Featured designs by Franklin Rowe International, Fluid Covenant, House of Khady Rose and INDEO/Ayinde. Images courtesy of the respective designers and their official pages. Composite artwork and design by HarlemAmerica
Harlem Week 2026 Fashion Review: The Avenue Was the Front Row
The energy was undeniable—and Franklin Rowe International, Khady Rose, Fluid Covenant and Iende Bradford gave Harlem four very different reasons to keep watching.
Fashion loves a velvet rope. Harlem has never had much use for one.
During Harlem Week 2026, the runway belonged to the public. Jackie Robinson Park and West 135th Street replaced guarded showrooms. Elders, families, HBCU students and serious fashion people watched from the same side of the barricade. You did not need a publicist or seating chart to confirm your importance. You simply had to show up.
The larger lineup brought youthful streetwear, occasion dressing and plenty of neighborhood energy. Within that wide field, four designers held our attention most strongly: Franklin Rowe International, House of Khady Rose, Fluid Covenant and Ayinde Bradford’s INDEO.
They did not resemble one another, and that was the pleasure: veteran mastery, culturally grounded elegance, gender-fluid experimentation and streetwear as a blueprint for a Black future.
Together, they reminded us that “Black fashion” is not a look. It is a vast and sometimes argumentative conversation.
Harlem Built The Room Outdoors
The fashion programming unfolded across two main events. On August 1, the Popsicle Streetwear Fashion Show brought ten Black designers and more than thirty-five HBCU student models to Jackie Robinson Park. Boutique BLVD, Artisan’s Alley and an Air Force 1 customization activation turned the event into more than a presentation. The audience could watch, shop, eat, listen and participate.
On August 15, Summer in the City carried fashion onto West 135th Street through “Fashion Flava,” “Clean and Classic” and Back-to-School segments. Streetwear, experimental design, occasion clothing and youth apparel could coexist without pretending they served the same customer.
The production lacked Fashion Week’s controlled lighting and surgical pacing. It also had something those rooms cannot manufacture: public response. Clothes had to compete with music, heat, conversation and Harlem itself. On 135th Street, the audience is never background.
The broader field included labels such as Signed By McFly, Mugzy McFly, Trucking Fly and others that added graphic energy and demonstrated the reach of Harlem Week’s platform.
Ayinde Bradford and INDEO: Streetwear With a Blueprint
Calling INDEO streetwear is accurate in the way that calling Harlem a neighborhood is accurate. It tells you where to begin, not everything that is there.
Ayinde Bradford builds from athletic proportions, functional clothing and graphic language, but the brand’s deeper engine is Afrofuturism. Too often, that word gets reduced to silver fabric, spaceships and a pair of futuristic sunglasses. Bradford uses it more seriously: as a way of imagining Black life beyond the limits other people have drawn around it.
His architectural background matters. Both disciplines organize space around the body through structure and proportion. INDEO’s strongest work treats the garment like a portable environment—a uniform for moving through the present while insisting upon a future.
That idea belonged on a Harlem runway. The clothes moved among the people whose future the work imagines. Athletic ease kept the concepts grounded; graphic language gave them urgency.
INDEO’s success was its refusal to choose between thought and utility. These were clothes with ideas, but they remembered that somebody still has to wear them down the block.
Fluid Covenant: Refinement Without Obedience
Fluid Covenant was the show’s useful disruption.
The Brooklyn project approaches fashion as image-making as much as a conventional label. Its world includes designers, photographers and stylists, and Harlem Week presented the collection as “Fluid Covenant by Benji.” That collaborative identity suits work moving between categories.
The name explains the proposition. “Fluid” refuses rigid boundaries—masculine and feminine, clothing and costume, product and experiment—while “Covenant” suggests relationship between garment, body, maker and witness.
Deconstructed layers and unsettled proportions challenged the assumption that refinement must be neat, conservative or gender compliant. Fluid Covenant did not offer easy answers. Good. Black designers deserve permission to be strange, difficult and ahead of the customer—not only uplifting, saleable and immediately understood.
