A Look at the Black Fashion Museum Collection and Designer Peter Davy

"Fashion is a magical system, and what we see as we leaf through glossy magazines is the look …and what we engage in is no longer only the … process of direct imitation, but …identification."

Blog post by O. Houston, citing Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity.

This exhibition looks at the collection from the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s (NMAAHC) Black Fashion Museum (BFM) which includes designs by Peter Davy (1944-1990), an Afro-Caribbean.

The Black Fashion Museum is one of the foundational collections at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It was donated to the Museum in June, 2007 by its founder, Lois Kindle Alexander-Lane (1916-2007), and her daughter, Joyce Bailey. Alexander-Lane passed away in September of that year.

The Black Fashion Museum was founded in Harlem in 1979. According to Mrs. Bailey, the museum was based in Harlem until 1996, when it was relocated to Washington, DC.

A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Lois loved fashion from an early age. She often visited the local department stores with her older sister Sammye to wistfully stare at the beautiful fashions in the store windows. They would then rush home to sketch and re-create the designs that they had seen. Those experiences became the basis for what became a life-long passion, even as she worked in other jobs.

After graduating from Dunbar High School in Little Rock, Lois moved to Hampton, Virginia to attend Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). She graduated in 1938, with a B.S. degree in English and Social Studies.

Shortly after graduating from Hampton University in 1938, she settled in Washington, DC where she became a 36-year employee of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a charter member of the National Council of Negro Women, an owner (1950-1955) of The Needle Nook boutique, and a freelance photographer. The boutique was located at 2700 Vermont Ave, NW.

After Alexander-Lane left the District of Columbia and then returned some thirty years later, the building would become the home of the Black Fashion Museum.

In the early 1960s, HUD transferred Lois to New York City. In 1963, she received a master's degree in retailing from New York University. Her thesis, "The Role of the Negro in Retailing in New York City from 1863 to the Present," received the Stern Brothers Award for Best Thesis. The research for her thesis spurred a desire to inform others about the unrecognized African Americans who were part of the history of American fashion, and to create opportunities for African Americans who wanted to enter the fashion industry.

In 1964, she opened another boutique. It was known as Lois Alexander and Company at 214 W. 125th Street.

In 1966, she founded two organizations: The Harlem Institute of Fashion (HIF) to educate youth about the achievements of blacks in fashion and to support their desires to become part of the fashion industry, and the National Association of Milliners, Dressmakers and Tailors (NAMDT) to develop practical means to assist HIF graduates find jobs in fashion.

This 1987 HIF flyer illustrates the kind of programs that they produced. It also demonstrates that Alexander-Lane was familiar with Peter Davy at least two years after he arrived in New York. He is listed twice under the category of designers.

In 1978 HIF received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant for $20,000 "to establish a fashion museum and sponsor seminars and workshops."

The grant allowed Alexander-Lane to travel across the country to find and acquire garments created by black designers. This field work allowed her to document the presence of black designers of fashion, costumes, hats and accessories.

View the fashion accessories in the NMAAHC collection.

Lois Kindle Alexander-Lane collected items made and worn by enslaved people, as well as designers and seamstress like Ann Lowe and Rosa Parks.

Ann Lowe (1898-1981), one of America’s most significant fashion designers, was born in Clayton, Alabama, the daughter and granddaughter of seamstresses. Lowe was extremely talented having started sewing at a very early age.

Around 1928, after years of making couture fashions for wealthy patrons, formal training in design school and operating her own salon, Anne Cohen in Tampa, Florida, she began working on commissions in New York at some of America’s best design houses, including Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Henri Bendel and Chez Sonia.

Ann Lowe designed clothes for America’s most affluent white families and individuals— the Rockefellers, Auchinclosses, DuPonts and Vanderbilts as well as Marjorie Merriweather Post, Marisol Rothschild, and Olivia de Havilland.

She is best remembered for creating the gown worn by Jacquelyn Bouvier when she married Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1953. Ms. Bouvier requested Lowe's services because she was highly recommended by former clients and friends of Ms. Bouvier.

Lowe also designed the gowns worn by the bridal attendants.


View more dresses designed by Ann Lowe from the NMAAHC collection.

Alexander-Lane collected this dress for the Black Fashion Museum. It was made by Rosa Parks, seamstress and noted Civil Rights activist.

This was the dress Mrs. Parks was working on when she refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955. Her refusal to move led to her arrest and the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, the progenitor of the modern Civil Rights Movement in America.

View additional Civil Rights items from the NMAAHC collection.

In 1988 the Black Fashion Museum moved to Washington, DC as a mobile museum that traveled to schools, church and civic organizations. In the early 1990s Lois Alexander-Lane returned to Washington and the BFM opened in the location of her former boutique, The Needle Nook. The Museum operated under the leadership of Alexander-Lane's daughter until June, 2007, when the collection, of several thousand objects, was donated to the NMAAHC.

