Mavericks of Style

“In Mavericks of Style, Uri McMillan takes us on a dazzling journey through the world of Grace Jones and her circle—Antonio Lopez, Juan Ramos, Pat Cleveland, Stephen Burrows, and many more. Part archive raid, part love letter to insurgent glamour, this book re-centers these style revolutionaries whose sharp elbows and sharper aesthetics reshaped fashion, performance, and art as we know it. Mavericks of Style is as seductive and vital as its subjects: a kaleidoscopic archive of those who turned the disco floor, the fashion runway, and their own bodies into living, breathing works of art.” - Tavia Nyong’o, author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World

“Uri McMillan offers a vibrant analysis of how artistic production and collaboration among Black and Latinx women and LGBTQ artists resulted in a transformative cultural moment in 1970s New York that spanned fashion, photography, art, and performance. Mavericks of Style describes how dance, color, racialized sexuality, and subculture fed the elite industries of fashion while also creating alternative spaces for Black and Latinx women and queer self-fashioning. Bringing the milieu of nightlife, leisure, and corporate spaces to life, McMillan makes a major contribution to cultural studies.” - Jillian Hernandez, author of Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment

I often find myself suspicious of the capitalist machinations behind the art-fashion hybrids taking over contemporary culture. But a new book by cultural historian Uri McMillan convincingly troubles that easy read, highlighting experimental Black and Brown artists of the 1970s who moved between the commercial and avant-garde realms with transgressive bombast, irreverent especially toward the art world’s elitism. A memorable chapter describes the formative friendship of Grace Jones and Ming Smith—who met modeling, then formed a kind of creative coalition." - Emily Watlington, Art in America