Placed within the Clean and Classic segment, the collection asked who gets to define “clean,” whose body determines “classic,” and why elegance is so often confused with obedience. The strongest looks behaved as though gender lines were never particularly useful.
Instead of chasing universal appeal, Fluid Covenant made experimentation part of the community conversation rather than an imported art-school exercise.
Franklin Rowe International: A Master Class In Entrance-Making
Then came Franklin Rowe, and the room—or in this case, the avenue—remembered what experience looks like.
Rowe’s decades across fashion, styling and costume show. His vocabulary carries 1940s glamour, European tailoring and an understanding that a garment should transform in motion. Silk, jersey, leather and strategic exposure are tools he controls, not novelty effects.
The signature Klio construction remains his clearest calling card: an open-shouldered form with continuous sleeves creating a dramatic line from wrist toward the lower body. It is architecture with a little Mahogany in its bloodstream—designed to create an outline you remember after the wearer has left.
Fashion coverage is addicted to the word “emerging,” as though relevance has an expiration date. Rowe offered the corrective: a developed signature can deliver what trendier talents often cannot—authority without strain. The clothes knew exactly what they wanted to be.
This is not nostalgia. Rowe’s glamour survives because construction supports spectacle. Movement activates the shape; the body completes the line. Nothing begs for attention when it understands the entrance.
Franklin Rowe International gave the show its strongest sense of continuity—proof that Black design history is not something to honor only in photographs. Sometimes it is still working, evolving and standing directly in front of us.
House of Khady Rose: Elegance Knows Her Name
House of Khady Rose brought quiet authority, never to be mistaken for timidity.
Senegal-born Khady Sy Rose designs for women who understand the force of composure. Her clothes draw from African heritage through craft, line and bearing without reducing that heritage to obvious print or costume. Fluid fabrics, tailored shapes and graceful movement carried the collection from daytime polish toward occasion dressing.
Western fashion frequently allows African influence only one volume setting: exuberant. House of Khady Rose claimed the rest of the dial. African and diasporic luxury can be restrained, tailored and sensual; cultural specificity does not disappear when the garment is not shouting.
The collection also recognized a woman too often ignored when fashion chases youth at full speed. She does not need cutouts to prove confidence or a trend cycle to certify relevance. She wants clothing that respects her presence, accommodates an actual occasion and knows the difference between decoration and elegance.
On a multigenerational Harlem runway, that customer was not theoretical. She was in the audience, beautifully dressed and evaluating every seam.
House of Khady Rose knew exactly whom it was speaking to: grace without apology, delivered fluently.
What Harlem Week got right—and what comes next
Harlem Week connected visibility to community. HBCU models gained runway experience, images and relationships. Designers reached beyond the usual industry circle, while vendor areas allowed admiration to become a purchase. Applause feels good; a returning customer builds a business.
That strong foundation also creates opportunities to deepen the connection between designers and their audience. Expanded collection notes, professional look photography and permanent post-show sales links could give each presentation a life beyond the runway. A program QR code could carry the excitement directly from the show to a designer’s storefront before the final music fades—while creating a lasting record of the creativity Harlem Week brought together.
As the platform continues to grow, enhanced schedules, designer biographies and direct shopping information could make an already dynamic presentation even more useful to audiences, designers and the broader story of Black fashion.
The Avenue Knows What It Saw
The four standouts offered distinct definitions of Black design without being asked to become one thing. That may be the show’s most valuable lesson.
Our style has always come from collision: church hats and sneakers, African memory and New York nerve, a tailor’s discipline and a teenager’s customization, the veteran who has perfected a signature and the young designer who would rather dismantle the rules.
For two August Saturdays, Harlem Week placed those collisions in public. Established names, independent experimenters, streetwear labels and community businesses shared one platform—a fuller picture of the creativity already moving through the city.
