So many clothes went from a collection in a basement to telling stories about Black women in history

At first, Kenneth Green had amassed such a collection of costumes from his work as a choreographer, casting director, and cultural event designer, he figured it was time for a purge.

“‘Clothes Story’ existed in my mind for, probably, a good 20 to 25 years because I love history and I love certain parts of theater. I’d collected some pieces, and I got to the point where I just had so many in my basement that I had to go through it and say, ‘You’ve got to get rid of some of this stuff.’ So, it was a process of cleaning things out,” he said. “I’d lined all of these dresses up and before I knew it, I had a row of about 30 dresses. They were dresses that I knew I wanted to save and then my daughter happened to come down and looked at it and said I really had something here.”

It would be a few more years before those dresses would find their way into an exhibition, but he began thinking about categories and the stories of when the costumes and clothing had been made. “There was always a person in mind, there was always a story in mind,” he says.

Those women’s stories and the replicas of their clothes make their West Coast debut at San Diego Mesa College Gallery in “Clothes Story: Highlighting African American Women’s Stories and Clothing from 1889-1963,” on display through Oct. 16. The local presentation, featuring about 30 of the collection’s 65 pieces, is supported by the Hervey Family Fund at The San Diego Foundation, and presented in partnership with the San Diego African American Museum Association and Mesa College. A public reception takes place from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday at the gallery and admission is free.

Green, who curated this traveling exhibition that opened in Atlanta in 2019, has worked as a casting director for Walt Disney World in Orlando and served on the faculty of the UC Irvine and Spelman College. For him, the clothes are an entry point to celebrating the lives and accomplishments of Black women, including Coretta Scott King, Diahann Carroll, and Mahalia Jackson, and Fredye Marshall and Dorothy Lee Bolden.

“I find the stories inspiring. I don’t necessarily cover stories with women that are familiar to everyone; we have stories about a lot of women who I consider ordinary and not necessarily popular in all regions, but they have fascinating stories,” he says.

Q: Why did you want to focus on Black women?

A: Personally, I admire Black women. I’m Black, I think the stories are fascinating, I think that Black women have kind of been in the shadows for a long time. I think that people have not given them their due, and they’re very stylish, very fashionable. When you look at trends, Black women have been ones that have put the pop and the zing in so many trends, which I find very exciting. I just think that it’s time that more of our stories be told, especially the women that have done amazing, trailblazing things. It was an opportunity for me to exalt them and to put their stories forward because there really were just so many stories that people really hadn’t heard about.

Q: As you were conceptualizing this show, what stories did you want to tell about Black women?

A: Well, I wanted to tell positive stories because when I look at our history, so much of it is steeped in trauma and I just wanted to find some positive stories and some women who’ve just done some things where people can say, “I didn’t know that that happened, that a Black woman did that,” or “I didn’t know that this woman who in my backyard did this,” so that was the reason. Also, I just thought the clothing was cool.

Q: How did you decide on which pieces would best tell these stories?

A: I had to put my producer hat on because I also had to look at what we could afford to produce. Who can we get to build this? I really needed to build things in a way that was historically accurate, for the most part. What fabrics could I have? Because, quite honestly, most of the fabrics that they used back in the day, we don’t use anything like that today. When you look at shows like “The Gilded Age” and “Downton Abbey,” those fabrics were very specific during that time period and, of course, those things aren’t around anymore, so I just had to use what I could afford.

If you look at the Coretta Scott King dress—she sang opera before she married Dr. (Martin Luther) King—that basically looks like a dress from (the character) Belle from “Beauty and the Beast.” It has all of this cascading in it, which is a very difficult dress to make. It’s almost like if you snip one thread and it goes the wrong way, the whole dress falls apart. So, you really need someone very skilled. It took me a while to find a designer who was willing to take that on. A lot of it just came down to finding variety in the presentation, just so everything looked interesting. There was a period of time in women’s fashion where they wore a lot of dark colors, a lot of browns and grays and blacks. I took a little creative license and for something that may have been made in brown, maybe take a chance and make it in green. We couldn’t just have a room full of brown and black, that isn’t very interesting.

Q: Why did you choose to focus on 1889 to 1963?

A: A lot of the research material that I’ve worked with just happened to start around the late 1800s. I’m not a fashion historian, I’m not a designer, I’m really an enthusiast, but I have spent time researching. As I looked at fashion after the 1960s and into the ’70s, history was starting to repeat itself, in terms of the way women’s clothing looked and was shaped. Now, this is just my opinion, but that’s where we stopped, in terms of the innovative parts of it, for myself.

Q: How did you acquire the garments for this show?

