The Creator of the Black Fashion Museum

Fashion Trailblazer Lois Alexander Lane

“The Museum will change the image that black designers are newfound talent. Most of today’sdesigners tell me they learned to sew from their grandmothers, and that is who I want to talk to. I want the clothes their grandmothers made.”

— LOIS K. ALEXANDER-LANE

Lois K. Alexander-Lane, also known as Lois Marie Kindle, was born on July 11, 1916, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Lois and her sister Sammye used to imitate outfits seen at white department stores when they were kids. Lois Marie Kindle began by sewing outfits for her dolls, and then eventually for her mother and sisters. She studied at Hampton University, and upon graduating in 1938 relocated to Washington, D.C. Between the 1940s and the 1950s, Lois worked as a freelance photographer for Black publications and was the Vice President of the Capital Press Club, an association for black journalists.

She spent much of her professional life in Washington, then moved to New York by the early 1960s to pursue a master’s degree in retail, fashion, and merchandising at New York University. Her tutors were extremely critical of the topic of her thesis, the historical significance of African Americans in Manhattan retailing. Her professor said it was a pointless attempt because Black stores and designers had no significant effect on the business. Lois made it her purpose at that moment to disprove this theory. Her investigation led to the discovery of numerous unreported African American dressmakers, and was awarded the best research of the year by faculty in the United States Census in 1963.

In 1965, she bought a brownstone in Harlem and established the Harlem Institute of Fashion. The institution was established to draw the attention of African Americans in the fashion industry. The institute provided free instruction in dressmaking, millinery and tailoring, English, mathematics, and African American history. In 1966, she also established the National Association of Milliners, Dressmakers, and Tailors. She served as the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers’ president. She was also a founding member of the National Council of Negro Women, among other organizations. She eventually moved to New York and launched another boutique before retiring in 1978 as a HUD community planning and development officer in New York, where she had worked for 36 years.

With a National Endowment for the Arts funding, Lois created the Black Fashion Museum in Harlem in 1979. she gathered clothing for the Black Fashion Museum by traveling across the country on many occasions to preserve African American heritage. The museum displayed garments created, made, or worn by African Americans from the nineteenth century. The Black Fashion Museum held two major exhibitions every year and large-scale opening festivities, such as the 1981 show ‘Bridal Gowns by Black Designers’.

The Museum’s collection had grown to include over 5,550 garments and accessories going back to 1865. The museum’s significant possessions included the outfit Rosa Parks was working on for her mother when she was imprisoned in 1955, as well as a collection of garments created by Ann Lowe, the designer of Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding gown.

Alexander-Lane later released her book, Blacks in the History of Fashion, in 1982, and was named one of the top 100 commercial and professional women in the United States by the business journal, Dollars, and Sense, in 1985. In 1994, the museum relocated to the formerly Sojourner Truth Home for Women and Girls at 2007 Vermont Avenue in Washington, D.C. In 1998, Lois Alexander Lane was honored at the Schomberg Center in New York City and the Design Center in Washington, DC. Lois’s health began to decline, forcing her to withdraw from all operations and focus on her well-being.

Lois K. Alexander-Lane died on September 29th, 2007, at the Magnolia Center nursing home in Lanham, New York, of Alzheimer’s disease and lung cancer. Joyce Bailey, Lois’ daughter, took over the museum and tried to keep it functioning but decided to stop it because the museum did not have as large an audience and was closed in 2007 along with the Harlem Institute of Fashion. Following Lois’s death, the Black Fashion Museum collection was donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Mrs. Alexander Lane told the Washington Post in 1981, “In the process, we discovered that few Americans – black or white – are aware of the contributions made by black Americans in the creative fields of fashion… There is an oft-quoted myth that black people are ‘new-found talent’ in the fashion field, and we want to change that. It is wonderful that Lois was acknowledged and honored while she was still active in the industry since she made several contributions to both the fashion business and the black community. Her efforts and accomplishments in the fashion industry surely live on.