The avenue became the front row, the marketplace and the critic. And when the four strongest voices stepped forward, Harlem knew exactly what it was looking at.
Bevy Smith: Harlem Made, Harlem Proud
The 2026 Harlem Week Trailblazer honoree built a second act by refusing to leave her first home—or her authentic voice—behind
Bevy Smith has never needed to add “of Harlem” to her name for branding purposes. Harlem is already present—in the cadence, the confidence, the standards and the instinct to turn a gathering into an opportunity.
That is why Smith’s 2026 Harlem Week Trailblazer Award felt less like an institution recognizing a media personality than the neighborhood honoring one of its own. Born Beverly Smith and raised near 150th Street and Eighth Avenue, she has carried Harlem into fashion boardrooms, television studios, publishing and the global TED stage without allowing those platforms to edit the neighborhood out of her. Her career is frequently described as reinvention. More accurately, it is a story of self-possession.
Harlem supplied the first fashion education
Smith grew up surrounded by evidence that style was not reserved for the wealthy or fashion-industry approved. Her mother staged fashion shows at home, changing outfits and wigs while her father photographed the looks. Outside, the women of the neighborhood offered another curriculum. Smith has recalled the barmaids at the Dunbar Tavern in their furs, jewelry, immaculate hair and sculpted nails—working women who understood presentation as dignity and pleasure.
Harlem also gave her historical consciousness. Black teachers taught Black history throughout the year, while Strivers’ Row, local institutions and streets named for Black leaders made achievement feel geographically close. Even through the devastation of the crack era, Smith’s Harlem remained a place of culture, community and exacting standards.
That foundation explains why her later fashion commentary never sounded imported from a press release. She knew luxury as aspiration, but she also knew style as resourcefulness: the ability to create an entrance before anyone had confirmed your invitation.
From selling fashion to owning her voice
Smith entered media through advertising sales and rose inside an industry where executive power remained overwhelmingly white and male. At Vibe, she became Fashion and Beauty Advertising Director as hip-hop’s cultural influence forced luxury brands to recognize the Black consumer’s economic power. She later became Rolling Stone’s Senior Director of Luxury Fashion Advertising.
On paper, she had arrived: European travel, prestigious mastheads, executive access and a six-figure income. At thirty-eight, however, Smith recognized that the glamorous career no longer matched her purpose and resigned without a television job waiting.
The decision became the origin of her signature philosophy: “It gets greater later.” Smith does not present reinvention as wishful thinking. Her version requires savings, relationships, preparation and the courage to become a beginner after mastering another field.
She built that next chapter through Dinner with Bevy, an invitation-only salon bringing fashion, entertainment, art and business figures to the same table. The dinners translated an old Harlem practice—the social gathering as cultural and economic infrastructure—into a contemporary media platform. Smith was connecting people who could make something happen for one another.
Bevelations become a media language
Television eventually caught up with the personality Harlem had long known. As a BET News correspondent, Smith hosted the network’s 2012 remembrance of Whitney Houston. On Bravo’s Fashion Queens, alongside Derek J and Miss Lawrence, she brought sharp critique, humor and Black cultural fluency to a national conversation that made room for ballroom language, street observation and high-fashion analysis.
Smith later co-hosted Page Six TV, appeared regularly on daytime television and played Aunt Tammy in Prime Video’s Harlem. Her SiriusXM program Bevelations expanded her voice through long-form interviews and cultural commentary, earning her a Gracie Award for national radio hosting.
Her 2021 memoir, Bevelations: Lessons from a Mutha, Auntie, Bestie, turned experience into a guide for boundaries, worth and second acts. A year later, her TED Talk, “How to Discover Your Authentic Self—at Any Age,” carried that message worldwide, surpassing 6.4 million plays and becoming one of TED’s most-watched presentations of 2022.
Its reach mattered, but so did Smith’s age: fifty-five. In an industry inclined to give women—especially Black women—an expiration date, she made maturity the source of authority.
