Carol Tulloch’s “The Birth of Cool” explores how Black style informs identity and moves across borders as a shared visual language rooted in history.

Cool is not a trend. It is inherited, interpreted, and carried forward, from 1960s portraits of Malick Sidibé, now on view in “Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination” at Museum of Modern Art in New York, to the everyday styling that continues to shape global fashion.

Kimberly Jenkins, Founder of the Fashion and Race Database, noted that “fashion has long benefited from Black genius while minimizing its architects. Figures like André Leon Talley expanded fashion’s intellectual and cultural scope, yet their influence is often sidelined. Black presence in fashion represents innovation and authorship across design, publishing, styling, photography, education, and curatorial work.”

Global fashion has long been shaped by Black aesthetics across the African diaspora.

In America, cool has always carried rebellion. It pushes past expectations and refuses confinement. It is standing for something and refusing to fall for anything like Kathleen Cleaver. It is the intellectual sharpness of James Baldwin and the steady composure of Barack Obama, presence as power, restraint as statement. It is the bold refusal to shrink, the confidence to stand fully as oneself, as Grace Jones, the avant-garde icon, has long embodied.

As Jenkins put it, “Cool is composure under heat, the ability to confront adversity without surrendering self. Throughout the 20th century, Black Americans used style — sunglasses, leather, hats, denim, sequins, bold color, as visible declarations of pride and power.”

Cool is not accidental. It has never been confined to one particular Black person or to a single space, whether hip-hop, ballroom, or any arena pioneered by Black people. We are not monolithic, and we were never created to perform a single script. Too often, our expression has been projected onto, misunderstood, reduced, and commodified, rewarded when it fits a narrow frame and questioned when it expands beyond it. Yet Black presence itself is an act of resilience, authorship, and global impact.

Around the world, we have elevated fashion into a storytelling tool, one that communicates healing, joy, and imagination. Our style is not spectacle. It is self-definition. It is discipline. It is a legacy. And it continues to shape the world not because it is consumed, but because it is created, protected, and carried forward by us.