Lois Kindle Alexander-Lane was willing to challenge monumental odds, to inform the world of the achievements of African American seamstresses, dressmakers and designers throughout American history. She dedicated her life to making spaces for African Americans to dream, and to realize their ambitions to be part of the fashion industry.

Born on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in 1944, Peter Davy moved to Trinidad in the early 1960s. There he developed a reputation for intricate beaded gowns for pageant queens, and elaborate costumes for carnivals in Trinidad and Tobago.


View costumes in the NMAAHC collection.

In 1985 he relocated to New York where he lived with his sister, Grace Johnson, on East 96th Street and later at 4518 Avenue K, Brooklyn. Initially he faced difficulty establishing himself as a recognized name in New York. Through Davy's persistence, his designs became popular from New York to Georgia. While in New York, he continued to design gowns for pageants.

Davy designed for individual clients, as well as fashion shows like the Harlem Institute of Fashion’s Designers Fashion Shows.

While the contours and sometimes the fabric of his designs were simple, he transformed the gowns into exceptional works of art with beads, sequins and cut-outs.

His hand-beaded gowns were donated to the Black Fashion Museum in 1993 by his sister, Grace Johnson.

Designers of haute couture express their ideas and thoughts more often with little regard for wearability and external expectations of what is flattering or comfortable. The ornamentation, fitted structure and padding are all intended to alter the shape or perceived shape of the body. Designers contribute to the wearer’s visual, emotional and social sense of self.

The clothes we wear help us make sense of our lives. Clothes represent an opportunity to display social status, whether actual or desired. Fashion consumption can be a substitute for identity that conveys a sense of power based on wealth, physical beauty or articulated sexuality.

Those who purchase designer fashions do so based on the expressed ideas and reputation of the designers and a belief that those fashions are a manifestation of their own personality.

The period from 1985-1990, (when Davy lived in New York) represented a mix of many fashion sensibilities, including traditional and reserved sophistication, casualness, glamour, urban street fashion, hyper-sexuality and nonconformity. It was a significant period of social, cultural and political change— an era that was a mixture of, new American conservatism that emphasized materialism and consumerism. Nationally, the yuppie (white) and buppie (black) college-educated baby boomers with highly successful jobs and expensive taste were the symbols of that decade.

View 1980s New York items in the NMAAHC collection.

The clothes and hairstyles that were worn by Michael Jackson, Madonna, Jennifer Beals, and other entertainment idols were imitated by the masses.

It was also a time in which those who were outside of the traditional, wealthy and established order began to push the boundaries of what was acceptable. These were challenges to the traditional safe and accepted attire.

View Michael Jackson's items in the NMAAHC collection.

Formal wear was worn during the daytime. And glittery, gold, silver, bronze and beaded accessories became part of the norm rather than exclusively for evening wear or special occasions.

View NMAAHC's hip-hop items from the 1980s.

Computers democratized the design process. Those who lacked math skills for making patterns or drawing skills for sketching were able to contribute through computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided design and drafting (CADD) software programs. The technology also allowed designers to see their creations in a variety of colors and multi-dimensions.

Combined with the traditional modes for learning design (flat pattern construction, draping and line drawing) computers became valuable resources that enhanced the existing processes as well as time-saving tools.

More than anything, it was the era of openly expressive sexuality and gender-bending as shown by Boy George with heavy make-up and skirts. A major influence was the growth of the fitness boom. People wanted to show off their beautiful bodies. The development of stretched, tight Spandex fueled the presentation of the body beautiful as public art. Fashion designers were creating clothes that were form-fitting, while also combining country club extravagance and urban street as the new norm.

As a young black male immigrant to America, Peter Davy faced many challenges in becoming a recognized designer of high fashion.

By the time of his death, five years after arriving in the fashion center of the world, he was respected as someone who created exceptional and elegant evening wear for women.

Peter Davy was born to create clothes. And he was so determined to do so that, by age nine, he had taught himself how to sew and assemble cut-out pieces into clothes for himself.

Even with limited resources, he resolved to make his own fashions and used whatever materials were available to him.

Davy loved covering his gowns with dazzling and sparkling beads.

In 1993, Peter Davy’s sister, Grace Johnson, donated more than 50 gowns to the Black Fashion Museum. It was the largest single collection in the Black Fashion Museum. Davy was so well regarded by Lois K. Alexander Lane that she mounted three retrospective exhibitions in his honor in 1993, 1994 and 2000.

NMAAHC would like to learn more about Peter Davy. If you knew him, have photographs or recordings of him, or have any carnival costumes or images, we would like to hear from you.

Please visit our website to share with us any memories, materials or documents about Peter Davy you may have.

Follow us on social media @nmaahc and search #APeoplesJourney to find more stories from our museum.

In the 1980s the growth of the computer and technology fields intersected with the fashion industry.

Fashion designs greatly benefited from the development of the computer.

This included patterns, textile weaving configurations, sizing designs and as well as the drafting of sketches.