A trailblazer who keeps the trail connected to home
Smith’s national profile has never displaced her civic work. She has supported Housing Works and Harlem United, served on the board of Cool Culture and hosted events connected to the Apollo Theater, Harlem EatUp! and the African American Day Parade.
That is the difference between using Harlem as an aesthetic and accepting responsibility for its future. Smith supports its businesses and institutions, speaks about its history and remains rooted in the neighborhood as gentrification transforms the landscape around her.
Her Harlem Week honor recognizes more than a résumé. It celebrates a cultural connector who entered corporate rooms, absorbed their knowledge and relationships, then built platforms governed by her own values. Her life also speaks to the designers on Harlem Week’s runways, who negotiate the distance between visibility and ownership, influence and compensation, institutional approval and community accountability.
Smith’s answer remains consistent: know where you come from, know what you bring to the table and never confuse a prestigious seat with possession of your power. It gets greater later—but, as Bevy would surely remind us, only when you do the work.
This Month’s Featured Articles
FeaturedHarlemEntertainmentHarlemHistory
Peggy Cooper Cafritz saw possibility in Black artists before the art establishment supplied its approval. Her historic bequest to the Studio Museum in Harlem now reveals how collecting, education and cultural power can help determine what America remembers.
Derriann Pharr, Simonette Quamina and Taylor Simmons became the first Artist-in-Residence cohort to work inside the Studio Museum in Harlem's purpose-built studios. Their exhibition, A sustained becoming, reveals three distinct approaches to the body, memory and the freedom to imagine what comes next.
Black horror has always known how to make fear political, laughter protective and darkness look magnificent. From Blacula and Ganja & Hess to Blade, Get Out and Vampire in Brooklyn, Black filmmakers have transformed the genre—and Harlem is ready to talk back to the screen.
Black filmmakers are no longer waiting for Hollywood's permission. From Harlem to the Harlems of the world, they are protecting their voices, owning their images and building new roads to audiences. The ABFF New York City Pop-Up shows what becomes possible when Black stories reach the screen on their own terms.
Harlem Week 2026 Fashion Review: The Avenue Was the Front Row
The energy was undeniable—and Franklin Rowe International, Khady Rose, Fluid Covenant and Iende Bradford gave Harlem four very different reasons to keep watching.
Fashion loves a velvet rope. Harlem has never had much use for one.
During Harlem Week 2026, the runway belonged to the public. Jackie Robinson Park and West 135th Street replaced guarded showrooms. Elders, families, HBCU students and serious fashion people watched from the same side of the barricade. You did not need a publicist or seating chart to confirm your importance. You simply had to show up.
The larger lineup brought youthful streetwear, occasion dressing and plenty of neighborhood energy. Within that wide field, four designers held our attention most strongly: Franklin Rowe International, House of Khady Rose, Fluid Covenant and Ayinde Bradford’s INDEO.
They did not resemble one another, and that was the pleasure: veteran mastery, culturally grounded elegance, gender-fluid experimentation and streetwear as a blueprint for a Black future.
Together, they reminded us that “Black fashion” is not a look. It is a vast and sometimes argumentative conversation.
Harlem Built The Room Outdoors
The fashion programming unfolded across two main events. On August 1, the Popsicle Streetwear Fashion Show brought ten Black designers and more than thirty-five HBCU student models to Jackie Robinson Park. Boutique BLVD, Artisan’s Alley and an Air Force 1 customization activation turned the event into more than a presentation. The audience could watch, shop, eat, listen and participate.
On August 15, Summer in the City carried fashion onto West 135th Street through “Fashion Flava,” “Clean and Classic” and Back-to-School segments. Streetwear, experimental design, occasion clothing and youth apparel could coexist without pretending they served the same customer.
The production lacked Fashion Week’s controlled lighting and surgical pacing. It also had something those rooms cannot manufacture: public response. Clothes had to compete with music, heat, conversation and Harlem itself. On 135th Street, the audience is never background.
