Burrows’s joyful approach to life, his multiethnic “family,” and his let’s-all-get-along politics formed the perfectly timed antidote for a tumultuous time. A series of devastating riots exploded across America during the summer of 1967. It seemed that virtually every major American city was going up in flames fueled by racial inequity, disenfranchisement, and poverty. On June 11: Tampa. June 12: Cincinnati. June 17: Atlanta. June 20: Newark. July 22: Detroit.
The Detroit conflagration, which lasted five days, began when members of the predominantly white police force raided an after-hours bar at the intersection of Twelfth Street and Clairmount. Onlookers on that July summer night protested the police action and the department’s aggressive tactics. As the crowd taunted the cops, windows were broken, a mob soon formed, and businesses were looted and set aflame. Dozens of black citizens were shot and killed by police officers and National Guardsmen. Residents hunkered down, afraid to be caught on the streets, let alone run afoul of the cops.
In search of causes and solutions, on July 28, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for the creation of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. It was an eleven-member, bipartisan commission cochaired by Illinois’s Democratic governor Otto Kerner and New York’s Republican mayor John Lindsay. It also included representatives from business, labor, law enforcement, and the NAACP. The commission members hailed from the “moderate and ‘responsible’ Establishment,” and critics complained that it lacked representatives of the black radical movement, academic leftists, and militant youth.
In March 1968, the commission issued the Kerner Report, which, despite its moderate lineage, opened in famously unsparing terms: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible.”1
The report went on to characterize the rioters as desiring “fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens.” Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to find their place in it.2 It also described a new mood that had arisen in young “Negroes,” noting that elevated “self-esteem and enhanced racial pride” had replaced “apathy and submission to ‘the system.’”3
Perhaps most important, when the Kerner Report offered its healing and preventative tonic, it looked at the media, among other forces. It encouraged newspapers, magazines, and television to broaden their content and become more inclusive. The report urged the media to “recognize the existence and activities of Negroes as a group within the community and as a part of the larger community. It would be a contribution of inestimable importance to race relations in the United States simply to treat ordinary news about Negroes as news of other groups is now treated. Specifically, newspapers should integrate Negroes and Negro activities into all parts of the paper, from the news, society, and club pages to the comic strips. Television should develop programming which integrates Negroes into all aspects of televised presentations.… Negro reporters and performers should appear more frequently—and at prime time—in news broadcasts, on weather shows, in documentaries, and in advertisements. Some effort already has been made to use Negroes in television commercials. Any initial surprise at seeing a Negro selling a sponsor’s product will eventually fade into routine acceptance, an attitude that white society must ultimately develop toward all Negroes.” 4
Whether or not one agreed with the findings of the Kerner Report, it had the effect of heightening cultural sensitivities to race. The government itself had found that there was an urgent need to open the doors of social access and visibility to black Americans. There was even an undercurrent of fear: What would happen if the disenfranchisement continued? What powder keg would explode next?
The anger and resentment that had poured into urban neighborhoods and fueled the ongoing Black Power movement enthralled a generation of radical young people, experimental artists, and the fashion industry, which was increasingly influenced by the street and by popular culture. Fashion didn’t like getting political, but it loved being subversive.
Black politics was spawning a black aesthetic that was confronting and changing mainstream culture. In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles helped give rise to a new black cinema movement when he directed Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. The title character, played by Van Peebles, is a black man who brutally attacks a racist policeman and flees for his life. The guerilla film is full of bell-bottoms, velour jackets, afros, sex, and black male heroics. In the final scenes, Sweet Sweetback escapes the police and crosses the border into Mexico. The film was dedicated to “brothers and sisters who have had enough of the Man.” The hero’s survival was seen as a revolutionary conceit.
When the original film was released, only two theaters would even screen it. One was in Atlanta; the other was the Grand Circus Theatre in Detroit. It was so enthusiastically received by black audiences that there were reports of moviegoers sitting through it two or three times in a row. The film, with its Black Power themes, was an enormous success considering its meager budget of $500,000 (including a $50,000 loan from comedian Bill Cosby) and went on to gross more than $15 million.
