It was like a scene out of a movie. Yashua Simmons, the stylist for this shoot, was a senior in high school when he visited the Howard University campus in Washington, D.C., with his mother in the early 2000s. “There was a Black girl, short hair. She reminded me of my sister,” he says. “She ran across the street. She had on this little denim pencil skirt and a white T-shirt, and as she ran across the street, I saw that on the back of her skirt, it said D&G on the pocket. I turned to my mom and I said, ‘I’m going here.’ ” Simmons laughs as he recalls the story. “It sounds superficial.” But it isn’t. Not really. The young woman Simmons saw was a vision of his future in fashion. The freedom of her movement, the boldness of her style, was an avatar for what Howard is for so many: a place of possibility and wild, shocking beauty.
Two decades later, Simmons, struck by the wave of protests and student unrest sweeping the country in the spring of 2024, envisioned honoring and celebrating these students “on the front lines” at his alma mater during its legendary homecoming festivities, which last year celebrated their centennial. The pieces began to click into place: Anok Yai, whose career was launched after a photo of her attending Howard homecoming in 2017 went viral, had to be the model. “It’s a homecoming for her,” Simmons says. “It’s a homecoming for me. It’s a 100-year homecoming. From there, it took off.”
The result is a collection of images that celebrates the spirit of Howard University. Founded in 1867 in the rush of freedom during Reconstruction after the Civil War, Howard University is often called “the Mecca” by its students and alums. Nearly every major event in post–Civil War African American history—and, thus, United States history—has a Howard connection. It was at Howard that President Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1965, announced his plans for the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action. It was at Howard that revolutionary thinkers like Stokely Carmichael attempted to hold the American experiment accountable to its promises of equality for all. Alain Locke, head of the philosophy department in the 1920s, was visionary enough to outline the parameters of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic explosion that continues to influence American culture to this day. Other alums include Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Chadwick Boseman, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who chose Howard as the site to watch election night in 2024.
“That spirit of unity and solidarity is really cherished on campus,” says Glory Edim, founder of the literary community and podcast Well-Read Black Girl and a 2006 alum. “Howard provides an atmosphere for curiosity. It fosters creativity and allows you to really want to be a leader. My favorite thing to do is look up members of Howard’s former student government and see what they’re doing now, because nine times out of 10, they are doing incredible things in the world. If they had the gumption to run for student politics on Howard’s campus, they are getting things done. You’re also taught, not only do you succeed, but it’s part of our mission to uplift and serve others as you rise in the ranks of whatever career. You know you are standing at the shoulders of … all these incredible luminaries.”
That spirit is evident in the fashion at Howard, something the community takes pride in. “Once the weather got warm? It was over,” says Brittany N. Williams, an actress and writer from Howard’s class of 2007, laughing. “Some of the most incredible, fabulous, stunning outfits. You would sit on the Yard and watch people walk the pathways that crisscrossed the Yard like it was a runway.”
Edim notes that Howard was a place where students could “reclaim narratives” and “have a space to be unapologetic.” Simmons sees it that way as well: “One of the things about Black folks is the pride in presentation: hair, nails, designer clothes, color combinations,” he says. “We reduce it to fashion, but I think it’s really about self-pride and the way we explore and represent ourselves.”
Howard enters people’s lives at that impressionable moment of youth when you have lived enough to know you are a person but not enough to really figure out what kind of person you may be. “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive,” Audre Lorde famously said. That’s what I think of when I think of spaces like Howard. They are incubators for a future, a space for potentially radical imagination.
The poet Lucille Clifton attended Howard for only two years in the 1950s, but it loomed large in her imagination. In her memoir, she describes arriving at D.C.’s Union Station with a fellow student, Betty, and feeling terrified of being in a big city after growing up in Buffalo, New York. “A Howard man came up to us and looked at Betty all little and cute with her college clothes and her name tag on and said, ‘You’ll love it here, and we’ll love you,’ and he turned to me and asked if I was her mother. From that moment I knew I wouldn’t last. And I didn’t. Two years. That was all.” But Clifton’s memoir, like her poetry, is full of sly, quiet humor. As the next section begins, “But what a two years it was! What a time! … At that time, at Howard, if you weren’t light-skinned or had long hair you had to have something pretty strong going for you. Well, I was a drama major from New York. They didn’t know that Buffalo is a long way from New York City, and for them that did know, I could lay claim to Canada, so it worked out well enough.”
Model: Anok Yai; hair: Rachel Lee for Oribe; Makeup: Jamal Scott for Nars; Manicure: Stephanie Coles; Casting: Anita Bitton at the Establishment; Production: Block Productions. Howard H Art installation: Kristi Love Style. Special thanks to Alpha Phi Alpha Beta Chapter and Howard University.
