Before the beat drops, there is first the bedroom. A hot comb sizzling fresh from the stove, the gentle whirring of a sewing machine. A group of women cross-legged on the floor, swapping clothes and gossip: who got turned away at the club door last weekend? Who might show up tonight?
For the London-based archivist Deborah Carnegie, there is something atavistic and sacred about the pre-night out ritual, in particular for Black British women. It is the subject of her latest work, a photography archive spanning 1950 to the present day, chronicling Black British women’s Saturday night fashion across the decades.
Presented for the first time at this summer’s London College of Fashion’s Fashioning Frequencies exhibition, Carnegie’s collection is the result of months spent gathering images from family photo albums, nightclub photographers’ archives and submissions from friends. (The show has now closed; Carnegie is looking for a new venue to show her photos.)
We’re meeting for lunch at Jumbi, one of south-east London’s extant African-Caribbean bars (and a spot I have spent many an evening in, in my Saturday night best; at night it is transformed into a sea of swaying bodies and rum punches under ambient red lights.). “I used to go out round here all the time back in my day,” Carnegie says over plantain and jerk rice. “It’s nice that places like this still exist.
“For so long our style has been disparaged as ‘ghetto’,” she says. In the 90s, Carnegie studied fashion as an undergraduate in Surrey. “My teachers at college used to ask me: ‘Who’s going to wear this?’ And I would think: ‘I’ve already got clients!’”
Carnegie’s work is a paean to a community whose influence on the country’s fashion she feels has gone underacknowledged. But the subject is personal as well as academic. Growing up in the 60s, she lived with her great-aunt, who ran a nightclub in the cellar of their south London flat.
“I’d be in the living room and see guests going downstairs in their fur coats – hair done, jewellery on – and the men in their pinstripe suits and trilby hats,” she says. “My auntie’s rule was that you had to get dressed up if you wanted to go downstairs.”
Her great-aunt came to the UK from Jamaica as part of the Windrush generation, and was one of the Britons who helped lay the foundations of a Black British aesthetic. Combining fabrics inspired by Africa, the Caribbean and the UK, there was noticeably more colour in their palettes, compared with the pallid austerity of postwar Britain. At the time, it was seen as outre. The Thurrock Gazette reported in 1948: “Dressed in an odd assortment of clothes, many wearing ties of dazzling designs, over 450 Jamaicans arrived at Tilbury Docks on the Empire Windrush.”
“Colour wasn’t as popular in the UK, so we used to make our own outfits out of materials for tablecloths: the greens, blues, oranges,” Carnegie says; they were “inspired by the front rooms in the Caribbean”. Money was an issue but no obstacle to style. “Back in the day, we just made our clothes ourselves,” she says. “We were poor, and most of the dresses didn’t fit our bodies anyway – we had big tits and big bums – so clothes here just didn’t fit us right.”
There is a warm familiarity in the images. We may not be hot-combing our hair and reupholstering tablecloths any more, but there is still a thread of continuity running through the 70 years of nightlife documented in Carnegie’s archive, whether it’s getting ready to step on to the linoleum of a 1950s blues night, or a 2000s Afrobeats weekender.
“Hair is still a focal point,” she says, “and dressing head-to-toe: the lashes, the nails, too.” Black British women remain, according to Carnegie, tastemakers when it comes to fashion. You only need to look at the pervasiveness of trainer culture, oversized hoops or the slick-back bun in recent years to see her point.
“That has always been the way,” she says. “When I was growing up, I never saw Black women on the runway or in magazines. But we’ve always been at the forefront. When we weren’t allowed in those spaces, we made Saturday night our catwalk.”
Saturday night life: images from the collection
A photo of Carnegie’s great-aunt on her wedding day in 1956, this portrait resists tradition. Instead of a white dress, she wore a bespoke suit tailored by her dressmaker, its neat buttons lending elegance and definition, her hair pressed with a hot iron. “She didn’t want a traditional white wedding,” says Carnegie. “The buttons really make the suit and define the look.”
Carnegie’s mother, Beverley, stands outside Wandsworth town hall on her wedding day in 1973. Her broad-brimmed hat was inspired by Bianca Jagger, her pearl necklace chosen to match her engagement ring. “She found the dress at a boutique in Wimbledon,” Carnegie says. “The platform shoes gave her height. My mum has always inspired my style.”
This portrait of Yvonne Pendley, a relative of Carnegie’s cousin, was taken just months after she gave birth, in 1974. “She was happy to get her figure back,” Carnegie says. Dressed in a vibrant yellow suit borrowed from her cousin, with her own shoes and careful grooming, Yvonne posed for a formal portrait before heading out for the evening.
Dionne Pendley, Yvonne’s niece, was heading to a gig in 1993 when this picture was taken. “It might’ve been Jodeci or Boyz II Men,” Carnegie says. Dionne adapted a leather jacket into a dress, borrowed the hat from a friend and paired it with Italian boots. It is quintessential 90s.
Taken in 2001, Carnegie, (far right), her sister Sam (second from left) and their friends are shown waiting at a bus stop in Wandsworth on their way to Notting Hill carnival. Carnegie made both her and Sam’s outfits – Sam’s from Ethiopian fabric, and her own from a faux-leather dress. “I don’t think we came back until the next day!” Carnegie says.
Singer Dainá Murel poses at her dancehall-themed birthday party in east London, in 2023. The photo captures the 2020s evolution of Black British women’s fashion, but calls back to the 90s dancehall era. “The flamboyant, ostentatious attire, adorned with fluorescent organza and Lycra, cutout clothing and luminous coloured wigs galore – it reminds me how important the subculture was,” says Carnegie.