The action was everywhere. Julia, starring African American actress Diahann Carroll as a widow and single mother working as a nurse, made its groundbreaking appearance on television in 1968. In literature, writer Amiri Baraka instigated the Black Arts Movement in Harlem. Maya Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In 1972, Alma Thomas, at eighty, became the first African American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. And on the dance stage, Judith Jamison was mesmerizing audiences with her emotional and regal performances with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company of New York.
The world of fashion was similarly looked to as a place where the culture could find signs of racial progress. Expressions of beauty and glamour mattered. Good race relations required taking note of who was selling women lipstick and miniskirts, which meant that advertisers and designers began looking for black models.
A current of earnest, idealistic do-goodism had been stirred. People believed—hoped—that with a positive attitude, with the right words and the right government programs, the anger could be quelled and injustice eradicated.
So while Lambert equated fashion with patriotism in order to bolster the economy, New York’s Bergdorf Goodman used it to make a pitch for racial harmony. In the spring of 1969, the specialty store, with its rarefied air, deep stock of French haute couture, and high-society clientele, hosted a fund-raising fashion show saluting black designers.
Bergdorf is housed in an imposing beaux arts building on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. From its founding in 1901, it was never a store known for edgy, experimental fashion. Rather, it trafficked in chic, patrician, expensive sophistication. We have never been a culture comfortable admitting to having an aristocracy, but we do. And Bergdorf ministered to the members of that aristocracy’s inner court. Indeed, in 1961, its fashion director collaborated with Jacqueline Kennedy on the creation of her inaugural ball gown.
Yet in 1969, Bergdorf Goodman, the favored haunt of the elite, turned its spotlight on half a dozen black designers.5 More than five hundred broad-minded New Yorkers paid at least $15 each to attend the show, which was dubbed “Basic Black at Bergdorf’s.” It paid tribute to Arthur McGee, Jon Haggins, Maybelle Lewis, Jon Weston, Luretha Williams, and a young, rising designer named Stephen Burrows, who had just started his professional career.
The Bergdorf party was rip-roaringly popular. Both the black community and white society clamored to go. Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate Republican and arts supporter, purchased a block of tickets. Guests included singer Dinah Shore and actor Raymond St. Jacques. And the clothes were youthful and charming: white crochet minidresses with geometric details at the waist, plaid pajama pants worn with a midriff-baring top.
The show benefitted Harlem’s Northside Center for Child Development, which was founded by psychologists Dr. Mamie Clark and her husband, Dr. Kenneth Clark. In the 1940s, the Clarks became famous for their “doll test,” which revealed children’s alarmingly biased attitudes about race. The couple’s testimony on the damaging psychological impact of segregation on children had weighed heavily in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that desegregated schools.
The Jothan Callins quintet, a jazz ensemble whose members were costumed in dashikis, entertained the audience. Guests nibbled on corn bread, fried chicken, collard greens, and chitlins. In 1969, soul food was pure radical chic, and serving it up at a celebration of black designers did not seem to strike any of the organizers as painfully condescending—or vaguely horrifying. But even then, passing chitlins around the fifth floor of Bergdorf went several steps beyond authentic and well down the slippery slope to minstrelsy.
Guests arrived convinced that it would be an electric evening, before anything had even happened; the store hadn’t seen such excitement since it hosted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor two years earlier. “I guess people were interested because they want to endorse something constructive in black-white relations, which everyone is very concerned about right now,” mused Lorna Bade Goodman, daughter-in-law of store president Andrew Goodman.6
Her husband, Eddie Goodman, third generation of the New York retail dynasty, had recently left the family fold to focus on business development in the predominantly black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Eddie assured the press that his new role had not been the impetus for the uptown show. Rather, thanks to the nightly news, the deafening social chatter, and the mood of the country, his father’s “consciousness of what’s going on in the world, just sort of expanded.”7
Eddie Goodman was not exaggerating. Race, as part of the cultural dialogue, had become inescapable. It was practically all anyone could talk about. Raised voices, wringing hands, and caustic words were signs of passion, honesty, and commitment. Back then, people believed verbal sparring could be meaningful and productive.
