Black Power, Afros,
and fashion as expression.

Black Power fashion made the body impossible to ignore: natural hair, African-inspired clothing, Black-owned enterprise, and movement uniforms became a language of self-determination.

Style as a declaration.

By the late 1960s, a Black American could enter a classroom, courthouse, storefront, or street wearing a visual statement that spoke before they did.

An Afro could challenge Eurocentric beauty standards. A dashiki could announce African diasporic connection. A black beret and leather jacket could signal political discipline, solidarity, and resistance to police violence. Together, these styles formed a new visual language.

Black Power fashion was not one uniform look. It was a collection of choices shaped by movement politics, beauty culture, gender, entrepreneurship, student activism, and everyday life. As historian Tanisha C. Ford argues, Black women in particular used clothing, hair, and beauty practices as tools of political resistance—not merely as decoration.

The polished suits and coordinated stagewear associated with Motown had already demonstrated how Black style could influence the national imagination. But Black Power shifted the question. The issue was no longer only whether Black performers could enter mainstream culture looking impeccable. It was whether Black people had to conform to white standards of beauty, respectability, and citizenship at all.

This was the era after the style worlds explored in “Motown Made Them Do It: How Black Musicians Redefined American Style”, and it drew on the earlier Black cultural independence developed in “Harlem Renaissance Style: Prohibition, Jazz, and the Birth of Black Modern Fashion.”

Black Is Beautiful before Black Power.

The fashion history of Black Power did not begin with the Black Panther Party. One of its most important foundations appeared in Harlem several years earlier.

On January 28, 1962, photographer Kwame Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath helped organize “Naturally ’62,” a fashion and music event at the Purple Manor nightclub. The show featured Black models wearing natural hairstyles and African-inspired clothing. Jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach also performed. Brathwaite’s photography and archive preserve this early visual language.

The organizers later formed the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios, or AJASS, and developed the Grandassa Models. The models were not simply mannequins presenting clothing. They were part of a cultural campaign that presented dark skin, natural hair, and African references as beautiful and worthy of public celebration.

The timing matters. “Naturally ’62” predates the moment when “Black Power” became a nationally recognized political slogan. The National Archives identifies 1966, during the Meredith March Against Fear, as the year Stokely Carmichael helped move the phrase into mainstream public life. Brathwaite’s photography and the Grandassa fashion shows had already created an image-based vocabulary for racial pride.

Many of the Grandassa models made their own clothing. Their garments did not reproduce one single African tradition. Instead, they created an American diasporic style from African references, handmade construction, jewelry, headpieces, and natural hair. The result was not a costume. It was a visual argument that Black identity did not require approval from white fashion institutions.

Brathwaite’s photographs were crucial because they circulated that argument. The images offered Black women as glamorous, self-possessed, and culturally centered. They also gave the emerging Black freedom movement a visual language of joy rather than victimhood.

The Afro was natural, political, and personal.

The Afro became the most recognizable hairstyle of the Black Power era, but its meaning was never completely fixed.

Black Americans had long modified their hair in response to racism, employment discrimination, beauty standards, and social pressure. Hair straightening could be a matter of personal preference, but it could also be a strategy for navigating workplaces and institutions that punished natural Black hair. The National Museum of African American History and Culture situates hair within the wider politics of Black presentation.

The Afro challenged that pressure by making Black hair’s texture and volume visible. It rejected the idea that beauty required proximity to white appearance. Scholars Kobena Mercer and Robin D. G. Kelley both treat Black hair as a historical and cultural site where race, identity, politics, and social meaning intersect.

By the early 1970s, the Afro appeared on activists, musicians, models, students, professionals, and children. Its presence did not mean that every wearer belonged to a political organization. Some people wore Afros because they liked the look. Others wore them as a deliberate rejection of assimilation. Still others moved between those meanings depending on the setting.

That flexibility is part of the hairstyle’s power.

The Afro could be intimate and public at the same time. It could express beauty, anger, pride, fashion, cultural memory, or simple convenience. The movement did not invent natural Black hair, but it transformed how natural hair could be read in public.

Angela Davis became one of the most powerful examples. During her 1970–71 legal ordeal, photographs of Davis with a large Afro circulated through newspapers, buttons, posters, and international campaigns. Her hairstyle became inseparable from images of Black radicalism and political liberation. Picturing Black History traces that visual history.

Kathleen Cleaver also helped shape the visual identity of the Black Panther Party. Her Afro, sunglasses, dark turtleneck, and leather jacket communicated a distinctly political form of style. Yet her appearance was not simply a copy of male Panther imagery. It showed Black women occupying public space as strategists, spokespeople, organizers, and symbols of revolutionary possibility.

