In the studio: House Of Aama

In Los Angeles, Akua Shabaka and her mother Rebecca Henry take part in a video call. They are similarly illuminated by light from the window, although they connect from different locations: Henry sits in his studio, while Shabaka appears on screen from a comfy alcove. They have matching sets of warm eyes. The two have been skilled partners in the development of their heritage brand, House of Aama, for nearly 10 years. Beyond their familial bond, the duo shares purposefulness of their sartorial practice – they create materiality for undervalued Americana.

House of Aama is Henry and Shabaka’s lifestyle storytelling brand; her fall/winter 2024 collection was shown in February during New York Fashion Week. During the celebrated show, designers and co-creative directors unveiled greater than 30 recent creations in an intimate presentation at a downtown jazz club honoring their Los Angeles and hometown roots.

“Over the last two collections, we have really entered the world of my paternal heritage,” Shabaka reflects. She is referring to her father and Henry’s late husband, Jamaiel Shabaka – a prolific avant-jazz horn player who died in 2021. This latest period in the history of the House of Aama may be very much rooted in the family heritage of arts and crafts, and even sheds light on the fusionist Pan-African ethos that brought Henry and her husband together.

, released in 1988, is considered one of the elder Shabaka’s most continuously referenced works. The highly improvised album combines traditional woodwind jazz musicality with Yoruba and other Afro-Cuban sounds, transforming an already culturally reflective genre into something much more dynamic. This source music reflects the textiles that inspired mother and daughter to take a cohesive approach to design. “I have always been someone who combined materials – new and vintage, as well as heirlooms with things I made myself,” says Henry, explaining how she continued the cycle of appreciating the family’s artistic heritage through clothes and their construction.

House of Aama, especially in its earliest collections, drew on the post-war history of the Henry family and mystical tales of the southern United States. “The association with crafts comes from the fact that both of my parents are Southerners,” Henry says. “My father is from South Carolina, my mother is from Louisiana, and I was in those places a lot of the time as a child. My grandfather had a farm in Shreveport, Louisiana, and my cousins ​​from Detroit would meet us there every summer.” During these childhood exchanges, Henry observed her family’s sewing traditions, watching her mother and aunts go to fabric stores and hand-create their summer wardrobes. “It was important that you could express yourself with something you created yourself,” he says.

This practical legacy is tied to Henry’s understanding of southernness and black culture on a visceral level. She carried it together with her as she grew up and later settled in Los Angeles, where she practiced law for a few years and raised her daughter. As the younger Shabaka got here of age, she clung closely to her maternal lineage in Louisiana and coastal Carolina, along together with her father’s Los Angeles and Caribbean roots. Jamaiel Shabaka’s skilled journey as a jazz artist, DJ and educator has been his own cultural memory practice, engaging a variety of African-Cuban musical traditions across multiple instruments. A longtime Los Angeles family, the Shabakas retain their ties to the Compton, Watts and Long Beach communities to this present day.

Inspired by the creative influence of her parents, Shabaka began her own work, delving into physical and oratorical archives reflecting her heritage. Recently, her family’s participation in the creation of a novel piece of jazz history in Los Angeles became the inspiration from which the House of Aama collection for fall/winter 2024 was born.

Tasked with finding recent ways to attach with heritage, Henry and Shabaka followed the stories that got here to them organically – including the thread of Jamaiel Shabaka’s walking patterns in Leimert Park and Central Avenue. After inheriting and exploring her father’s archives, Shabaka discovered the depth of a neighborhood art movement that has global resonance – not only in the music world, but additionally in her and her mother’s work today. “We landed on the Free Jazz movement,” Henry says. “The Ornette Coleman and Billy Higgins that I knew were the stories that were presented to us, so we really took stock of everything and focused on that particular piece of jazz history in Los Angeles.”

The Free Jazz movement emerged in the avant-garde Nineteen Fifties and developed right into a dynamic mental revolution at the end of the twentieth century. Closely tied to the anti-war and Black Power consciousness of the time, this musical reframing celebrated collective improvisation and non-traditional forms to push the boundaries of what was considered jazz. Many of the period’s luminaries, who were themselves friends and mentors of the late Mr. Shabaka, formed a community during jam sessions, rehearsals and performances in the historic cultural centers of Black Los Angeles in the Watts and Leimert Park neighborhoods.

