If you aren’t familiar with SSENSE, it’s the online epicenter for buying luxury brands and high-end streetwear. Founded by the three Atallah brothers, the goal was to take away the obstacles and headaches that could arise from purchasing high-end fashion and democratize the latest, coolest brands.
More than any other platform right now, SSENSE does curation right. They’re painfully aware of which pieces from new collections are a fit for their audience. They show you what’s relevant and hot right now — prioritizing pieces you’ll genuinely like rather than what’s just being pushed by the brand. Now, SSENSE carries brands of all price points from Adidas to Versace.
Another highlight: SSENSE is known for its brand diversity. They often highlight Black-owned brands and showcase collections from people of color and lesser-known designers. To close out Black History Month 2024, SSENSE is teaming up with none other than ESSENCE: a pairing that makes perfect sense.
ESSENCE, the lifestyle publication geared towards Black women, is helping feature three designers and artists: Bianca Saunders, Mowalola, and Stanley Raffington. The series will showcase their designs and tell their story.
According to SSENSE’s site,
“The two brands are turning ESSENCE’s “In The Studio” print franchise into a video series hosted by Lynette Nylander. The series will spotlight the achievements and creativity of Black designers who have significantly impacted the menswear realm. With three episodes, each featuring a distinguished designer, the series offers exclusive insights into their creative processes and journey,”
Meet The SSENSE X ESSENCE Feature Designers
Bianca Saunders
Bianca Saunders
British GQ
Bianca Saunders’ clothing embraces masculinity in womenswear. Her jackets will always be a bit oversized, or the style will mimic a classic streetwear bomber that could have been borrowed from boys like Jeremy Allen-White and Jacob Elordi — a girl can dream.
“The essence of Saunders' clothing lives in the details, which point to how she subverts ideals often associated with menswear.”
Finding the intersectionality between workwear and streetwear, Saunders clothing is genderless and trendy. Some of her signatures include layered shirts, tucked waists, and somewhat minimalist designs.
@babyboyflame Buying Black: @Bianca Saunders #streetwear #menswear #blackownedbusiness #fashion #fashiontok #fashiontiktok ♬ Oldschool - Cookin Soul
Mowalola
Mowalola
Joyce NG
Mowalola, a highly sought after designer whose pieces have been worn by the likes of Rihanna and Naomi Campbell, is a bit of an icon in the fashion world. Her mantra for fashion is “do what you want to do” and that’s exactly the kind of energy Mowalola’s clothes give off.
Much like Bianca Saunders, Mowalola is known for her gender bending designs. Inspired by cinema, many of her collections revolve around movies. And this is on full display at her cinematic runway shows.
She brings an edge to her designs through textures like leather and intentionally placed cutouts. She’s not afraid to make public commentary on race and gender, making her runway shows incredibly popular.
“The British designer has shifted the cultural zeitgeist with her boundary-pushing collections inspired by the world around her.”
@i_d Replying to @JAC So are we! #ferragamo #maximiliandavis #tiktokfashion #mfw #mowalola ♬ original sound - i-D
Stanley Raffington
Stanley Raffington
ESSENCE
In a world where the Chanel black-and-white aesthetic hails ever-popular, especially amongst those emulating Old Money Style and Sofia Richie’s closet, it’s hard to find designers who aren’t afraid of a bit of color…enter Stanley Raffington.
Often incorporating Rastafarian colors of red, yellow, and black as an ode to his Jamaican roots, Raffington isn’t going to shy away from any hue. He quickly rose into fashion prominency when Madonna and FKA Twigs attended his show, which included 3D printed accessories.
Constantly inspired by his Jamaican roots and the nostalgia of past trends, you will see lots of Y2K nods in Stanley Raffington’s clothing. He’s embraced tech in the fashion world by utilizing 3D printing in many of his designs and runway shows, and he’s not slowing down now.
@yungstanz Process behind my 3d printed curve bag. Taking inspiration from the architecture of Zaha Hadid, mixing new technology with natural materials and craft. Available now exclusively at @SSENSE ♬ Never Lose Me - Flo Milli
Dear Fossil Fuel Executives: How Can You Live With Yourselves?
Horrific heat waves across the nation, leaving hundreds dead. Wildfires tearing apart the American west. Billions of shellfish dead in the Pacific in a mass die-off. All of this within the past week. Another destructive hurricane season incoming.
Welcome to the era of the climate crisis. For a long time, activists and journalists have been yelling about it; but decades of inaction, doubt, and misinformation have stalled progress, leaving us on track to blow past worse case scenarios predicted years ago.
A new bombshell report from the IPCC, recently leaked in France, warned that global warming was happening faster than expected, and several "tipping points" — significant climate changes that cannot be reversed — have already happened. "Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems," it warned. "Humans cannot."
Of course, we can still mitigate the worst consequences of the climate crisis by decarbonizing and switching to renewable energy. Every single degree that we can reduce warming by is incredibly significant; every fraction of a degree means another nation not flooded, another war caused by drought or starvation avoided.
