On Thursday February, Cassandra Bromfield leads the women of the St. Albans at the Queens Public Library with a course on “100 years of Black Fashion.” It is part of that history.
Her resources are Wikipedia entries about the likes of Harlem’s Dapper Dan and Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (who designed Mary Todd Lincoln’s White House gowns) and fashion collages. Glitter, feathers and fabrics mark the work tables. After an hour of sketching and gossiping about family and the collapse of the Jamaica Colosseum Mall, 2D cutout models appear, ready for the game.
Bromfield lives for these kinds of creative mashups and storytelling moments. A Brooklyn-born fashion designer, the 69-year-old has been mixing his pieces with the history of other New Yorkers for nearly his entire life.
His ready-to-wear fashions attract the tag line: “No two pieces are alike.” Her patchwork designs range from silk tops and couture dresses to African printed placemats.
Bromfield put her storytelling skills to work on dresses that appeared on the red carpet of the Academy Awards and as a stand-in during Frederick Douglass’s wedding drama for the dress of his wife, Anna Murray Douglass.
From childhood pastime to adult fashion show
Bromfield began making doll clothes at age 8, the same year her mother bought a two-bedroom apartment in South Williamsburg. His aunt’s working machine still sits in the apartment Bromfield inherited. Another great legacy – the connection to making clothes – can be found not only in his mother and aunt but in their mother of St. Vincent.
In high school, Bromfield added pizzazz to his jeans with patches and magic symbols. At City College, where he studied art, Bromfield continued to make clothes, especially for parties: “It was a way to get these clothes and not keep bothering your mother for money,” he said, since the fabric was much cheaper than ordinary clothes.
Bromfield saw fashion at the time as a hobby or side game, not yet a career path. But when she wore her creations while working at Macy’s, her first job after graduation, a colleague, now friend, noticed and became a customer. Soon after, she took the leap and enrolled in a one-year fashion design program at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). There, job opportunities opened up.
Bromfield finished the program at FIT on a bright note – for the senior fashion show, he made a bright yellow linen suit with beaded decorations on the neck, and painted some of the same designs on the shoes. “I thought, ‘Oh, boy, I’ve made it,'” he said.
Making it in the fashion industry
That hope served him well when he encountered the realities of the clothing industry. Bromfield threw himself into his first job by pretending to be familiar with equipment he had never seen before. She later bridged the talent gap as a model for Jennifer Dale, a huge fashion brand at the time.
While selling her pieces on the side, Bromfield officially launched her custom fashion business in the late 1980s. It was difficult, though not for lack of representation: at the time, Black designers Willi Smith, Patrick Kelly and Stephen Burrows were there.
“It wasn’t a white Italian boy’s world,” Bromfield said, but added that designers needed financial support to succeed in the big arena, which was always hard to secure.
Success came gown by gown. The long-time client has commissioned pieces worn for high-profile events, including the Academy Awards and the wedding of Donald and Melania Trump. To “keep the lights on,” she also sewed, pressed, and steamed dresses for Fashion Week shows and for shoots with “Brides” magazine.
Storytelling and teaching
Storytelling is key to Bromfield’s business, along with workshops like St. Albans. His process starts with listening to the client’s story and finding ways to integrate them into each piece.
“I want to hear about the uncle who made a special recipe was to attend your wedding,” he said.
Bromfield’s wedding dresses incorporated images from the wearer’s life – one captured the loss of a couple’s child, the other the beauty of a mother-daughter relationship. He has decorated the child’s name on the wedding dress, he has added the mother’s veil and the honored generations of women with embroidered names.. She has written about these heirlooms and details in a bridal blog and journal. He also chronicled the process that family heirlooms underwent before being exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.
In 2022, her friend Lana Turner, chairwoman of The Literary Society in Harlem, asked her to help design the plum-colored silk wedding dress that historical sources describe as being worn by Anna Murray when she married Douglass. Bromfield researched period pieces, learning about slip dresses in museums and learning about whalebone corsets on YouTube.
Bromfield must also teach others about the importance of his work, even if it means dropping projects. One prospective buyer offered an “unreasonable” price for two dresses.
“In the short term, I felt very low,” Bromfield said of the gap between expectations and the cost of goods and labor. He could understand if someone couldn’t buy a piece, but what hurts is when a potential buyer doesn’t feel the value of his work.
Then a customer ordered a dress and paid her the price, and Bromfield got his spark. It’s about a lesson about self-doubt: Resist building, or letting others build, a wall of excuses for not doing something or asking for your price, Bromfield says.
“You start by pulling barbed wire around the wall, then you put in guards, then you bring in dogs and you’re more aggressive,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Cassandra Bromfield
Shop his collections.
Follow on Instagram at @cassandrabromfielddesigner
Subscribe to his YouTube channel @CBromfield.
#fashion #designers #creations #graced #Oscars #wedding #Frederick #Douglass #Epicenter #NYC