By Neve Chamberlain

A group of Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) fashion students are preserving Toronto’s Black fashion history through interviews featured in a new Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) exhibit.

Nigel Lezama, undergraduate program director and associate professor in TMU’s fashion studies program, is an advisory member of Sunday Best: The Power & The Glory of Black Style, a new exhibit that opened last week at the gallery.

Lezama has been working with fashion studies students on a digital interview project called Black Style in Context within the exhibition. 

The project features interviews, conducted by students, with Toronto-based Black fashion professionals and designers, including Iris Simpson, Mic Carter, Jeffery Kong and Kirk Pickersgill.

The AGO exhibition explores the history and cultural significance of Black fashion across the African diaspora from the 1880s to the present. It features more than 50 garments shown through display and contemporary art such as photography, paintings and accessories from around the world. 

The exhibit presents fashion as a powerful tool for Black communities to assert their identity and challenge exclusion and oppression, an online AGO press release said.

Lezama says the interviews are a way to enrich visitors’ experiences of the exhibition by examining the “life behind the garments.”

He said he wanted the interviews to feel like genuine conversations rather than [formal] interviews. He and his students practiced how to listen and to be engaged with the artists to create an environment of trust.

“It was so enriching for me to see my students get their voice through these interviews,” said Lezama. 

Amaiah Alexis and Mya Moore are fashion students and were interviewers for the Black Style in Context project. 

In an email to The Eyeopener, Moore wrote about her conversation with one of fashion icon Iris Simpson, where Simpson shared her experience working as a Black woman and luxury fashion buyer. 

“She was so inspiring to talk to, and when she spoke, it was impossible not to feel motivated by her and her outstanding career,” Moore wrote.

“I definitely want to dive a lot deeper into my Caribbean roots and make more traditional pieces as well,” said Alexis, in an interview with The Eye. 

“Fashion and style is about so much more than just the clothing. It is history, it is togetherness, yet individuality. And most importantly…it is about community,” wrote Moore.

The AGO exhibit is the first of its kind in Canada, according to Lezama. He said it’s important to recognize Toronto’s vibrant and inclusive fashion scene in the 1980s. “Toronto was a fashion capital,” he said.

Alexis described the power of the historic “Sunday best” garments—clothing traditionally reserved for church or special occasions—on display. 

“They make you feel like you’re a million bucks. Everyone cannot help it but look at you because you stand out in a way that is just so, so unique to yourself,” she said.

Clothes can be a sense of armour, Alexis added. “You wear the clothes, the clothes don’t wear you.” 

Lezama hopes students will engage with the exhibit with all their senses open and see themselves as historical subjects, “meaning that we have agency, and that when we dress, we make choices that have meaning embedded into those choices, and that we also have an impact as the world moves.”

“I would like to see our students see ‘what was’ and imagine ‘what can be’ through an exhibition like this,” said Lezama. 

Alexis also highlighted how the exhibit demonstrates the power of clothing to create meaningful conversations on histories threaded into someone’s clothes, which allows us to “get a different perspective on life.”

“I feel like we further history in a good way when we remember that our clothes really do hold a lot of power,” she said.

Lezama hopes his students will carry their experiences working on the project and that listeners find comfort in the honesty and beauty of the conversations.

“I hope that they enjoy what they’re listening to. I hope that it keeps them curious. I hope that it makes them have questions and more questions,” Alexis said.

The Sunday Best exhibit will be on view at the AGO until Feb. 28. The Black Style in Context interviews are available through QR codes, which visitors can scan while making their way through the exhibit. It can also be listened to online.