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Elysia Crampton Calls for ‘Black & Indigenous Solidarity’ at Wales Bonner

Elysia Crampton

For her sophomore presentation, which unveiled during London Fashion Week, British designer Grace Wales Bonner spoke to our world's charged political climate with a collection reflecting the power of street preaching--practice that's largely become lost in the digital age, but helped foster great political and religious movements throughout history. Building off this and time spent studying in Senegal last year, Bonner's spiritual lineup was evocative of London's streets, echoing the many languages and migrants that add color to England's capital.

This weekend's production saw Bonner celebrating urban diversity, as models all moved about urgently, as if commuting during rush hour in the city. There were allusions to Jehovah's Witnesses, Rastafarian streetwear and medieval Renaissance fashion--a melting pot that centered around speakers blasting spoken word by producer Elysia Crampton, whose music channels her Bolivian-American background and empowers fellow transgender artists of color in the electronic community. Crampton also modeled during Bonner's presentation, later posting a powerful statement to Instagram paralleling the collection's global inspiration.

"Black & indigenous solidarity in the face of the civil calendar year called 2017," Crampton wrote. "We are stronger together, we enact legitimacy & meaning through & by one another in spite of coloniality, state, & corrupt market--& we carry & author that truth within the contradictions & conviction of our standing. Know that you are part of a wonderful history, here, now, alive, interanimative, haptical, colored [with] aroma & sound braided in a synaesthetic struggle of love."


"What marshals the forces that hold things together?" she continued. "Is substance the testament of a fugitivity materialized?--particle stuff fleeing a hard desiring zero, form created from an indecisive despair speckled [with] tiny gaps of meek resolve? Is matter the residue of a terrible intimacy whose awfulness billows & crashes, seething in a night beyond the quantizing gaze, the fleshedness of being? There is a future that we carry on our backs, bearing its weight, with the past in front of us, here [with] us always."

This past summer, Crampton released her queer sophomore album, Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City, which spoke to the many different places she's lived in her life, growing up in Mexico and later residing in California. Much like Bonner, Crampton's work is deeply personal, while casting a wide cultural net to include many different narratives. "What I'm more interested in are my own privileges and how I'm able to be a voice for those who still aren't voiced but who are threaded through my voice at the same time," she told OUT.

Listen to Crampton's official Wales Bonner soundtrack, below:

Advocate Channel - The Pride StoreOut / Advocate Magazine - Fellow Travelers & Jamie Lee Curtis

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