Why isn’t America more Like Josephine Baker?

There is a certain idea that France has of America, and the French have of themselves, that was at the heart of a charming and elegant Stephane Rolland show, whose inspiration was Josephine Baker.

And as much about her heart as her art. In a collection dedicated to the American singer and dancer’s exceptional humanism. Seen in a memorable collection presented inside concert theatre Salle Pleyel. First Lady Brigitte Macron leading the applause at the finale.
 
In a week when the Trump administration has begun destroying all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in the U.S., this was a reminder that the most loved American in Paris fashion will always be Baker. A Black American woman who adopted a dozen children in a multiracial family during her long life in France. Creating a school for them in her rural chateau.

Baker arrived in France in 1925, one of the first American women of color to move there. Escaping the racism and segregation of her native St Louis where she saw Black families burnt out along the banks of the Mississippi. Nicknamed the Black Venus, she went on to become a singer, cabaret and film star, famed for erotic dancing. Hemingway called her: “The most sensational woman anyone ever saw.”
 
During WW2, she bravely worked as a spy for the French Resistance and the Allies; and then became actively engaged in the civil rights movement – the only woman speaker, dressed in her Free French uniform, who spoke with Martin Luther King at March on Washington in 1963.

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Rolland, a subtle creator, blended Baker’s chutzpah and pizzazz with one of her contemporaries, sculptor Constantin Brancusi. The result was a very distinct collection, that blended anatomically shaped silk gowns and columns suggesting exotic birds, with geometrical jackets and tops worn with broad shouldered gowns worthy of an imperial goddess.
 
One inverted V-shaped top in burnt cock feathers with a matching hat was Paris couture at its best. While a gleaming gold breastplate riffed on Brancusi’s most famous work, The Bird. The print-free palette was muddy brown, silver, russet and lots of white.
 
Baker’s legacy is also apparent in France’s Maison des Adolescents (MDE), where teenagers are accompanied to find good careers. Rolland has held Awakening Workshops with these MDE kids and brought them to ESMOD, Paris’ leading independent fashion school. Many other creatives – from filmmakers Claude Lelouch and Marilyn Fitoussi to la Comédie Française and the Opera de Paris – undertook similar initiatives. And marched from the runway to the front row to open the show.
 
Baker would surely have approved, as did this audience – 700 of whom had paid entrance fees to support these noble efforts. And to think that the same day CNN is reporting that Trump has initiated a freeze on all foreign aid. 
 
Baker would not have liked that, at all.