HBO Max picks up another film for its streaming platform: Outlier Society’s Fashionably Black.
Come spring of 2020, HBO Max will be releasing its impressive stable of content, like Gossip Girl and the Greg Berlanti produced series Strange Adventures, into the wide and crowded field of television. But to me, the most exciting news to come out of Camp HBO Max is the announcement of Fashionably Black, a comedy film produced by Michael B. Jordan and Alana Mayo’s Outlier Society.
According to Deadline, “[T]he comedy explores what happens when you actually put a black woman at the top spot in fashion. The film will follow viral sensation Zoe Bankole who, after becoming the industry’s first and only black woman creative director for a French haute couture house, must contend with short deadlines, petty rivals and attempts at whitewashing her style in order to create the collection of her dreams.”
Finally, a movie about a black woman in the fashion industry! We’ve had plenty of fashionable black girls and women grace our screens, influencing the culture, and living their best lives in the fliest of ‘fits. But, correct me if I’m wrong, we haven’t had a black woman dictate taste in a film this century, and we’re nearly 20 years into it. I am by no means a cinephile, so please do point me in the direction of films about black women in fashion. But the examples that come to mind are from the world of television.
There’s Wilhelmina Slater (played by Vanessa Williams), creative director and editor-in-chief of Mode in Ugly Betty and Kat Edison (played by Aisha Dee), social media director of Scarlet Magazine in The Bold Type. And that’s it. Two women, a decade apart in their creation. Frustrating, am I right? Well, thank goodness for Fashionably Black. Now we’ll have three black women depicted in the fashion industry and hopefully more will come in their wake.
I assume Fashionably Black‘s Zoe will be a disruptor befitting the same description given to Mayo in her interview with Glamour. That she’ll toss the status quo out the window and rework the modus operandi of an industry prone to appropriating culture and whitewashing it for their own benefit. Being a black face in a white space is one thing, but Zoe is about to be the black woman in charge, and with that comes power and the ability to change the landscape.
As Mayo said herself:
"“…I think it is really, really cool for people like us to occupy these spaces because one feeds the other…. We’re finally at a place where I feel like ‘the system’ is excited by young people coming in with a different point of view.”"
Zoe’s point of view is going to be different, and it’s going to ruffle feathers but this is how change is made. I, for one, am excited to see what the writers of the film, Christa Gatewood and Robin Thede (also executive producer), have in store for her and the people who try to get in her way.