“Between the previous collection and the current collection, I spent a lot of time talking to many of my family members who were very active at the time,” Shabaka recalls. She notes how her aunts made her aware of her family’s connections to this prolific movement, and thru the accompanying study of archival photos, she was capable of imagine what this era meant to her parents’ past and her artistic present. “Discovering music and understanding the spirituality of it was really interesting – understanding the desire at the time for Black people to really look at themselves beyond their current situation, and using music as a way to achieve that,” he says. By allowing herself to be guided by history, she inadvertently tapped into the same creative expansion that had guided her paternal family for generations.

During the fall/winter 2024 presentation, titled “Sun Records,” viewers were treated to quite a lot of shades that reflect the light and heat of this era. Kaftans and semi-sheer maxi dresses moved along the sidewalk, immediately brightening the dimly lit venue. These pieces, in various shades of gold, orange and royal blue, energized everyone present on that dreary February day. For some time, the energy of Nineteen Seventies Los Angeles was in the basement of New York.

House of Aama, as a narrative-oriented label, creates collections based on the consistency of the narrative from previous seasons. The sources of inspiration – family history and the journeys of Black Americans – are vast and at all times ready for a brand new look, as evidenced by subsequent brand launches. The 2017 release “Bloodroot” spawned one other, after which one other, line evoking the poetry of African-American folklore: incl. “Salt Water” for spring/summer 2022 and the “Parable” capsule for 2023. In each version, Henry and Shabaka discover a historical place of kinship and reimagine it with a surreal, contemporary twist. In 2021, the couple arrived at “Camp Aama,” a reimagining of a sun-drenched community gathering place with a classic summer camp aesthetic. It is an ode to Black freedom, set in a mythical resort, that emerges from the latest collection and can likely be visually developed in future clothing releases.

The work of designers constructing a socio-political narrative through clothing may be in comparison with the work of Black femme visual artists working in other media. Julie Dash’s groundbreaking film similarly uses fashion and adornment as modes of subversive cultural identity, dressing historically inspired characters in their very own specific context of black heritage in the South Carolina Sea Islands. This screen world, much like the one which viewers enter in House of Aama presentations, reconciles multi-layered stories with almost utopian ideals of identity, memory and tradition. Many of the pieces capture the haunting charm and poetic melancholy of a past when generations of black families were often at home and least protected.

In the 2017 “Bloodroot” collection, Edwardian blouses with high, lace-trimmed necklines and delicate satin buttons check with the neo-Gothic image of the black south. It is historical in nature, but thematically current. The collection was released in a 12 months of racial tensions in America, heightened by the inflammatory whistles of the then-president. The same fall that the collection was released, a crowd of white nationalists fearing the lie of the “Great Replacement” gathered at the Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, singing a version of “Dixie” and chanting “Blood and Soil.” At the same time, the focused mother and daughter created their works with no considered hatred, as a substitute embodying the spirit of cultural triumph that the antagonists feared most.

In an interview Shabaka gave to the now-defunct British publication for girls and non-binary people of color, she expressed the relevance and thematic focus of the work, which was widely praised for its liberal use of color and seamless mix of traditional craftsmanship with contemporary aesthetics. “Blood root is a rare herb used by ancient magicians and root makers as a powerful guardian of the family,” Niellah Arboine explained to the author.

Like jazz itself, Rebecca Henry, Akua Shabaka, and House of Aama are children of the same meditation on expansive Black connectivity, pursuing a body of labor that may withstand an unknown future. The brand’s pieces offer insight into Shabaka and Henry’s family tree and the designers’ countercultural engagement with African American aesthetic practice and American heritage branding. As for the future, Shabaka and Henry proceed to speak with one another, expressing intentions and vision in a way that only a mother and daughter can truly understand. As designers, each of them follows in the footsteps of a deep family mission, similar to their moms and dads before them.