Performative Elegance: The Windrush Generation, Fashion and the Politics of Respectability

Abstract

This chapter will look at the capacity of fashion to act as a space for conformity and resistance against othering, to mitigate against the negative perceptions of Blackness. Using the context of the first Windrush arivees and the generation that followed immediately after (1948–1978), this chapter aims to investigate why this performative elegance was not enough and how the desire to fit in turned into the desire to fight back for the generation to follow. This arrival initially saw many Black people from the Caribbean arrive in Britain for the first time, some wearing their best clothes or clothing specific for the occasion of arriving in the “Mother Country” to look for work. The sartorial inference suggested one of elegance and dignity supposedly befitting for a new life in Britain.

Using the theory of epistemological violence and how this has been wrought against the Black body, this essay will discuss how the history of misinterpreted empirical data has become so impacted in universal general knowledge that Blackness does not just embody fear and disgust to non-Black people, but also to people who themselves live with darker skin. I will look at how Black people adopted the use of clothing and respectability politics as a tool with which to disassociate themselves from wider society’s projections and how they aimed to identify their true selves whilst maintaining agency and dignity amidst the disallowance to exist peacefully.