The iconic figure of Harriet Tubman supersedes the factual details of her life: There is the real Harriet Tubman and there is how she is remembered, which looms larger. In most of the surviving photographs of Tubman, we see her as a stoic freedom fighter and abolitionist. However, in 2017, a recently discovered photograph of her was auctioned at Swann Galleries, and it shows us a new side of Tubman: a younger, more feminine Tubman, dressed on trend for the 1860s. Perhaps this photo represents a more hopeful Harriet Tubman forging a life post-emancipation.
Author: Jonathan Michael Square
Jonathan Michael Square is the assistant professor of Black visual culture at Parsons School of Design. He is also currently a fellow in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Fashion Institute of Technology, and, most recently, at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Fashionista, Fashion Studies Journal, Refinery29, Vestoj, Small Axe, Hyperallergic, British Art Studies and International Journal of Fashion Studies. A proponent in the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom, which explores the intersection between histories of enslavement and the fashion system. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the same topic, tentatively titled Negro Cloth: How Slavery Birthed the Global Fashion Industry.