Couture for Us: How Black Women 40+ Wear the Fantasy
As Paris Couture Week returns, it’s a great reminder that for years, Black women (especially over 40) have embodied couture in ways that celebrate confidence, heritage, and timeless style. Couture, […] The post Couture for Us: How Black Women 40+ Wear the Fantasy appeared first on Essence.
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By Karissa Mitchell ·Updated July 10, 2025 < /> As Paris Couture Week returns, it’s a great reminder that for years, Black women (especially over 40) have embodied couture in ways that celebrate confidence, heritage, and timeless >Carnival. The church pew? A front row of First Ladies and deaconesses in hats sculpted to the heavens, suits so crisp they might as well be runway samples. Ballroom culture taught the world what it means to serve a look that’s handmade, otherworldly, and laced with narrative. And drag? Please, Black queens and femmes over 40 have been doing high fantasy and performance art long before it was Notting Hill Carnival (Photo by: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
A black woman at church. (Photo by Clarence Gatson Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Drag Queen Latrice Royale attends “Rupaul’s Drag Race: All Stars” Premiere Party (Photo by Vincent Sandoval/FilmMagic)
Paris Couture Week has always promised a dream: handmade gowns, beading that takes months, silks spun just so. It’s an art form built on exclusivity, secrecy, and the idea that only a select few deserve to embody this level of fantasy. Historically, that select few did not look like us, and oftentimes were much younger than 40. But here’s the twist: the spectacle and performance that couture sells are things Black communities have mastered for generations, with or without the blessing of European gatekeepers.
This is why Black women 40+ are the blueprint for wearing couture like they mean it. They don’t just buy or borrow. It’s innate. As Abrima Erwiah, co-founder of Studio 189, said in an interview with OkayAfrica, “What you wear matters, it affects other people; it affects what you put on your heart.” There’s an inherited wisdom here: how to >Diana Ross sweeping across a stage in a Bob Mackie gown, Patti LaBelle in all her sequins, or your own auntie at a family gathering in a gown that could stop traffic. There’s power in seeing age not as a limit but as an amplifier ofdecoding="async" src="https://www.essence.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Diana-Bob-scaled.jpeg" alt="Couture for Us: How Black Women 40+ Wear the Fantasy" width="400" height="591" />Diana Ross and Bob Mackie during The 20th Annual CFDA American Fashion Awards (Photo by Jim Spellman/WireImage)
Patti Labelle performs in concert for’Hollywood 100th Birthday’ (Photo by Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)
Today, we’re watching this reclamation in real time. Black designers like Christopher John Rogers and Sergio Hudson are making couture-level drama that feels like home, with women over 40 rocking these looks on carpets and covers with zero apologies. Angela Bassett, Tracee Ellis Ross, Viola Davis, they’re walking proof that you can be seasoned and still draped in the highest forms of fantasy. Stylists and editors are finally catching up to what we’ve always known: the fantasy is not just for the young, or the white, or the new. It’s for the ones who’ve lived enough life to hold it up.
From the Harlem Renaissance’s tailored suits and extravagant hats to the pageantry of Christopher John Rogers New York Fashion Week: 2020 (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for NYFW: The Shows)
So let’s be clear: couture belongs to us, too. For Black women 40+, it isn’t about playing dress-up or faking youth. It’s about affirming a legacy of spectacle, drama, andrel="tag">Couture Fashion Week
The post Couture for Us: How Black Women 40+ Wear the Fantasy appeared first on Essence.
