Repurpose for more than fashion’s sake
Putting Together the Pieces
Written by Patricia B. Moore
In partnership with Ten Thousand Villages
Pursuing Passion shares the stories of people who make their living doing what truly brings them joy. It is so evident to me and anyone who meets him that Stephen Jenkins has found his true purpose. Stephen is the founder of Gracist, a fashion line that is an invitation to a conversation. What does that even mean? When you see his pieces you will know. They are loud, colorful, vibrant, and inviting. In fact, that is how I found Stephen. I have seen his work around town and when I saw a friend post a photo in an outfit so clearly from the Gracist collection, I took that as a sign to reach out and learn more.
After just an hour with Stephen, I learned so much about who he was, who he is, and how he hopes to leave his mark on this world. The formative years of Stephen’s life were spent in New York City. Quite the opposite of the big city, Stephen now resides in Manakin Sabot just outside of Richmond, VA. This move was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is said that you’re not prepared to live until you’re prepared to die. COVID-19 prepared Stephen to truly live in this next phase of life. Reflecting on how the pandemic changed his life, he said “Sometimes you are given a gift and you didn’t even know you needed it. Then you’re like, ‘How did I live without this?’.” Living outside of the hustle of a city has given Stephen the freedom to connect with himself, his creativity, and his higher purpose.
The Gracist fashion line is Stephen’s gift to both Niger and America - a culmination of 60 years of his life and where he finds himself now. From Harlem, New York to the Harlem of the South (this is how some have referred to Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood), Stephen just recently began to unpack the history of Black people in America. Growing up in New York, he didn’t learn much in school beyond the facts of the existence and abolishment of slavery. While his mother was from the American South (Richmond, VA), she claims to have “escaped” it in the 50s and spoke little of it. There were only 3 places she told her children they could not go: jail, the military, and the American South. To put his experience into perspective, he told me, “Being poor, piece of cake. Being Black, piece of cake. But it is hard for me to reconcile what happened in the past.”
The Gracist brand is a statement of rebellion, retribution, and healing. The brand comes from the merging of the words Grace + Racist. Racist being a negative word that he wanted to repurpose. Grace representing the unfavored and unearned mercy that we give to people. By human nature, we default to thinking negatively or assuming the worst about an individual. Gracist is an invitation to rewire that thinking and bring out the best in people. To do that you must visually see the best in people, and thus the clothing line was born.
In the last few years, Stephen has taken two trips to Niger, the largest landlocked country in West Africa. When reflecting on those experiences, he described his life before those trips as a period of “suffering in the affluence of America without purpose and meaning.” Niger is mostly desert land. It is a place of extreme poverty. It is also a place where the average woman has 7.5 children. What the country lacks in financial wealth, it makes up for in rich relationships. Stephen is using the relationships he has gained there along with his relationships here in the U.S. to create more financial wealth for talented artisans.
Gracist repurposes denim Stephen buys here in the U.S. He ships the clothing to Niger where African cloth is applied in an overlay. Stephen buys the fabrics and currently has 3 principal artisans in Niger who bring his clothing line to life.
Stephen describes Jean as a true savant. She works with him on his ready-to-wear line. Jean can look at you and know your size. She is an amazing seamstress and makes all her designs from scratch.
His designer Elhadj is Fulani - that is the world’s largest nomadic group. He has no cell phone, TV, or other modern technological device. He also has no idea how brilliant he is. The first time Stephen gave him two pieces of clothing upon which to add African fabric, Elhadj used his eyes and mind to disassemble the pieces and envision what was possible. Stephen came back 7 days later and was handed the most amazing pieces of clothing he had ever seen in his life. When Stephen asked how much he owed, he was told a ridiculously low price. Knowing that overpaying Elhadj was just as bad as underpaying him, Stephen vowed to do one better. He would collaborate to bring him more work.
The last member of Stephen’s artisan collective is Sedu. Someone introduced Stephen to Sedu because he makes amazing bags. When they first began their work together, Sedu was working in an alley on a foot machine. The machine was damaged and tilted. With help from Jean, Stephen was able to get Sedu a better machine for around $200. Being able to help equip Sedu with better tools to work on his craft brought him more joy than anything. Sedu is deaf and has 7 kids to provide for, 5 of whom are also deaf, as hearing loss is genetic. Two weeks after delivering the machine, the country was shut down due to a political coup but Sedu was still able to continue to work. Sedu is in charge of Stephen’s accessory line.
