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Kerby Jean-Raymond continues to break new ground for Black fashion designers as the creative director of Pyer Moss.
On Thursday, the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode announced that the New York-based label will appear on the official calendar as a guest member for Paris Haute Couture week in July, making Jean-Raymond the first Black American designer to be invited by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture to present a collection.
The news comes one month after the acclaimed designer confirmed he will be presenting his Spring/Summer 2022 Pyer Moss Collection 4 during New York Fashion Week in September. The show — which is set to take place just days before the 2021 Met Gala — will mark Jean-Raymond’s return to the N.Y.C. runway after a nearly two-year hiatus.
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The Council of Fashion Designers of America recently announced that New York Fashion Week will run from Sept. 8-12 and will return to in-person shows if state guidelines permit.
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Pyer Moss’ last New York Fashion Week show, entitled “American, Also,” debuted in 2020 at the Brooklyn’s Kings Theater in the designer’s home neighborhood of Flatbush. Like most of Jean-Raymond’s work, the presentation challenged “the exclusion of African Americans in many aspects of American culture,” the label stated.
During a conversation with one of his biggest celebrity supporters, Tracee Ellis Ross, at Vogue‘s Forces of Fashion in 2019, Jean-Raymond reflected on the inspiration for his designs.
“We’ve been asked to repatroitize African Americans in a time that feels very xenophobic, elitist, and exclusionary. So we’ve been highlighting the stories of African American contributions to the American popular space,” he said of his “American, Also” collections. “The first collection of the series was done here [at Spring Studios], so we met you guys where you were. The second one was at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and the third takes you back to where I’m from in Flatbush, Brooklyn.”
He continued, “We turned the Kings Theatre into a hood fashion party, it was definitely a sight to behold. It was the craziest thing to behold because there were 3,000 people inside and another 1,000 outside. We reactivated the choir, have done film collaborations, to tell this story and make it into something that was truly special.”
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