The broader field included labels such as Signed By McFly, Mugzy McFly, Trucking Fly and others that added graphic energy and demonstrated the reach of Harlem Week’s platform.
Ayinde Bradford and INDEO: Streetwear With a Blueprint
Calling INDEO streetwear is accurate in the way that calling Harlem a neighborhood is accurate. It tells you where to begin, not everything that is there.
Ayinde Bradford builds from athletic proportions, functional clothing and graphic language, but the brand’s deeper engine is Afrofuturism. Too often, that word gets reduced to silver fabric, spaceships and a pair of futuristic sunglasses. Bradford uses it more seriously: as a way of imagining Black life beyond the limits other people have drawn around it.
His architectural background matters. Both disciplines organize space around the body through structure and proportion. INDEO’s strongest work treats the garment like a portable environment—a uniform for moving through the present while insisting upon a future.
That idea belonged on a Harlem runway. The clothes moved among the people whose future the work imagines. Athletic ease kept the concepts grounded; graphic language gave them urgency.
INDEO’s success was its refusal to choose between thought and utility. These were clothes with ideas, but they remembered that somebody still has to wear them down the block.
Fluid Covenant: Refinement Without Obedience
Fluid Covenant was the show’s useful disruption.
The Brooklyn project approaches fashion as image-making as much as a conventional label. Its world includes designers, photographers and stylists, and Harlem Week presented the collection as “Fluid Covenant by Benji.” That collaborative identity suits work moving between categories.
The name explains the proposition. “Fluid” refuses rigid boundaries—masculine and feminine, clothing and costume, product and experiment—while “Covenant” suggests relationship between garment, body, maker and witness.
Deconstructed layers and unsettled proportions challenged the assumption that refinement must be neat, conservative or gender compliant. Fluid Covenant did not offer easy answers. Good. Black designers deserve permission to be strange, difficult and ahead of the customer—not only uplifting, saleable and immediately understood.
Placed within the Clean and Classic segment, the collection asked who gets to define “clean,” whose body determines “classic,” and why elegance is so often confused with obedience. The strongest looks behaved as though gender lines were never particularly useful.
Instead of chasing universal appeal, Fluid Covenant made experimentation part of the community conversation rather than an imported art-school exercise.
Franklin Rowe International: A Master Class In Entrance-Making
Then came Franklin Rowe, and the room—or in this case, the avenue—remembered what experience looks like.
Rowe’s decades across fashion, styling and costume show. His vocabulary carries 1940s glamour, European tailoring and an understanding that a garment should transform in motion. Silk, jersey, leather and strategic exposure are tools he controls, not novelty effects.
The signature Klio construction remains his clearest calling card: an open-shouldered form with continuous sleeves creating a dramatic line from wrist toward the lower body. It is architecture with a little Mahogany in its bloodstream—designed to create an outline you remember after the wearer has left.
Fashion coverage is addicted to the word “emerging,” as though relevance has an expiration date. Rowe offered the corrective: a developed signature can deliver what trendier talents often cannot—authority without strain. The clothes knew exactly what they wanted to be.
This is not nostalgia. Rowe’s glamour survives because construction supports spectacle. Movement activates the shape; the body completes the line. Nothing begs for attention when it understands the entrance.
Franklin Rowe International gave the show its strongest sense of continuity—proof that Black design history is not something to honor only in photographs. Sometimes it is still working, evolving and standing directly in front of us.
House of Khady Rose: Elegance Knows Her Name
House of Khady Rose brought quiet authority, never to be mistaken for timidity.
Senegal-born Khady Sy Rose designs for women who understand the force of composure. Her clothes draw from African heritage through craft, line and bearing without reducing that heritage to obvious print or costume. Fluid fabrics, tailored shapes and graceful movement carried the collection from daytime polish toward occasion dressing.
