fabrics, and embellishments that you’d need a magnifying glass to tell apart.
Whenever I’m at my parents’ house and I’m upstairs near her bedroom, she will scream out from the living room downstairs, “Can you bring my black top down?” as though I will know which of her 100 black tops she is referring to. On more than one occasion, she has even left the house in mismatched shoes, not being able to differentiate between her many black patent flats.
I often ask my mom why she doesn’t experiment more with color in her wardrobe, and she says she simply feels way too cartoony in a busy print or bright color. According to her, all-black outfits require “little to no thought” when getting dressed every morning. They’re a shortcut to looking instantly polished. Even I find myself gravitating towards all black, influenced by her easy approach.
Avoiding high-octane colors, however, is totally at odds with our cultural roots. We are Indigenous, and our Ojibwe tribe is known for its vibrant beadwork and colorful floral prints. Our Bandolier bags are famous—large, heavily beaded pouch bags with a slit at the top. We also specialize in jingle dresses , a powwow dancer’s garment adorned with silver or copper cones, as well as ribbon skirts and shirts , special-occasion pieces where each colored ribbon signifies something personal to the wearer.
You wouldn’t know it from my mother’s wardrobe, but we are, in fact, one of the early masters of color! Sometimes, she will channel this energy by adding a bright floral scarf by Jamie Okuma, or by wearing a bright pink lip color (her signature shade is Nars’s Schiap). But in her day-to-day style, she would rather be caught dead than wear a busy, multicolor dress like many of our ancestors did.
But there are some occasions that warrant exuberant color. Every summer, our community dancers—including jingle dress dancers , hoop dancers , and fancy dancers —gather on our traditional territory in their finest regalia and dance in the powwow circle to the beat of the drum. The event revolves around dancing, but it also doubles as a fashion show. The regalia is often made from scratch, a chance to show off your cultural couture. My sister is a jingle dress dancer, and to watch her, my mom will transform herself, shedding her black clothes in favor of a multicolor ribbon skirt, of which she owns many.
My favorite is one that two of my cousins made. It has a multicolor array of yellow, orange, and red ribbons standing out against the red printed backdrop. Sometimes, she will even wear a beaded buckskin bag with it that my sister made. Decked out in her look, she certainly blends into her surroundings at the powwow, where exquisite craftsmanship and color is everywhere. Seeing my mom in a colorful ensemble is always a shock to the senses, but it makes total sense. “Be proud of who you are,” she’ll always tell me. I’ve grown to love how she keeps her ribbon skirts reserved for special occasions. Her dramatic switch-up from all black into her colorful regalia always causes you to focus in on all of its beautiful details just that much more, as though she deliberately holds back in her day-to-day wardrobe to make you notice it more when she does dress up.
Of course, outside of special events or ceremonies, my mom always ends up retiring her ribbon skirt and going back to black—cue that AC/DC song —and that certainly won’t be changing anytime soon. In fact, as I was writing this essay, my mother realized a top that she was wearing was navy, not black, and she just immediately changed. But when she does embrace color next, whenever that will be, I know that it will result in yet another striking display of cultural pride. That’s always worth going against your signature style for.
© 2022 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Vogue may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
The countdown is on Secure your copy
The author's sister (left) and mother
The insider’s guide to what to shop and how to wear it.
The latest fashion news, beauty coverage, celebrity style, fashion week updates, culture reviews, and videos on Vogue.com.
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
Rick Owens, fashion’s dark knight, would love my mom. Or rather, he would enjoy her thoroughly colorless wardrobe. For as long as I can ever remember, my mom has always worn head-to-toe black. It’s a bit of a running joke in our family; we often call her Morticia Addams. She owns countless black tops that are all the same, yet “different,” in her eyes—meaning there are extremely subtle variations of necklines, fabrics, and embellishments that you’d need a magnifying glass to tell apart.
Whenever I’m at my parents’ house and I’m upstairs near her bedroom, she will scream out from the living room downstairs, “Can you bring my black top down?” as though I will know which of her 100 black tops she is referring to. On more than one occasion, she has even left the house in mismatched shoes, not being able to differentiate between her many black patent flats.