The sixties had ushered in crunchy-granola liberalism and navel-gazing self-criticism, bold political activism and racial diplomacy. This was the era that spawned Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, which assessed liberal guilt and black anger. It would not have been surprising had the white guests arrived at Bergdorf wearing Black Panther berets and Aunt Jemima head wraps, proclaiming them all the rage.
By the time soul food was being served on the fifth floor of Bergdorf, the race problem was part of dinner table chatter, church pew politicking, college campus protests—and the popular culture.
There were no easy or obvious answers to solving it, but what made the Basic Black show even possible was the fact that people were actively looking for them. And as unlikely as it seems today, they were looking everywhere, from legislatures to television, literature, and even fashion.
Race matters were woven into the culture. In October 1969, Life magazine ran an advertisement for Sylvania color televisions that equated picture quality with kumbaya racial diversity. In the ad, the central image is a lineup of four women—white, African American, Asian, and Hispanic—each staring proudly from a television screen. The copy reads, in part:
Presenting life the way it really is. White people aren’t white, black people aren’t black, yellow people aren’t yellow, brown people aren’t brown. Not in real life. Not on Sylvania color TV.
Everyone’s color is different. That’s a fact, which has caused some problems. In the color TV business, the problem is to accurately reproduce all these different colors (things, too, not just people) and keep them accurate from scene to scene and channel to channel.… Together, the Sylvania chassis and picture tube give you reds that stay red, blues that stay blue, yellows that stay yellow, and flesh tones that are true and natural. That’s the way life really is.
Regardless of race, color or place of national origin.
The cover of that issue of Life featured model Naomi Sims with the headline BLACK MODELS TAKE CENTER STAGE. Inside, there was a group shot of thirty-nine black models—men and women—represented by a new agency called Black Beauty, which was run by a white former model named Betty Foray. The story also touted the success of Charlene Dash, a twenty-year-old black model represented by the Ford Model Agency who’d done commercials for, among others, Clairol. Racial progress was measured in a multitude of ways, even by the color of the elegant faces that smiled from the pages of fashion magazines and by the race of the men and women who dressed them.
Basic Black at Bergdorf’s was exemplary, not simply because it celebrated black designers, but because people believed that fashion could change this country for the better. People believed American fashion, in its choices and depictions of beauty, could help everyone get along. Basic Black was not merely raising money for a cause; it was a way of standing on the right side of history—albeit with a cocktail in one’s hand and the smell of collard greens in the air.
* * *
France, too, was grappling with tumult, both social and economic. In the spring of 1968, a massive student uprising that broadened into a worker revolt and labor strike brought the country to its knees. Under the government of Charles de Gaulle, France in the 1960s had settled into a period of stability and affluence. The population was more urban, less religious, and better educated than it ever had been. Paris West University Nanterre La Défense was founded in 1964, just as France’s rural population was declining and vast numbers of citizens were moving into the cities and suburbs. With that shift came a growing number of university-age students ready to be educated in the ways of a cosmopolitan society. In 1938, France had 60,000 university students; by 1961 there were approximately 240,000. And by 1968 there were 605,000.8
Nanterre developed a reputation for a left-leaning atmosphere and would count among its alumni French president Nicolas Sarkozy; head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn; the woman who replaced him, Christine Lagarde; and French prime minister Dominique de Villepin.
Despite the country’s growing wealth and shifting demographics, France remained a paternalistic culture, one that created a sense of oppression and malaise for anyone who was not male, middle-aged, and bourgeois. From women to blue-collar workers, the country was roiling with discontent. The issues were minor to significant, aesthetic to substantive, both political and cultural.