The Afro was also quickly commercialized. By the early 1970s, wigs, sprays, and hair products were marketed to consumers who wanted the “Black look.” This contradiction—between liberation and commerce—would follow Black fashion throughout the twentieth century. A style could begin as resistance and still become a profitable market category.

The dashiki and Black-owned fashion enterprise.

The dashiki became another defining garment of the period. The loose-fitting pullover tunic had West African linguistic and clothing histories, but its American popularity grew during the 1960s as part of a wider embrace of African heritage.

The American dashiki was not a single traditional garment imported unchanged from Africa. Designers adapted the silhouette, fabric, pockets, sleeves, embroidery, and prints for Black American consumers. It became a diasporic garment: African in reference, American in production, and political in use. The Fashion Institute of Technology’s history of the dashiki documents that adaptation.

One of the most important businesses in this story was New Breed Clothing. Founded in Harlem in 1967 by Jason and Mabel Benning, Howard Davis, and other Black designers and professionals, New Breed connected fashion with economic independence.

Mabel Benning reportedly sewed early dashikis by hand in the company’s Harlem storefront. The business later established a factory in Brooklyn and employed Black workers. Its clothing was worn by activists, celebrities, and ordinary customers who wanted to participate in the emerging Afrocentric style.

New Breed mattered because it demonstrated that fashion could be part of Black community development. The storefront was not only a place to buy a shirt. It was a meeting point, a cultural space, and a visible example of Black entrepreneurship.

This distinction is important. Black Power clothing was not simply purchased from an anonymous national fashion industry. Black people designed, manufactured, sold, modeled, and circulated many of the garments associated with the movement.

The dashiki also helped make Pan-African identification visible in everyday life. It appeared at rallies, on college campuses, in Black-owned boutiques, in photographs, and in popular entertainment. It could be worn with trousers, jeans, jewelry, headwraps, or other garments. Its meaning depended on the wearer and the setting.

In one context, a dashiki communicated cultural nationalism. In another, it expressed celebration or community belonging. In yet another, it became a commercial “ethnic” fashion item. Its history shows how quickly political symbols can move among activism, commerce, and popular culture.

The Black Panther uniform.

If the dashiki represented cultural connection and African reference, the Black Panther uniform represented organized resistance.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Its program centered on Black self-determination, community control, armed self-defense, and opposition to police brutality. The National Archives documents the Party’s history.

The Party’s visual identity became internationally recognizable: black berets, Afros, sunglasses, black leather jackets, dark turtlenecks, buttons, and sometimes firearms. The look was disciplined, practical, and intentionally confrontational.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture emphasizes that the uniform was more than a fashion statement. The beret connected the Panthers to revolutionary and military imagery. Sunglasses could help conceal identities during a period of intense surveillance. Leather jackets were partly practical and accessible; many members already owned them. Buttons carried messages such as “Free Huey,” “Free Angela,” and “All Power to the People.”

The uniform also marked a departure from the “Sunday best” associated with earlier civil rights demonstrations. Formal clothing had helped many activists present their demands as legitimate within the language of American respectability. Panther style rejected the obligation to appear harmless before demanding justice.

But the Panther uniform should not be confused with the entire Black Power movement. Not every Black activist wore a beret or leather jacket. The movement included cultural nationalists, student organizers, artists, community workers, religious activists, and people whose political participation was expressed through everyday dress rather than organizational uniforms.

The imagery of women Panthers was especially powerful. Black women wore berets, Afros, sunglasses, leather jackets, trousers, and other forms of militant dress. Their presence challenged conventional assumptions about femininity and political authority.

At the same time, historical accounts should not romanticize the Party’s gender politics. Women were central to Panther organizing and survival, but they also confronted sexism within the organization. The uniform could symbolize gender inclusion while the institution itself remained imperfectly inclusive.

That tension makes the clothing more historically meaningful, not less. Fashion can reveal both a movement’s ideals and its unresolved contradictions.

Campuses, Black Studies, and the circulation of style.

Black Power fashion moved through the same institutions that helped spread Black political thought.

Peniel E. Joseph’s peer-reviewed article “Dashikis and Democracy” connects student activism, the emergence of Black Studies, and the Black Power movement. The title itself captures the period’s central insight: clothing and political education were not separate worlds.

Black college students challenged university administrations, demanded curriculum reform, organized demonstrations, and created new spaces for Black history and culture. At Historically Black Colleges and Universities, student activism became part of a longer institutional tradition. The National Museum of African American History and Culture notes that the records of these struggles survive in student newspapers, yearbooks, photographs, artwork, and alumni scrapbooks.