I often ask my mom why she doesn’t experiment more with color in her wardrobe, and she says she simply feels way too cartoony in a busy print or bright color. According to her, all-black outfits require “little to no thought” when getting dressed every morning. They’re a shortcut to looking instantly polished. Even I find myself gravitating towards all black, influenced by her easy approach.
Avoiding high-octane colors, however, is totally at odds with our cultural roots. We are Indigenous, and our Ojibwe tribe is known for its vibrant beadwork and colorful floral prints. Our Bandolier bags are famous—large, heavily beaded pouch bags with a slit at the top. We also specialize in jingle dresses , a powwow dancer’s garment adorned with silver or copper cones, as well as ribbon skirts and shirts , special-occasion pieces where each colored ribbon signifies something personal to the wearer.
You wouldn’t know it from my mother’s wardrobe, but we are, in fact, one of the early masters of color! Sometimes, she will channel this energy by adding a bright floral scarf by Jamie Okuma, or by wearing a bright pink lip color (her signature shade is Nars’s Schiap). But in her day-to-day style, she would rather be caught dead than wear a busy, multicolor dress like many of our ancestors did.
But there are some occasions that warrant exuberant color. Every summer, our community dancers—including jingle dress dancers , hoop dancers , and fancy dancers —gather on our traditional territory in their finest regalia and dance in the powwow circle to the beat of the drum. The event revolves around dancing, but it also doubles as a fashion show. The regalia is often made from scratch, a chance to show off your cultural couture. My sister is a jingle dress dancer, and to watch her, my mom will transform herself, shedding her black clothes in favor of a multicolor ribbon skirt, of which she owns many.
My favorite is one that two of my cousins made. It has a multicolor array of yellow, orange, and red ribbons standing out against the red printed backdrop. Sometimes, she will even wear a beaded buckskin bag with it that my sister made. Decked out in her look, she certainly blends into her surroundings at the powwow, where exquisite craftsmanship and color is everywhere. Seeing my mom in a colorful ensemble is always a shock to the senses, but it makes total sense. “Be proud of who you are,” she’ll always tell me. I’ve grown to love how she keeps her ribbon skirts reserved for special occasions. Her dramatic switch-up from all black into her colorful regalia always causes you to focus in on all of its beautiful details just that much more, as though she deliberately holds back in her day-to-day wardrobe to make you notice it more when she does dress up.
Of course, outside of special events or ceremonies, my mom always ends up retiring her ribbon skirt and going back to black—cue that AC/DC song —and that certainly won’t be changing anytime soon. In fact, as I was writing this essay, my mother realized a top that she was wearing was navy, not black, and she just immediately changed. But when she does embrace color next, whenever that will be, I know that it will result in yet another striking display of cultural pride. That’s always worth going against your signature style for.
© 2022 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Vogue may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
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Eulalia Bryson at work in her basement sewing shop, mid-1980s. (Courtesy J.D. Bryson)
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"Send the boss man down here to talk to me..."
A vintage business card for Dr. B's Clothes Clinic. (Courtesy J.D. Bryson)
Still hard at work: the author's mom in her basement shop circa 2005. (Courtesy J.D. Bryson)
The author's mother, Eulalia Bryson, at the beach in Santa Monica on her 77th birthday, January 2012. (Courtesy J.D. Bryson)
The author and his mom in Palm Springs. (Courtesy J.D. Bryson)
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One day this summer, I was reading my Instagram and came across the wonderful historical accounts of Black women who have made their mark in American entrepreneurship, from Madam C.J. Walker to Rose Morgan and lots of people in between. I found the stories incredible and enlightening.
Often they were a necessary means to an end due to lack of options for Black women to be gainfully and fairly employed. Or they filled a need by the Black community that was overlooked by the general population.
From June 2020 to July 2021, we published your stories each week to continue important conversations about race/ethnicity, identity and how both affect our lived experiences.
But as I sat and pondered one of the stories, it dawned on me that there was a story right here, in the other room. I'm talking about my mother.
Her entrepreneurship story is one that I had not been willing to attribute to the subtleties of racism and discrimination. It's easy to ascribe that ugliness to events and actions that are farther out and away from oneself. It's harder to see, and accept, when it's a part of your everyday life, your existence. Nothing quite as blaring as the N-word. It is oh-so-subtle.