In March of 1968, students at Nanterre began protesting against university rules that prohibited men and women on campus from after-class fraternizing. Fresh to adulthood and the freedoms that implied, students wanted to have sex in the privacy of their dorm rooms. They wanted to be unbound from the strictures of a conservative, structured, Father-knows-best culture. They were railing against Frenchness, as it was then perceived.
Thanks to the development of the birth control pill, modern medicine had given students a warrant for sexual liberation. In 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the Pill for use. Its popularity was instantaneous, sending millions of women to their doctors demanding it, so much so that in July 1968 Pope Paul VI declared the church’s opposition to the Pill in the Humanae Vitae encyclical. The sexual revolution was at full tilt. The Nanterre students’ sense of sexual oppression lit the fuse for the spring aggression, but a host of other issues led to the explosion.
The Vietnam War had unleashed, in France, a complicated mix of colonialism, communism, and nationalism. And while capitalism had stoked the French economy, the benefits were not trickling down to the workers. A cultural revolution was under way, and the protests of 1968 reflected the diffuse anger, frustration, and longing that grew from every little indignity. Even fashion could be exasperating. A law originally passed in 1800 that prohibited women from wearing pants was still honored in France. “In the sixties, women … couldn’t wear trousers,” fashion historian Pamela Golbin explains. “It’s difficult for us today to grasp that.”9
Indeed, when trousers first began to appear on the runways of André Courrèges and Yves Saint Laurent, the stir among the fashion press and consumers was not so much because of the silhouette but because of the subversive idea that a woman would defy the law by appearing publicly in a forbidden garment. “You couldn’t wear [pants] in a lot of places. You couldn’t wear them at the [restaurant] Côte Basque [in New York]. I had to drop my pants and go in in a tunic, and this was the early sixties,” socialite Nan Kempner said before her death in 2005.10
It wouldn’t be until January 31, 2013, that France would finally remove the 213-year-old anti-trouser law from its books.11
The student protests at Nanterre soon spread to the Latin Quarter and the neighborhood surrounding the Sorbonne, as frustrations exploded into the light. The students were joined by faculty members, who were joined by union workers, who were joined by sympathetic bystanders. The angry throngs began prying up the cobblestone streets and hurling the rocks at police in riot gear. The police responded with tear gas and billy clubs.
Protesters—“Trotskyites, anarchists and revolutionary students”12—attempted to burn the Bourse, the Paris stock exchange. They shattered windows along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where history had seen Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and Albert Camus take coffee and libations. Cars and buses were overturned, tires slashed, and gas tanks torched. Streets were barricaded by both police and the insurgents. General mayhem ruled the city for weeks as angry crowds ran from neighborhood to neighborhood seething with fury and discontent.
According to one contemporary account, “Red Cross workers with helmets ran through exploding tear gas grenades to give first aid treatment to the hundreds of casualties. As the police slowly drove the demonstrators up the Rue de Rennes, Red Cross workers carried youths and girls, with heads streaming with blood. Policemen and journalists with long years of experience of Paris riots almost disbelieved the evidence of their eyes as they viewed the scene of destruction.”13
Soon there was a total work stoppage as clock-punchers occupied their factories and fell in line with the students. France was grinding to a halt. “Everyone was concerned,” recalls Givenchy. “Americans, at that time, would not buy in France.”14
De Gaulle had to end the gridlock and the rioting. By early June, the trade unions had negotiated a 10 percent increase in all wages, as well as a 35 percent increase in the minimum wage. They won a shorter workweek and “mandatory employer consultations with workers.”15 And of course, the sexual revolution rolled through Paris unhindered. The streets were alive with emotion. The young men and women who had begun their protests properly attired in jackets and neat dresses ended them in jeans and with a decidedly scruffier look. If fashion is the costume of social tribes, society was at war. And it was clear who was winning.