Showing our body,” said another.īehind the salacious visual and lyrics about diamonds, stilettos, and fellatio, Kimberly Jones was a young woman trying to exert her power in a man’s world. “She made people feel like that’s all we about. The TV show Rolanda, hosted by Rolanda Watts, aired an episode titled “Is Lil’ Kim sexualizing our children?” “The poster is vulgar and I think it misrepresents Black women,” said a young woman on the daytime show. In 1996, the image incited parental debates over whether the rapper was destroying the moral fabric of the country. Plastered around New York City, the soft-core promo had pedestrians doing double takes. Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core album - two million copies sold worldwide - was a fun, raunchy romp distilled into one famous image: the diminutive rapper wearing a leopard-print bikini and a fur-lined robe and squatting with both legs opened. In this exclusive excerpt, Krishnamurthy looks at how women in rap and design changed the game in the 1990s and early aughts, particularly Lil’ Kim, Donatella Versace, Kimora Lee Simmons, and the circle of superstars around them. In her book, Fashion Killa: How Hip-Hop Revolutionized High Fashion, longtime music journalist Sowmya Krishnamurthy chronicles the unique and often unlikely kinships - forged through family, friendships, and sometimes simply fame - that have been the basis of legendary collaborations between labels and tastemakers in Black music. He turned to a group of us and asked, 'Is it my imagination or did that show just make the audience horny?' It was a true fashion moment, a master class in raw sensuality that I have not witnessed since, and it signaled the arrival of Helmut Lang as one of fashion's masters.Luxury fashion has become synonymous with hip-hop, though not too long ago, many of its institutions would have turned their noses up at the rap stars who dominate pop culture today (and racism is still resonant in the industry despite modern strides). "As we left the Trocadero trying to digest what we'd seen but too uncomfortable to really discuss it, Woody Hochswender, who was then the fashion critic of The New York Times, wasted no time getting to the point. I'll never forget how visibly uncomfortable the audience was watching the parade of overt yet stripped-down beauty-the sexual tension in that room was beyond electric! If all that wasn't enough, it was also the first appearance of Helena Christensen on a runway-a showstopper in itself. See-through dresses and catsuits with beads and feathers were the only thing barely covering the girls' naked bodies underneath, the male models were clearly not wearing underwear, and half the cast was in bare feet. Every man and woman with bare, flushed faces and wet hair like they just stepped out of a hot shower, wearing rubberized suits and dresses that changed color with their body heat. In a complete 180 to the overly sexualized and choreographed shows of the time personified by Mugler, Montana, and Lacroix, the parade at Helmut was like machine-gun fire, one model after the other. I remember distinctly on arriving the whole audience complaining that the room felt overly humid, but then the lights went up, the heat was turned higher, and a watershed moment began. ![]() ![]() The thing I was most looking forward to that season was Helmut Lang's Paris show. "In 1991 I was a buyer for Charivari, a high-fashion boutique in New York.
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