This is common knowledge, understood by the majority of our world's leaders. So what is stopping progress? Why have we moved so unfathomably slowly towards change?
At the heart of the issue is the fossil fuel industry, which is currently fighting tooth and nail to block climate legislation and maintain the oil and gas industries. This is not a new phenomenon. Since the 1980s, when the first reports of climate change's potentially dire consequences emerged, the oil and gas industries have been launching disinformation campaigns to convince the public that climate change is a myth, while spending billions to block climate legislation on federal and global levels.
Fossil fuel companies knew as far back as the 1960s that their products could potentially be dangerous. A 1968 paper produced for the American Petroleum Institute found that carbon dioxide levels were rising in the atmosphere, potentially causing rising sea levels and significant changes in the global ecosystem.
By the early 1980s, fossil fuel companies including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio and Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil were meeting together in a task force to discuss climate change, showing that they were always aware of the problem long ago. A vast account of evidence that the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change can be found here: The evidence is stark, and stunning, particularly because these same fossil fuel companies would later deny that climate change was even real.
Somehow, by the 1990s, the American Petroleum Institute was organizing million-dollar plans to challenge the science of climate change; Exxon and Chevron were revealed to be participants in the plan. Exxon-funded think tanks received millions in funding to create research that "disproved" climate change, much of which was later debunked.
Over the next 20 years, fossil fuel companies would launch ever-more advanced disinformation campaigns to convince the public that climate change wasn't real. "The fossil fuel industry's denial and delay tactics come straight out of Big Tobacco's playbook," reads a report on the industry's disinformation efforts.
Fossil-fuel funded right-wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation — many of which were funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers and Exxon — manufactured research that appeared to "debunk" climate change.
But mysteriously, "90% of skeptical or denialist climate change papers in the United States originate from right-wing think tanks." The Washington Post reports, "In the 1990s, oil companies, fossil fuel industry trade groups and their respective PR firms began positioning contrarian scientists such as Willie Soon, William Happer, and David Legates as experts whose opinions on climate change should be considered equal and opposite to that of climate scientists."
"Think tanks, foundations, trade associations and other third-party groups that represent fossil fuel companies for promoting 'contrarian' science that misleads the public and disrupts efforts to implement climate policies needed to address the rising threats," Politico wrote last week.
"Rhetoric on climate change and the undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, unduly discounted risk and urgency, dissent, and, most importantly, polarized public support delaying mitigation and adaptation action, particularly in the U.S."
This disinformation spiraled into what we have today: A world that has barely lifted a finger to respond to climate change, leaving us with disaster after disaster. Why? What was all this misinformation for?
It was to preserve the profits of fossil fuel industries. It was mostly to continue to line the pockets of wealthy fossil fuel executives.
If there is a hell, Exxon's various CEOs — like Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson — who denied their own companies' climate research while raking in profits — will one day burn in it for what they did. Their actions, along with the leaders of various disinformation campaigns and politicians, will condemn millions — if not billions — of people to death. They should be viewed alongside the greatest villains of our history as orchestrators of mass genocide.
Fewer than 100 companies are responsible for two-thirds of climate change. The leaders of these companies should be recognized as genocidal criminals, and they should burn in hell. "What is unfolding could be, in a sense, a series of individual 'slow genocides' that, taken together, amount to a collective extermination," writes James Robbins in The New Republic.
Yet their efforts continue, even as the world grows hotter. The great irony is that even if these people burn in hell, innocent people on Earth will also burn in the fire-torn, heat-soaked world they created.
It's not too late. It will never be too late. There will always be more that we can save. There is so much to do. Emily Atkin's Heated has an excellent primer on how to take action, which can look like lobbying the government or joining a campaign or teaching or educating; the important thing is that everyone does something. However, contrary to the popular narrative that defined environmentalism for the past few decades, simply conserving water and recycling is not enough.
Ironically, the fossil fuel companies were also largely responsible for spreading the myth that individual action could stop climate change. BP, for example, was responsible for creating the myth of the "carbon footprint."
Today, fossil fuel companies are trying to pull similar tricks by greenwashing themselves, launching PR campaigns that make it seem like they are "going green" when actually, they are contributing to the problems more than ever.
The fossil fuel industry has to die. It has to stop pouring poison into our atmosphere and condemning billions to agonizing suffering. It needs to be replaced by renewable energy — which could create millions of jobs and supercharge the economy — and fast.
There is hope. There's always hope. The European Union recently unveiled an ambitious plan to achieve a carbon neutral future within the next nine years, which includes a plan to tax jet fuel and effectively ban petrol and diesel-powered cars over the next 20 years. "We're going to ask a lot of our citizens," EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans said. "We're also going to ask a lot of our industries, but we do it for good cause. We do it to give humanity a fighting chance."
But the plan is expected to suffer through years of negotiations before implementation — years that we don't have.
And the fossil fuel executives and politicians who continue to push back against these efforts — even as the world literally burns — should have a place next to the worst genocidal madmen in our history.