For Gracist, the clothes are just a platform for stories. Stephen loves that he gets to elevate the stories of his collaborators. There is a documentary in the making and he recently printed postcards to begin this storytelling work which he handed out at his booth during Visual Arts Center’s annual Craft & Design event. Craft & Design is held at Richmond’s Main Street Station in Shockoe Bottom, once an epicenter for the American Slave Trade. 150 years ago that land was used for a slave market, to sell black bodies to white slave owners. Now Stephen finds himself, a Black man, selling American denim overlaid in African fabrics to affluent white buyers, the irony of which is not lost on him but instead celebrated with gratitude for the opportunity to change narratives and create a platform for more challenging discourse.
The last gentleman to buy a piece from the Gracist collection at Craft & Design chose a lime green patterned jacket. Shortly thereafter, he was seen in that jacket outside of the Altria Theater on the night that Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson was speaking at The Richmond Forum about her book “The Warmth of Other Suns” (stories from The Great Migration when Black people moved in mass from the Jim Crow south to cities in the north). To Stephen, this white gentleman wearing a Gracist collection jacket was signaling to others that he was someone whom they could safely dialogue with about race. While telling me this story, Stephen reflected on how there were signals along the way when Black people fled the South to tell them who and where was safe. He thinks of his clothing line as the signal of today for engaging in diverse conversation.
Stephen says he gets his entrepreneurial spirit from his mother. His mother would simply identify a problem and solve it. She used to say, “If you want to hide things from Black people, put it in a book.” So the first thing she bought in installments was an encyclopedia set that she made her children read every evening after homework. He was unsure if his mom could even read at the time when she purchased the set, because as he recalls his mother didn’t get her high school diploma til his little brother turned 5 years old. To this day, Stephen loves reading. He says it “allows him to choose his friends and live multiple lives.”
Stephen’s parents divorced when he was young. His mother was left to raise 8 children alone and realized she could not progress without an education. Stephen recalls being in college at the same time as his mother. She went on to get not one but two degrees and have a successful 40-year career as a nurse. She recalled the proudest day of her life was going to the welfare office to tell them she didn’t need them anymore. The welfare office tried to talk her out of it but she wanted to show her kids there was a way out. She showed them that if you work hard, you can achieve success.
Stephen was an entrepreneur from a young age. He would get people’s groceries for them or do yard work. He loved when it would snow because he would make lots of money shoveling. He remembers his most lucrative gig in his childhood years was at the Metropolitan Opera House. His mother knew a security guard there, Mr. Gillespie. He asked if any of the kids wanted tickets to the Opera and Stephen was the only one that was interested. While his siblings were at home watching the Jackson 5 and Fat Albert on TV, Stephen would go pickup the opera tickets Mr. Gillespie would leave for him at the box office and stand out front to scalp them. The tickets for the matinee were about $80 each full price, so he would sell the tickets that were left for him at half price, making about $400 in an hour. Then the nice staff at the theatre would even come out and ask if he wanted to go in for the performance. So he’s seen La Boheme and Puss in Boots. At age 12, Stephen was making money and experiencing a lifestyle of culture his siblings didn’t have access to. Of course, he couldn’t tell anyone what he was doing or the party would be over. To this day his mom refers to Stephen as the luckiest person because he used to take the money he made, plant it on the ground when he was out with his mother, and act like he found it. What he learned from that experience was one man’s trash (those unused opera tickets) was another man’s treasure. It’s just a matter of getting the product to the right person.
It made total sense to me when Stephen mentioned he was one of the founders behind one of my favorite shops in Richmond, It’s a Man’s World - it’s a high-end men’s consignment shop right next to the Maggie Walker statue on Broad Street in the Arts District. He is no longer working with the store, but I appreciate that he brought the concept to Richmond.
Clothing has always been a thing for Stephen. Growing up he would get invited to places and wouldn’t have the right clothing. He remembers feeling like a little man when he got his first suit jacket and loved it so much that he wanted to sleep in it. He became acutely aware that when dressed appropriately, people would treat you differently. He would become acceptable to people he didn’t even like. So eventually he would go to thrift stores and collect used clothing to sell in Cooper Union (a neighborhood in lower Manhattan). He would simply lay them out on the ground for people to browse and buy. He was there to sell but also learned to trade for what he wanted from others. Selling clothes taught him to engage with people.
Today Gracist is a means for Stephen to get people to engage with one another. He thinks of it not just as repurposing clothes, but also repurposing energy and conversations. COVID-19 and his travels to Niger helped him become born anew. Reconnecting with American history here in Richmond forced him to come apart and reassemble the pieces of himself with new knowledge into someone with greater purpose, just like the disassembling of the clothing he sends to Niger gets infused with new fabrics to create fashion with a greater purpose.
We all experience periods in our lives that break us down and pull us apart, what matters is how we put those pieces back together. What has recently pulled you apart and how might you put those pieces back together in an interesting way that fills your life with new purpose?