A: Everything is a replica. There might be one or two vintage pieces that look fantastic, but for the most part, they’re replicas. I wish I had an original Leontyne Price, but that would never happen. As I started this project, it wasn’t about building a museum collection; that was never the purpose, that’s just where we ended up. We tried to make everything that we did along the way as close to being authentic as possible. So, if we couldn’t get the right fabric, we got close to it. For example, we have the very famous Mahalia Jackson gown that she wore when she was in concert with Louis Armstrong, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful gown and it’s ornately trimmed. We did a replica of that, and I thought we got pretty close. I mean, I wish we could have gotten a little closer, but even as we looked at the trim on the front of that gown, it was quite expensive, so we got as close as we could. I think we created a great story moment for her. We put her as part of a collection with Myrlie Evers-Williams, Betty Shabazz, and Coretta Scott King. They all are in a story together in the collection. We look at the commonalities, and then we put Mahalia in there, who kind of becomes that common force as we talk about her journey and her popularity of singing “There is a Balm in Gilead.” We just tried to do everybody’s clothing line the best we could and also put them in compelling situations. So, as you go through the collection, you read who they are, you see their stories, you see the great, big clothing, but you also get emotional connections of who these women were, what they stood for, and what they represented.

Q: What is the range of materials and styles that people will see in this exhibition?

A: When we first built this collection, we started in 1889 with this beautiful dress modeled after the first valedictorian of Spelman College, and that was Clara Howard. Her dress was designed around 1889, so we built that dress and it was really awesome. Then, as we started doing more research, we ran across the Black Victorians around 1865, and the dresses that they wore being based in England under Queen Victoria. Those dresses were quite ornate and they were beautiful. A lot of them lived kind of like regular folks during that time period. There also were a lot of Black people during that time period who weren’t so lucky, but there was a group who dressed with lace and tassels and very fancy embroidery, and that really was an indication of the wealth that you were living in, or that you were from, at that particular time.

Everything was based on research from various archives from different locations, and some of the pictures from the Black Victorians were of these beautiful women who just had these beautiful, ornate dresses. I had to go ahead and investigate that, so we have about maybe four or five dresses that are in the collection from 1865, although we don’t advertise that. When you see the collection, people are really impressed and very moved because they also have the full hoops and petticoats, and there’s a lot of volume to them. Then, when they see the pictures that go along with the dress, especially the younger generation says, “I’ve never seen a dress like that before.” That’s the cool part for me, that by bringing the information forward, you see people experiencing something that they had not experienced before.

Q: Walk us through some of your process for putting all of this together-what did your research look like? What kinds of decisions were made about the installation?

A: Everything initially started with my research from the various projects that I’ve worked on before I started “Clothes Story” because I really spent my time producing historical events. So, I spent a lot of time in various archives and I would go through a lot of pictures, a lot of letters. As I ran across great pictures, I would just tag them and put them aside. Some of them were just the dress itself, some of them may be the setting. There is a famous picture by Thomas Askew of four women on the steps of Atlanta University Center in Atlanta, Ga. I just saw it on television the other night. They all just look amazing and all of the dresses were similar, but different. That picture just struck me as they look like scholars and they look like they were engaged. It’s just a great, great picture. So, I held on to that and replicated that picture. Then, there were some pictures that had great clothing, or a great emotional connection. Over the years, I’ve probably gone through hundreds and thousands of pictures and every one features history differently. It just depends on the moment. I just pulled pictures from that, and then depending on what I had to work with, we started putting it together and figuring out what our resources were and what our goal was at the moment.

Q: Who are some of the women we learn about in this show? What are some of their stories?

A: Betty Shabazz. It was very important for us to find a picture that could go with each dress, so people could see who these people were from their perspective. It was very important for us to try to build a dress that had a photograph connected to it, so people could see the connection of how people saw themselves, in terms of what they wore. We didn’t just design a dress for someone and there was no connection or no realness to it. So, Betty Shabazz’s picture was when she was on the cover of Ebony magazine with a very simple dress and a very simple head wrap. We built that dress and actually had that fabric designed. We could not find a fabric that we could get close to it, so we took the picture and sent it off for fabrication, and they made the fabric for us.

We have Leontyne Price. We did one on Fredye Marshall. She was a jazz singer in the ’40s, based out of Columbus, Ga., and she wore that typical nightclub, fringe, sequined kind of garment. I wanted to tell her story because she was a stand-in for Leontyne Price in “Porgy & Bess” throughout Europe in the ’60s. Diahann Carroll’s dress is one of our favorite ones. It’s one when she was on the cover of Ebony Magazine in 1962 and her dress is very high fashion, has a lot of great color. Then, there are various women like Dorothy (Lee) Bolden, who was an activist in the south. She was just a regular mom who worked as a domestic for a White woman in Atlanta. She was incarcerated because the woman asked her to stay for another four hours after her shift, and she wouldn’t do it. The woman called the police on her, and they arrested her and put her in a psychiatric ward for three days because she talked back to a White woman. After she got out, she got connected with Dr. King, and he helped her to organize the National Domestic Worker’s Union of America. Her outfit is just regular, a skirt and a blouse. Some of the clothes are extraordinary, some of them are very ordinary, some of them are flashy, some of them are just regular. For me, “Clothes Story” is about the stories because the stories are the things that I’m most fascinated with, that pull me in and really pique my interest. The clothes are what pulls people in the door, and I’m not mad about it, but I was more interested in the stories that we were telling.

Q: What do you hope people learn or realize as a result of engaging with this show?

A: I just hope that they learn a little bit more about our history and the contributions of Black women. There’s just so much history about Black women that we don’t celebrate, that we don’t know about, so I just hope that “Clothes Story,” in some small way, makes people walk away feeling proud and informed and like they can share this information with someone they know.