There’s a notion that fashion styles will always repeat themselves. Currently, the trends from Y2K have been taking over everyone’s lives in real life and online. But who started those trends to begin with? The video vixens of that era were some of the first trendsetters of the new millennium and one costume designer has now launched an exhibit to honor them.
The late 90s and early 2000s were a time of a cultural renaissance in hip-hop and overall Black culture. The days of boom-bap, hip-hop were long gone and the era of sex, money, and liberation came to the forefront. The music the rappers gave their fans required a certain aesthetic and that included video vixens.
Costume designer, Biancha Jones, began her career in fashion because of video vixens. In a February 2022 interview with Vogue Magazine, Jones said the vixens deserved their own exhbit.
“If these ladies get an exhibit in the hip-hop museum, I would love to be the person who recreates the outfits from the music videos and puts them on a mannequin,” she explaiend. “My favorite thing about costume design is storytelling. I feel like they all have a story, and that’s what makes me so interested in it.”
A little over a year later and the hip-hop museum has yet to create an exhibit to feature the video vixens, so Jones made it herself.
The Video Vixen Exhibit
“It became my goal to get these wonderful women into an exhibit for their contribution to music and fashion,” Jones said in a statement to 21Ninety. “A lot of them are not aware of how big their impact is but from my project, I would often tell them they are extremely loved. I would get so many ladies telling me they admired these women, just as much as I have.”
Jones said that her exhibit took a lot of work from her tribe. She wanted to make sure that she was able to showcase the influence of many vixens and not just focus on five. She was able to have colleagues and friends bring in several magazines like “Black Men,” “King,” and “Smooth” to really bring the showcase to life. The exhibit launched Saturday in NYC and Jones hopes that it can travel around the country. She wants to be able to give these women their flowers no matter where they’re from.
“These women have impacted the beauty standard, how we dress and even makeup too,” she explained about the video vixens she watched growing up. “For a lot of us, especially me, they were who we wanted to be. They were beautiful, fearless and confident. Their skin looked like mine. They made me feel beautiful as a black girl. I owe them so much. They did not deserve the hate they got but that’s okay, I am here to give them the flowers they deserve, forever. “