Those archives also preserve the visual world around the protests. Students did not arrive at demonstrations as abstract political subjects. They arrived in clothes, hairstyles, buttons, jewelry, denim, uniforms, and African-inspired garments.

The campus became a place where style could be shared, debated, and interpreted. A dashiki could mark a political commitment, a cultural interest, or simply participation in a new social world. A natural hairstyle could connect a student to Black pride while also reflecting personal taste.

Ford’s research follows Black women through boutiques, beauty salons, record stores, campuses, and political spaces. These locations formed an infrastructure of style. They allowed fashion to circulate beyond famous photographs and movement leaders.

The Black Power era therefore expanded the geography of fashion. Style did not flow only from Paris, Fifth Avenue, or Hollywood. It moved through Harlem storefronts, HBCU campuses, neighborhood salons, Black newspapers, community centers, and movement gatherings.

Black women refused a single liberation look.

Black women were often expected to carry the symbolic burden of racial representation. Their appearance could be judged as too conservative, too sexual, too militant, too dark, too glamorous, or insufficiently political.

Maxine Leeds Craig’s Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? shows how Black women negotiated beauty, class, politics, and personal appearance over generations. The Black Is Beautiful movement did not erase those debates. It brought them into sharper focus.

A Black woman could wear an Afro, a wig, braids, a headwrap, straightened hair, a dashiki, a miniskirt, a long dress, heels, denim, or a tailored suit. These choices did not fit neatly into a simple opposition between “natural” and “assimilationist.”

Political style was not a test that women either passed or failed.

For some, rejecting straightening was liberating. For others, wearing a wig or pressed style remained part of self-expression, professional presentation, family tradition, or personal pleasure. Some women used clothing associated with glamour and femininity while participating in political organizing. Others embraced utilitarian or military-inspired clothing.

This variety complicates the idea that Black Power fashion was anti-fashion. The movement challenged white beauty standards, but it did not reject beauty, elegance, sensuality, or creativity. It created new standards and new possibilities.

The Grandassa Models, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, student activists, and everyday Black women all contributed to that expanded visual field. They demonstrated that Black political expression could be severe, joyful, glamorous, practical, intellectual, or all of those things at once.

When liberation became a market.

By the early 1970s, fashion businesses and media outlets recognized the commercial value of Black Power aesthetics. Dashikis entered wider circulation. Afros became marketable through wigs and hair products. African-inspired prints appeared in advertisements and popular culture.

This commercial expansion created a contradiction. The marketplace could spread Black style while stripping away the political history that produced it. A dashiki could be sold as a trend after being worn as a statement of African identity. An Afro could be advertised as a novelty after activists had used natural hair to challenge racial hierarchy.

Yet commercialization did not erase Black authorship. Black designers, photographers, entrepreneurs, models, students, and consumers had already created the language. The market followed a cultural movement that Black communities had built.

That pattern would recur throughout American fashion. Black style was often treated as marginal until it became profitable. Once it became profitable, the people who originated it were frequently pushed out of the story.

Conclusion: fashion as self-determination.

Black Power fashion made the body impossible to ignore.

The Afro challenged the idea that Black hair needed correction. The dashiki connected American consumers to African heritage while supporting Black enterprise. The Panther uniform made political organization visible. Student clothing helped create new social identities on campuses and in communities. Black women expanded the movement’s meaning by refusing to choose between politics and beauty.

The period’s most important lesson is that fashion was not separate from liberation. It was one of the ways liberation became visible, repeatable, and collective.

From Brathwaite’s Harlem photographs to New Breed’s storefronts, from HBCU campuses to Panther demonstrations, Black people used style to define themselves before institutions could define them.

Sources and further reading

Follow the thread.

• Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul
• Kwame Brathwaite Archive and the “Black Is Beautiful” movement
• National Archives, “Black Power”
• Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics”
• Robin D. G. Kelley, “Nap Time: Historicizing the Afro”
• Mickell Carter, “Black Women, Black Power, and the Afro”
• Amanda Boggio, “Dashiki,” Fashion Institute of Technology
• Michelle Fisher, “African-American Designers Hidden in Plain Sight”
• National Archives, “The Black Panther Party”
• National Museum of African American History and Culture, “More than a Fashion Statement”
• Peniel E. Joseph, “Dashikis and Democracy”
• NMAAHC, “Preserving Student Activism at HBCUs”
• Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?

The article distinguishes Black Power fashion from a single uniform or trend, holding political symbolism, personal style, Black enterprise, gender, and commercialization together.