From Tampa to Paris, the Politics of Doechii’s Paris Fashion Week Debut
Plus fashion's contentious embrace of female hip-hop artists.
“As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.” - Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not a Luxury
Of all the celebrity sightings at Paris Fashion Week, Doechii’s debut was unequivocally the most impactful. Here was a dark-skinned, self-proclaimed Swamp Princess taking the famously elitist city by storm, clad in a series of couture looks produced on those very grounds. One day she was a grande dame presiding over the Louvre’s first Grand Fashion Dinner; the next, a barefoot vintage collector in transit to her next adventure. Doechii’s sartorial performance showcases a deft understanding of presentation as a storytelling vehicle. “She commits to a character or a look and embodies that DNA,” Doechii’s stylist Sam Woolf told Elle.
Indeed, Doechii imbued every look with an aura of warm earnestness and regal confidence that breathed life into them. If these images are imprinted in pop culture, it is not because of the clothes themselves but of the way Doechii personified them. And considering luxury’s fraught relationship with Black artists, her appearances feel that much more significant.
Doechii’s Paris Fashion Week debut has garnered all but positive online reactions, and this rising style icon has earned the praise. But as with each instance of the industry fixating on a new Black female rapper, there is a bit of apprehension within the community as we brace to potentially see the familiar “praise and discard” script play out. As the cultural critic
expressed in a recent video, “Be happy for the girls who get the money and the shine…but you have to do that while always having a little bit of skepticism in the back of your mind because it’s transitory, fleeting.”