Fly Girl:

On Beauty, Flight, and the Politics of Respectability

“Adornment is never just decoration; it is declaration.” – Anonymous

While working on my 2023 exhibition If Heaven Had Heights, I was fascinated by the ways style can simultaneously defy systems and define us. Sagging, for instance, has long been criminalized and pathologized. As my own critiques of the style evolved I began to see sagging as embodied resistance. A signal flare. A refusal to disappear.

I spoke with my friend Robyn. She paused as I shared my take on oppositional fashion and Black resistance. “What’s the female version of sagging?” she asked. We sat with that question, landing on the recent trend of young Black women wearing bonnets in public. There was something radical in it. Something discomforting about the transformation of an intimate, private garment into a public assertion. Something intriguing about the bonnet as rebellion.

From Tignon Laws to the Gele

There’s a long tradition of head coverings that have carried both burden and brilliance for Black women. In late 18th-century New Orleans, colonial authorities enacted the tignon laws, mandating that free Black women cover their hair in public. This law was intended as a marker of inferiority, a way to make Black women’s presence less conspicuous.

But Black women did not submit quietly. Instead, they transformed the tignon into elaborate, stylized headwraps. With bright fabrics and bold patterns they transformed something malicious into something magnificent. What was meant to mark them as lesser became a canvas for creativity, dignity, and resistance.

Head covering for Black women extends back even further with roots that resonate across the diaspora. The Nigerian gele, for instance, continues a tradition of headwrapping as a practice of beauty, pride, and cultural identity.

Fly Girl and the Politics of Respectability

Fly Girl (2023) sits directly in this continuum. Modeled after Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, my subject is adorned not with a pearl, but with a satin scarf, bonnet, and the dangling Jordan “Jumpman.” Her gaze is steady, alluring, and utterly self-possessed.

Much like sagging, the bonnet disrupts dominant ideas about respectability. Society asks: Why wear that in public? Why reject the codes of “proper” beauty? Yet these questions are less about fashion and more about control and policing which forms of Black self-expression are deemed acceptable.

In Fly Girl, the very item dismissed as inappropriate becomes radiant. The bonnet, framed in light and color, becomes as iconic as Vermeer’s pearl. Her style is not a lapse in respectability but a refusal to bow to other’s ideas of it.

The Jumpman earring is a nod to my use of Afrotropes as a means of both ritual and transformation. Where Vermeer’s pearl suggested mystery and exoticism, the Jumpman suggests hope, aspiration, and ascension. It is the symbol of flight and rising beyond the limits placed on Black women’s bodies and choices.

Here, the bonnet is not just fabric. It is armour, ornament, and launchpad. Like sagging, it signals a refusal to be unseen. It reminds us that rebellion looks different on Black bodies—not because we seek chaos, but because our existence itself is a rebellion.

Toward Liberation

If Heaven Had Heights framed sagging as a kind of chrysalis—a cocoon for metamorphosis. Fly Girl extends this framework to Black womanhood. It asks us to reconsider the ways Black women’s choices in fashion are pathologized, policed, and yet persistently reimagined as sites of creativity and power.

When I look at Fly Girl, I see not just a young woman in a bonnet. I see a cosmology of survival. I see the echoes of the tignon laws, the brilliance of the gele, and the refusal of generations of Black women to fall in line with narrow definitions of beauty and worth.