Weekly updates:

Culture Style

Style recap: The colourful fits of Afropunk Festival, Brooklyn

Memorable looks and quotes from this year's event at Commodore Barry Park

Posted by

The first rule to Afropunk is you have got to stay hydrated. Walking through a sea of that many beautiful black people leaves you prone to thirst, which you don’t want to experience while the Brooklyn sun blazes down on you at the twilight of another NYC summer coming to a close.

Since its creation in 2005, Afropunk has become the summer-ending event for black people in or around the Tri-State area who enjoy music that treads the line of alternative. It’s the last time of the year that we get to sit in the grass, let our hair down, get our faces painted and listen to obscure, classic, and cutting edge music in the park before we go hibernate in our apartments for another seven months.

Whether you want to check out the futuristic audio-visuals Flying Lotus is doing during his set, drop acid while you listen to TV On The Radio, or anxiously wait for Ice Cube to perform ‘Bow Down’ (spoiler alert: he never does), it’s all possible with the two-day schedule Afropunk lines up every year.

But as important as the music is to the festival, it’s the people who make it what it is. It’s their creativity and self expression exhibited through fashion that makes the festival bigger every year. Afropunk is becoming something of a civilian’s Met Ball, on the low, where the words “Afro” and “Punk” lend themselves to new interpretations each year, and the looks created wind up online, permeate culture, and push the image of black beauty further into mainstream culture, creating even more afro punks who show up the following year.

It’s like a girl near the merch section told a friend of mine: “You can’t even tell who’s gay.”

These are some of the coolest people I saw wandering around the third dimension Afropunk’s energy created in Commodore Barry Park.

Weekly updates