Minding My Black Business
This year has shown us, once again, the importance of supporting and buying Black. The BLM movement and protests for racial justice coupled with the fact that wealth in this country isn’t equally distributed have sparked a resurgence in loving and supporting our own; because, frankly, we all we got.
Say what you will about the Instagram algorithm (and I’m likely to agree) but one thing it does well is putting you on to people and pages that align with your tastes and lifestyle choices (giving a strong side eye to Tiktok...) One such page that I recently came across is the Black Fashion Designers Directory! Not only is the page’s layout visually appealing but it highlights Black designers of “…all countries, all ages and genders and positions,” per the page runners. The page was started in January 2019 by curators that work in the Fashion industry! Every few days to a week, the page features a different designer! They even highlighted one of the brands I love, Mifland! In my very first post, “The Cotton Trenches,” I wrote about how I was inspired to create this site because of Andre Leon Talley’s memoir, The Chiffon Trenches. While my goal for this wasn’t to be a fashion blog per se, I can’t deny that most of what I post leans towards the sartorial. So, you can imagine how ecstatic I was to come across this directory. It feels like kismet; serendipity. Scrolling their page just for a brief moment, I found a number of designers that excite me!
Twitter is a strange place… On one end, you have extreme political “discourse” and “news” and on the other, all the porn your puss could ever desire. I recently returned to Twitter after a years-long romp with Facebook and Instagram to find, unsurprisingly, that I had no idea what the Twitterverse was anymore. At any rate, I came across a tweet that asked something like, “is there a Black etsy-esque site?” Enter Miiriya! Miiriya is an e-commerce hub for Black-owned businesses! They have literally everything you could possibly need: From handwoven decorative baskets to facial toners, even anal beads! Yes, you read that correctly and yes, all of those items are currently in my cart… What’s also lovable about Miiriya is that, whoever runs their twitter page is a whole fool! Their retweet and meme game is SKRONG!! They’re also constantly adding new vendors and items to their site!
Honorable mention goes out to anyone else using their pages and platforms to amplify Black voices and businesses, and to make finding them easier for us all. Take Tyson Blackmon, for example. He’s created an IG story highlight reel dedicated to Black-owned businesses. Before starting this site and what also served as its inspiration, I created a highlight reel called Bzar Black — a curated space of Black artists found about Instagram. Shoutout to all of the Black creatives, content producers and entrepreneurs!
Being Black is hard. But it’s also fucking beautiful.
The tee I’m wearing in the pic for this post is by The Blackberry Vine.
