Feeds to Follow: @nygelsartorial
The advent of digital media as an arbiter of history has complicated the idea of creative ownership and opened a floodgate of ahistorical takes on fashion (see: the too-common perception that Paris Hilton was the central innovator of “Y2K” fashion). As digital media has supplanted physical media over the last 20 years, a wave of digital archivists are preserving the cultural histories that exist only in physical formats and are in danger of being lost to time and degradation.
Magazines, advertisements, and other physical media are crucial parts of design history—they carry evidence of the stylistic innovations that inevitably come back in vogue as visual trends constantly cycle. Nygel Simons (@nygelsartorial) is an archivist dedicated to the distribution of such content, posting scans of the kinds of aforementioned physical media on his Twitter and Instagram feeds.
An essential part of his posts is the credits he lists in his captions: whenever possible, the photographer, stylist, makeup artist, and any other creatives involved are named. From editorial spreads to album artwork to advertisements, @nygelsartorial lives by the ethos that a stellar photo is the result of a vast nebulus of creative energy, and must be treated as such.
In our booming nostalgia economy, fashion archivism is thriving on Instagram but is often skewed towards designer-based curation, with accounts like @prada.archive, @mcqueen_vault, and @diorinthe2000s boasting some of the biggest followings. @nygelsartorial’s focus is primarily on highlighting the importance of Black women in fashion and design history—a history that fashion establishments have been all too eager to rewrite.
Hypervisible in pop culture but consistently under-credited for their innovation, aesthetics cultivated by Black creatives often return to the mainstream in different (whiter) packages years later. @nygelsartorial takes the time and nuance to properly celebrate the blueprints that make up the moodboards of all of your favorite creatives.
The account often highlights the legacy of Black style pioneers via the references embodied by their successors. As bits and bytes of aesthetic history are constantly being canonized, yet the legacy of Black fashion is often boiled down to the same few beats (looking at you, Lil’ Kim’s jumpsuit/pasty moment and Cam’ron’s pink mink), accounts like @nygelsartorial aim to provide a more expansive view of the vast creativity and eternal relevance of Black creatives.
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