We didn't live in an overt environment of racism and blatant discrimination when I was growing up in the Midwest. Although there were some issues. I went to a high school in Decatur, Illinois that had about 35 to 40 Black kids in it, and kids will be kids. Even with that, I formed a band that was as diverse as the music we played, which was a mix of jazz, disco, and R&B. Although we were in a town in the middle of corn and soybean fields, race was not the subject of conversation.
Race and/or discrimination, although the catalyst, is not the crux of this story. The story is about how a single Black woman in the 1970s had to believe in her worth and skills, when the establishment constantly negated these things by not paying her for them -- yet freely rewarding the white men around her.
My mother had worked for years as a tailor.
She had apprenticed with some of the best menswear lines and stores in Peoria and Chicago from the age of 16 years old. Once in Decatur, she settled in at Myers Brothers Department Store in 1970.
After a short stint there, she went on to a menswear store that seemed to be more appreciative of her skills. Upon hiring, she was promised profit-sharing bonuses, and was initially afforded the same respect her male counterparts were.
Still, time went by and she had not gotten that elusive bonus yet, for one reason or another.
Since her salary was low to begin with, the bonus was a negotiating tool, I'm sure, with which to lure one to hire on. For her, that bonus meant a bit more than just a new pair of shoes or a bottle of cologne. It meant catching up on the light bill and getting that leak fixed in the refrigerator -- and perhaps some extra food would be nice.
That menswear store grew and moved to a new, large, modern location. Business was booming. On the surface, it would seem that profits grew, too. Unfortunately, there would be no bonus that year for my mother, well, because of the expense of building and moving.
However, one of the salesmen, a white man who had been hired shortly after her, a couple of years earlier, had come into the tailor shop to complain about his bonus being smaller that year -- because he had to share it with one of the high school boys who had started working there part time.
"There were bonuses this year?" my mom asked.
"Oops, I let the cat out of the bag?" the salesman replied.
"Yes, you did. Send the boss man down here to talk to me when you go back up," she requested.
After some talk about this reason and that reason for not giving her a bonus -- again -- that year, mom decided it was time for her to quit. The ongoing differences were adding up, and now they'd been underscored with this last act. Time to go.
"Why did you quit that good job?" asked a couple of friends, "What are you going to do now?"
She didn't know, but she started at the unemployment office. That certainly was a fight, until mom presented her two-page documentation of the things that had gone on the last two years or so.
In front of the Appeals Officers, the owner started to rebut, and was asked to leave the room by the officers. The owner was told that with all that was documented, he was getting off easy -- this could go on as a discrimination case.
The unemployment benefits started, but then what? After a tough time finding work, and with some perseverance, the only thing my mom could do was start working on her own.
My mom never dreamed of having a home-based business, but one does what one must do.
Fortunately, one of the places she'd tried getting a job, after turning her down, called a couple of weeks later to tell her that the dress designer they worked with needed a new seamstress.
As a 16-year-old, I thought it was neat that evening gowns my mom was sewing would be in the downtown stores. Nevermind I would wake up at 3 a.m. to find her doing it. And until gown season was over, we had evening gowns hanging all over the dining room, being assembled for a fee that is paltry by any meaning of the word.
Store to store she went for steady work. It was sporadic, at best. Fortunately, the guys she worked with at the job she'd quit steered freelance work her way. That sustained us for a while.
Then my grandmother came to live with the two of us and we needed more room, so my mom remodeled our basement, where she could put in a tailor shop to her specifications.
That required commercial-grade equipment if she was going to make it work. A loan wasn't an option. The bank questioned her repayment plan "...if you become pregnant." Another obstacle for a woman, let alone a Black one. Fortunately she had forged relationships with suppliers who were willing to let her have the machines as she paid for them "on time" in installments.
Meanwhile, my mom, grandmother, and I got the basement ready for both ladies to do their thing.
My grandmother was teaching piano and organ lessons in one of the rooms -- while my mom was fitting and sewing in the main room -- which meant the doorbell was quite busy during those days.
By now, my mom had contracted business with most of the boutiques and men's stores in town, not to mention the personal clients she had. Things were truly humming. So much so that she had to hire a couple more ladies to help out. I even helped on the pants-hemming machine at times.
Dr. B's Clothes Clinic , as she named her business, was growing, not due to glossy packaging or soaring billboards, but from the strength of business cards, phone book ads, and old-fa
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