Over a decade ago, Adrienne Jones, an artist, fashion designer, and professor at the Brooklyn-based Pratt Institute, received several scrapbooks from her godmother, Clara Branch. Like Jones, Branch was also a professor and connoisseur of fashion. She taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology and was well-known on campus for starting the Soul Fashion Club in the 1970s. The club gained a reputation of its own, hosting some of the biggest and boldest fashion shows on campus through the 1980s.
Flipping through the pages, Jones was in awe. “I thought I had a pretty good knowledge of Black designers,” said Jones, remembering the first time she came across the scrapbooks. “I realized how very little I knew.”
Inspired by Branch’s legacy and the early works of Black designers she found within the scrapbooks, Jones founded and curated the Black Dress Project at Pratt Institute in 2014.
“It felt like information that needed to be shared, not just through the books, but through my eyes. It was also around the time when discussions around the lack of diversity in the fashion industry,” she said.
Eventually, she added another dimension to the exhibition with accompanying panels, the Black Dress Talks. She brought together Black creatives and entrepreneurs who could talk about their work, the business, and the challenges and joys of the industry. But Jones also wanted the masses to realize, as she did, that Black influence was everywhere in fashion but was underacknowledged and, at worst, invisible — and that needed to change.
“We’re bringing to light all of these creative people who, you may know their work, but not necessarily know their face. Or know that they’re Black,” she said. “The majority [of Black work] has been behind the scenes.”
On April 9, more than a decade later, at the Pratt Student Union, she organized another panel, this time spotlighting jewelry, which she originally intended to group together in a panel about accessories. But Jones said the feedback was so overwhelming and so specific, it needed its own separate panel. It featured accomplished jewelry designers — many of whom already had seasoned careers elsewhere in the fashion world — Shara McHayle, Lorraine West, Angely Martinez, and Jameel Mohammed.
Marielle Argueza photos
Inspired by the hip hop and streetwear culture of Brooklyn in the ‘80s and ‘90s, McHayle (right) spoke about how her signature hoop earrings and their iterations were an ode to the bold and borrowed fashion choices of the Fly Girl. Credit: Marielle Argueza photo 
From left to right, Professor Adrienne Jones, who moderated the panel, and jewelers Shara McHayle, Lorraine West, Angely Martinez, and Jameel Mohammed. 
Jameel Mohammed was the youngest panelist featured and wanted to help reshape the narrative about luxury fashion. “Black People have always been luxurious,” he said. 
Audience members listen intently to the Black Dress Talks panelists at the Pratt Institute Student Union.
Panelists began by speaking about their origins in jewelry. McHayle, who created Hoop88Dreams, had perhaps the most unconventional start. She began her career in marketing and sales in the 1980s with the legendary streetwear brand PNB (Proud Nubian Brothers). Though her start was on the back end of the business, her experience with streetwear emboldened her to create and pay homage to the urban culture she had grown up with, specifically to the figure of the Fly Girl. “The Fly Girl is often borrowed from, but rarely celebrated,” she said. “I’m reclaiming her for us.”
Mohammed, the youngest of the panelists, creates jewelry, in part, also as an act of reclamation and shifting the dominant narratives in fashion. Inspired by the Black diaspora and the cultures of adornment that Black people come from, he hopes his jewelry will eventually become treasured heirlooms within families. “To see European culture, and to not see the residual Blackness, is a choice. Black people have always been luxurious,” he said.
But jewelry isn’t all about artistry and messaging. It is also about numbers, survival, and business. Martinez and West, who are neighbors in Manhattan’s Diamond District, spelled out some of the realities. Martinez explained that sometimes it was important to just take salaried contracts despite knowing the worth of their work. “You have to pay your rent, you have to eat, you have to live. Then you can focus on creating,” she said.
West remembered her excitement about her first $40,000 month, but being told by her peers that she needed to make those figures and more to survive the pandemic. For her, it was a lesson that she needed to be surrounded by people who would not only better her business but also be real with her. “Be around people about their business. I came late, but I’m still entitled to be better,” she said.
For Jones, the balance of bringing people who are not only experienced artists but who also embody the entrepreneurial spirit is what Black Dress is all about. “The importance for me in bringing this to the students at Pratt is so they know there are other options. You get a degree in fashion design; Does that mean you’re going to come out and be a designer? Or a creative director? There are so many different avenues you can go into,” she said.
As for the future, Jones said they’ve already touched on most categories. “It may be time to bring something back.”