Western fashion frequently allows African influence only one volume setting: exuberant. House of Khady Rose claimed the rest of the dial. African and diasporic luxury can be restrained, tailored and sensual; cultural specificity does not disappear when the garment is not shouting.
The collection also recognized a woman too often ignored when fashion chases youth at full speed. She does not need cutouts to prove confidence or a trend cycle to certify relevance. She wants clothing that respects her presence, accommodates an actual occasion and knows the difference between decoration and elegance.
On a multigenerational Harlem runway, that customer was not theoretical. She was in the audience, beautifully dressed and evaluating every seam.
House of Khady Rose knew exactly whom it was speaking to: grace without apology, delivered fluently.
What Harlem Week got right—and what comes next
Harlem Week connected visibility to community. HBCU models gained runway experience, images and relationships. Designers reached beyond the usual industry circle, while vendor areas allowed admiration to become a purchase. Applause feels good; a returning customer builds a business.
That strong foundation also creates opportunities to deepen the connection between designers and their audience. Expanded collection notes, professional look photography and permanent post-show sales links could give each presentation a life beyond the runway. A program QR code could carry the excitement directly from the show to a designer’s storefront before the final music fades—while creating a lasting record of the creativity Harlem Week brought together.
As the platform continues to grow, enhanced schedules, designer biographies and direct shopping information could make an already dynamic presentation even more useful to audiences, designers and the broader story of Black fashion.
The Avenue Knows What It Saw
The four standouts offered distinct definitions of Black design without being asked to become one thing. That may be the show’s most valuable lesson.
Our style has always come from collision: church hats and sneakers, African memory and New York nerve, a tailor’s discipline and a teenager’s customization, the veteran who has perfected a signature and the young designer who would rather dismantle the rules.
For two August Saturdays, Harlem Week placed those collisions in public. Established names, independent experimenters, streetwear labels and community businesses shared one platform—a fuller picture of the creativity already moving through the city.
The avenue became the front row, the marketplace and the critic. And when the four strongest voices stepped forward, Harlem knew exactly what it was looking at.
Bevy Smith: Harlem Made, Harlem Proud
The 2026 Harlem Week Trailblazer honoree built a second act by refusing to leave her first home—or her authentic voice—behind
Bevy Smith has never needed to add “of Harlem” to her name for branding purposes. Harlem is already present—in the cadence, the confidence, the standards and the instinct to turn a gathering into an opportunity.
That is why Smith’s 2026 Harlem Week Trailblazer Award felt less like an institution recognizing a media personality than the neighborhood honoring one of its own. Born Beverly Smith and raised near 150th Street and Eighth Avenue, she has carried Harlem into fashion boardrooms, television studios, publishing and the global TED stage without allowing those platforms to edit the neighborhood out of her. Her career is frequently described as reinvention. More accurately, it is a story of self-possession.
Harlem supplied the first fashion education
Smith grew up surrounded by evidence that style was not reserved for the wealthy or fashion-industry approved. Her mother staged fashion shows at home, changing outfits and wigs while her father photographed the looks. Outside, the women of the neighborhood offered another curriculum. Smith has recalled the barmaids at the Dunbar Tavern in their furs, jewelry, immaculate hair and sculpted nails—working women who understood presentation as dignity and pleasure.
Harlem also gave her historical consciousness. Black teachers taught Black history throughout the year, while Strivers’ Row, local institutions and streets named for Black leaders made achievement feel geographically close. Even through the devastation of the crack era, Smith’s Harlem remained a place of culture, community and exacting standards.
That foundation explains why her later fashion commentary never sounded imported from a press release. She knew luxury as aspiration, but she also knew style as resourcefulness: the ability to create an entrance before anyone had confirmed your invitation.
From selling fashion to owning her voice
Smith entered media through advertising sales and rose inside an industry where executive power remained overwhelmingly white and male. At Vibe, she became Fashion and Beauty Advertising Director as hip-hop’s cultural influence forced luxury brands to recognize the Black consumer’s economic power. She later became Rolling Stone’s Senior Director of Luxury Fashion Advertising.
