Luxury brand creator Brother Vellies fights for justice in fashion : NPR

Wildflower is the new memoir from Aurora James, founder of luxury accessories brands Brother Vellies and Fifteen Percent Pledge.

Penguin Random House

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Penguin Random House

Wildflower is the new memoir from Aurora James, founder of luxury accessories brands Brother Vellies and Fifteen Percent Pledge.

Penguin Random House

Three years ago, fashion designer Aurora James made a 15 percent pledge, challenging retailers to devote 15 percent of their shelves to products made by Black-owned companies.

The killing of George Floyd in 2020 has created a tidal wave in social justice. James also wants to challenge companies to commit to economic justice.

Since he started this quest, more than two dozen major retailers like Nordstrom, Macys, and Sephora have joined forces.

James is the creator behind the Brother Vellies brand, luxury shoes he designed on a limited budget until sales soared.

“What most people don’t know is that I work with artisans around the world who have been historically excluded from participating in fashion,” she tells NPR’s Michel Martin. “So the people in Kenya and Ethiopia and Haiti and I are actually working with them on doing things that they’ve been doing for generations.”

Fashion is a familiar world for James – he had a brief stint in modeling and worked for Fashion Television. He also studied the modern gardening business. When James met someone at the job who happened to be wearing a pair of veldskoens, South African-made court shoes, his future trajectory changed. Most South Africans call the veldskoens “Vellies”, pronouncing the “V” like “F.”

The Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund awarded Brother Vellies top prize in their annual contest in 2015. But, despite the huge demand for his shoes, James constantly feels mired in debt. He told the story in his memoir, Wild flower.

James said he had only achieved his current success after years of struggle. Long before he was established in the world of fashion, he was selling marijuana to make ends meet. After her mother married the man she thought abused her and her mother, she was forced to find her own path.

“I feel very proud of everything I have accomplished,” he said. “And not being completely transparent about how difficult it is only going to hurt other people who are on the job and don’t have an easy path to it themselves.”

Here is a shortened version of Michel Martin’s interview with Aurora James. It has been edited for clarity.

Michel Martin: You come from this unusual background. Let me put it this way: this is a bit of a shock. And I just wonder if other people react the way I do when they find out that you literally have to scratch and claw your way through everything.

Aurora James: You know, I think we spend so much of our human time just trying to dress up our own identity, right, to make it look good to other people. And I think there’s always so much I want to achieve in my own life. And, you know, dropping out of school, not getting into college I basically didn’t graduate from college at all, like I found myself behind bars at one point. Like, all of this stuff isn’t really conducive to being in the room I want to be in this country. And I don’t really want to let my past mistakes keep me from what I know I can achieve in the future.

One of the points you make time and time again in this book is that talent is distributed worldwide. But access to resources to bring them bear no. And this seems to be a lesson you learn early on, but it’s also a lesson you seem to want to talk about very bluntly in a way that no one else at your level of mode does. And I just want to ask how did you first come to that belief?

Well, I think I spent so much time in the museum. My mother always took me to museums. And we’d go even to the native reservations and watch the ladies bead, right. And he would talk to them about beading patterns and what they meant to them and what level of expression that was.

And he would tell me this Nigerian saying, which goes, ‘Until the lion has a historian, the hunter will always be a hero.’ And he said, I want you to think about the most marginalized people in the world and the fact that their archives aren’t in the books that you’re about to read, or even in the many museum collections that you have. back will look the way they want. So you have to look for it.

And I think because, you know, I’ve consumed a lot of fashion media that we’ve all seen Parisian ideas, couturiers and all that stuff. When I really started traveling across Africa and saw the people who made Vellies, the desert boots I worked with or who carved beads from cow bone, like me, that level of artistry was as fantastic as what they did in Paris or what do they do in Italy. And the only difference is that these are colored hands in countries we don’t associate with luxury.

There were a few stories that stood out to me… One time you applied for a scholarship and one of the judges rejected your application because he said that the fact that some artisans can do the work in house means they can do it. abuse their children, as they can make the children do the work. And you’re like, wait, what? You know, that means they don’t have to hire childcare… Then the other thing is later when your business gets more developed, someone creates a really onerous business loan for you that ends up costing you more than you got out of it.

My grandmother used to say “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And I would always say, “Wow, it’s so dark.” But when we think about it as consumers, I also talk in the book about how America’s donated clothing has killed nearly 70% of production across Africa. I was made to donate all my clothes to, you know, “the poor in Africa” ​​when I was young. I remember doing that and spring cleaning. And I didn’t know that, there’s going to be all these American clothes in the landfills there and it’s going to kill their local manufacturing industry. Correct. It means well, but the end result is not.

So for me it’s a lot more interesting to actually empower the community to make shoes, and then they can decide how they want to try to leverage their own resources that they then have.

When it came to something like the loans I took out, it was a $70,000 loan that ended up costing me over a million dollars. Really very sad. The more work I did after the fact, the more I began to realize how commonplace it actually was and that women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color were the most affected by predatory lending.

And I think over the years, a lot of people have really embraced this idea that I started this business with $3,500 and bootstrapped it in and, you know, now vice president of CFDA and all that jazz. And it sounds so beautiful.

But if you take a deeper look at what it really means to grow a small business in this country, it’s a lot more complicated, right? People tell you that you have to raise money from friends and family. But what if you don’t have any friends or family who can give you $10,000 or $30,000 or $50,000? Where will you get it from? And who are the people ready to exploit the situation? And how can we create more structures in this country that will actually support small businesses?

The audio version of this story was produced by Ana Perez and Shelby Hawkins. The digital version of this story was edited by Lisa Lambert.