Two upcoming Clark County events will put Black and African culture front and center: The African Fashion Show PDX on April 18 and the Black History Fashion Show on May 23.
The African Fashion Show PDX, 3 to 7 p.m. April 18 at the Vancouver Innovation Center in Fisher’s Landing, is a fundraiser for the Portland-based Firmina Foundation, which provides school buildings and educational materials for children in Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia.
“We choose villages that have no schools, where children are still learning under a mango tree,” said Firmina Foundation founder Rukshana Triem, 49. “We support the village economy. We buy things from the village and use local labor.”
This is the African Fashion Show’s fifth year, said Triem, but it’s the first time the event will be in Clark County. She said she chose the Vancouver Innovation Center because the venue will allow the nonprofit to use its own caterer, Adesa Delicious Food, serving Angolan cuisine, mini chicken pot pies and Portuguese egg tarts.
“Most spaces want us to use their catering but they won’t let us do African food,” Triem said.
Triem said she expects about 300 attendees at the event. The show will feature African-inspired fashions by seven designers, modeled by 60 people of all ages and sizes. The first woman on the catwalk will be 70-year-old Portland comedian Deborah Wooten-Williams, who has spina bifida. Triem said she’ll model fashions from her wheelchair. The event will also feature African dance lessons for attendees as well as drumming by the seven-member, multiracial Stuhr Fire Rhythm Group.
“In this time, we need more gathering, we need more music, we need more artists,” Triem said.
The event’s cultural umbrella is quite broad, Triem said, especially considering that Africa is comprised of 54 countries. Triem herself has lived in three of them. She was 5 years old when her family fled a war in Mozambique, she said. They hiked through the mountains for two days before finding refuge in a village in Malawi. They eventually moved to a refugee camp in Zambia, where they lived for five years. In 1992, when Triem was 15, her family was granted asylum in the United States and they immigrated to San Diego.
Triem moved to Portland in 2003, when she was 28. She became active in local nonprofits and launched Women’s Lifestyle Coaching. She now helps women build businesses, she said, as well as taking them on confidence-building outdoor adventures.
Her business helps to finance the Firmina Foundation, she said, though the annual fashion show does more than raise funds for the nonprofit. The event is also a way to “support the business in our backyard,” she said, especially those owned by women and people of color. Triem said 17 vendors will be at the event. Some will sell artisan products such as African clothes and beads. Others are small-business owners, like the travel agent who can help people plan trips to Africa, Triem said.
“This is the moment for us to come together and share our culture, because culture opens up opportunities for us to get to know each other,” said Triem.
Author Ruby N. Lewis, chairwoman and president of the Vancouver nonprofit Please Don’t Die Black Men (aka PDDBM), will be at the event under her pen name Lewa Ubunifu. She’ll sell her children’s book, “Ifé Lela’s Magical Escape,” as well as her other books and plays.
Lewis will share a table with PDDBM’s treasurer and marketing manager, Imara Muraty, who will sell merchandise and clothing to support PDDBM. Meanwhile, PDDBM will host its own Black History Fashion Show and Cultural Experience on May 23 at Generations Church in Vancouver.
“These cultural events are extremely important for adults but even more important for the kids,” Lewis said. “The kids need to be able to say, ‘I am beautiful. It’s OK to have my skin color, it’s OK to have my hair, it’s OK to have my cultural aspects of myself.’ ”
The show will feature fashions by three young designers of color: Desiray Anner, 12; Yaretzy Garcia Flores, 10; and Lewis’ daughter, Marianna Leonard, 16. Anner and Leonard each created 11 outfits for the show and Flores created five. They’ve been learning fashion design in PDDBM-sponsored classes, which are intensive after-school courses lasting many months. The students designed clothes for all ages and sizes, ranging from babies to adults.
The show was originally scheduled for February in honor of Black History Month, but Lewis, Leonard and Muraty — who is training to be a fashion design teacher — were all injured in a car accident in November. Classes had to be suspended for many weeks while the three women healed, Lewis said, and the show was postponed to give students time to complete their outfits.
Each student will have their own website and business cards to help them promote their work. The show is also an opportunity to raise PDDBM’s profile in the community and draw attention to its educational and outreach programs. Toward that end, the organization will debut its new mascot at the event: a 7-foot-tall Black man inspired by the nonprofit’s logo.
The May 23 event will include two exhibits in addition to the fashion show. One exhibit will highlight West African tribal hairstyles from the era before the transatlantic slave trade, Lewis said, noting that slave traders shaved Africans’ heads, robbing them of a vital element of cultural identity. The other exhibit is “a mini fashion designer museum,” Lewis said. Twenty-six panels will offer biographical information and images of African American fashion designers from the 1860s to the present.
The Black History Fashion Show is a way to share Black culture with the Clark County community, but Lewis said it also fights back against the tide of negative messages for Black children and children of color. Lewis said her daughter, a student in Vancouver Public Schools, was the target of racially motivated aggression. Seeing her daughter hurt that way was a deep pain she wouldn’t wish on any parent, she said.
“We have to support kids,” Lewis said. “We have to make sure that they are confident and can express themselves in creative ways, whether it’s fashion design or whatever. We have to let them know they’re special and they matter.”
