'The youth are the future, and I’m living vicariously through them. I’m inspired by their gumption and lack of fear,' shares Jacques Agbobly while reflecting on fashion as a mode of empowerment.
is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month.
I’m half Ghanaian, but I was born and raised in Togo, West Africa. I knew I was gay from a very young age, but growing up in a strict Christian household in Africa, it wasn’t very accepted. I didn’t know any African queer people. I was visibly queer: My grandmother loved to buy me Barbie dolls, and then my dad would take them away and hide them. When I moved to the US in 2007, we moved into this building that had an after-school program, and there I felt like I could just be myself.
Growing up in Togo, my grandmother rented part of her home to seamstresses and tailors, and I saw myself in that. As I was getting interested in fashion and started seeing other designers who were like me, expressing their queerness through design, it empowered me. Fashion is about identity—it’s about what you feel on the inside, and how you want to express it on the outside.
As a queer Black person, though, I didn’t see myself represented in magazines or fashion spaces. Now my queerness is at the very forefront of everything that I do—when I’m designing, I’m imagining people who look like me. And as someone who comes from a country where queer folks are persecuted on a regular basis, I want to go back home and empower the people who brought me up. We have the power to uplift each other, and to hold each other down.
There’s all these steps being taken now to take away basic human rights, but while we’re fighting that, we have a duty to keep building our community. The democratic system can make a lot of advancement, and then someone can come in and take all of that away—but the one thing no one can take away from you is your community. The youth are the future, and I’m living vicariously through them. I’m inspired by their gumption and lack of fear.