On paper, she had arrived: European travel, prestigious mastheads, executive access and a six-figure income. At thirty-eight, however, Smith recognized that the glamorous career no longer matched her purpose and resigned without a television job waiting.
The decision became the origin of her signature philosophy: “It gets greater later.” Smith does not present reinvention as wishful thinking. Her version requires savings, relationships, preparation and the courage to become a beginner after mastering another field.
She built that next chapter through Dinner with Bevy, an invitation-only salon bringing fashion, entertainment, art and business figures to the same table. The dinners translated an old Harlem practice—the social gathering as cultural and economic infrastructure—into a contemporary media platform. Smith was connecting people who could make something happen for one another.
Bevelations become a media language
Television eventually caught up with the personality Harlem had long known. As a BET News correspondent, Smith hosted the network’s 2012 remembrance of Whitney Houston. On Bravo’s Fashion Queens, alongside Derek J and Miss Lawrence, she brought sharp critique, humor and Black cultural fluency to a national conversation that made room for ballroom language, street observation and high-fashion analysis.
Smith later co-hosted Page Six TV, appeared regularly on daytime television and played Aunt Tammy in Prime Video’s Harlem. Her SiriusXM program Bevelations expanded her voice through long-form interviews and cultural commentary, earning her a Gracie Award for national radio hosting.
Her 2021 memoir, Bevelations: Lessons from a Mutha, Auntie, Bestie, turned experience into a guide for boundaries, worth and second acts. A year later, her TED Talk, “How to Discover Your Authentic Self—at Any Age,” carried that message worldwide, surpassing 6.4 million plays and becoming one of TED’s most-watched presentations of 2022.
Its reach mattered, but so did Smith’s age: fifty-five. In an industry inclined to give women—especially Black women—an expiration date, she made maturity the source of authority.
A trailblazer who keeps the trail connected to home
Smith’s national profile has never displaced her civic work. She has supported Housing Works and Harlem United, served on the board of Cool Culture and hosted events connected to the Apollo Theater, Harlem EatUp! and the African American Day Parade.
That is the difference between using Harlem as an aesthetic and accepting responsibility for its future. Smith supports its businesses and institutions, speaks about its history and remains rooted in the neighborhood as gentrification transforms the landscape around her.
Her Harlem Week honor recognizes more than a résumé. It celebrates a cultural connector who entered corporate rooms, absorbed their knowledge and relationships, then built platforms governed by her own values. Her life also speaks to the designers on Harlem Week’s runways, who negotiate the distance between visibility and ownership, influence and compensation, institutional approval and community accountability.
Smith’s answer remains consistent: know where you come from, know what you bring to the table and never confuse a prestigious seat with possession of your power. It gets greater later—but, as Bevy would surely remind us, only when you do the work.
This Month’s Featured Articles
FeaturedHarlemEntertainmentHarlemHistory
Peggy Cooper Cafritz saw possibility in Black artists before the art establishment supplied its approval. Her historic bequest to the Studio Museum in Harlem now reveals how collecting, education and cultural power can help determine what America remembers.
Derriann Pharr, Simonette Quamina and Taylor Simmons became the first Artist-in-Residence cohort to work inside the Studio Museum in Harlem's purpose-built studios. Their exhibition, A sustained becoming, reveals three distinct approaches to the body, memory and the freedom to imagine what comes next.
Black horror has always known how to make fear political, laughter protective and darkness look magnificent. From Blacula and Ganja & Hess to Blade, Get Out and Vampire in Brooklyn, Black filmmakers have transformed the genre—and Harlem is ready to talk back to the screen.
Black filmmakers are no longer waiting for Hollywood's permission. From Harlem to the Harlems of the world, they are protecting their voices, owning their images and building new roads to audiences. The ABFF New York City Pop-Up shows what becomes possible when Black stories reach the screen on their own terms.
