Cross Colours: Black Fashion In The 20th Century

at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through March 1, 2020)
Reviewed by Seren Sensei

Everything old is new again. This motto has held steady for years in the world of fashion, with it’s here-today-gone-tomorrow trends, and nowhere has it rung more true than in the waves of 1990’s urban culture that are currently enjoying a huge resurgence on runways. As numerous high fashion and luxury brands clamor into the billion dollar market for streetwear, Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century, showing at the California African American Museum (CAAM), is a fresh and dynamic exhibit examining the history of the recently rebooted Cross Colours: a Black-owned brand that was one of the first to cater exclusively to a young, Black, and ‘urban,’ i.e. inner-city, customer who predominantly wore streetwear. A testament to its culture-shifting perspective, the retrospective opens with the story of how the line came to be, and then moves through its brand history and significance in time as viewers explore the gallery.

Life-sized mannequins on display wear the original designs, which primarily consisted of t-shirts, jackets, sweatshirts, shorts, and hats. Promotional materials like magazine advertisements and commercials are encased in glass or looped on screens, especially ones featuring a young Djimon Honsou early in his modeling career. Honsou peers out ferociously from a larger-than-life ad painted on the wall where he seems to yell at the onlooker, fists raised in a…