Latest news with #CottonClub
The Star
4 days ago
- General
- The Star
Why recycling old clothes isn't the easy fix we hoped it would be
At the height of the holiday season on Amsterdam's Kalverstraat last December, thousands of shoppers who regularly descend on the popular shopping district came face to face with the grim reality behind humanity's sartorial excess. A local activist group had deposited an enormous pile of clothes on the sidewalk, in sight of stores such as Adidas, Zara and the popular Dutch casual fashion chain Cotton Club. Some seven feet-tall and 25-feet around (over two metres tall and seven-metres around), the garment dump drew puzzled looks from passersby, some of whom stopped to read handwritten signs poking out the top. "Every 10 minutes we throw away this much clothing in the Netherlands,' read one. The intent, the organisers said, wasn't just to draw attention to clothing waste, but to urge companies to reveal how much clothing they make-a first step toward addressing what's long been a disastrous side-effect of the phenomenon known as "fast-fashion.' But while a local newspaper ran an article on the protest, not much else came of it. It was however emblematic of a now-well understood problem across Europe, and its seemingly intractable nature. Tied to the arrival in the 1990s of fast fashion – which for the uninitiated is essentially the ability to churn out new clothing lines at cheap prices-the environmental destruction caused by discarded and disintegrating clothing cannot be understated. Attempts at reuse and recycling have only put a small dent in the worsening problem, hindered by a thorny set of technological obstacles to making old clothing new again. But not far from where that pile of discarded pants and tops befuddled Amsterdam shoppers, there is a company that says it may have hit upon a solution. It's one of a handful across the globe trying to crack the code to clothing waste. According to the European Commission, consumers in Europe discard around 5.8 million tons of textiles every year. Globally, that figure comes to 92 million tons. Clothing consumption almost doubled between 1975 and 2020, according to Textile Exchange, a nonprofit that organises textile and apparel manufacturers and brands around sustainability. It's projected to leap another 25% by 2030. Read more: Can the fashion industry turn to technology to solve its massive waste problem? The genesis of (and indeed collateral damage from) fast fashion has been well documented. Global clothing chains such as Zara and H&M pioneered the trend of re-supplying stores with new, low-priced clothing every four-to-six weeks instead of with the seasons, enabling more consumers to follow trends without committing too much cash. Add to that rising incomes in developed nations and low wages in exporting countries, and fast fashion became a winning business model. But those low prices and monthly trends mean the journey from fashion statement to landfill became much shorter-and that's where the environmental disaster began. Clothing, as with anything, is the sum of its parts. Plastics, dyes and chemicals are leaking out of growing mountains of refuse all over the world, poisoning lands, rivers and oceans. Some of the microplastics inside every human being may easily have originated in a discarded pair of cargo shorts. As for those clothing items that end up in incinerators, well, fast fashion does its part to accelerate global warming, too. And that's just the endgame. The starting point of what many people wear is cotton, and growing it requires tremendous amounts of water, depleting resources in a world where fresh water and arable land are becoming more scarce. Polyester is made from fossil fuels, the burning of which is the prime culprit in climate change-a fact that also applies to the untold number of factories, planes and trucks that make up the global clothing supply chain. Recycling and reuse sound like an appealing solution, but as Bloomberg revealed in a 2022 investigation, much of what's collected ends up overwhelming the usually underdeveloped destinations where it's sent for repurposing, resale or donation. Or the items are "downcycled' into things like stuffing for car seats and mattresses. Producing new clothes from old items hasn't been a workable solution, either, at least not at scale. The processing required reduces the length and strength of fibres, making it hard to turn them into yarn that would be practical for making new clothing. According to a 2024 study in Cleaner Engineering and Technology, the biggest hurdle to recycling clothing is the quality of the end product. Just 1% of old clothes are made into new clothes. But after a decade of attempts, a new wave of recycling tech is taking hold in Europe, with companies and entrepreneurs hoping to break through the barrier between a planet drowning in old clothes and one where everything is effectively a hand-me-down. Andreas Bartl, a senior scientist at Technical University Vienna who studies textile recycling methods and processes, said an inflection point has been reached. "The last two years, technologies have evolved and this is a big jump in quality,' he said. "The rate of about 1% will improve in the next years.' New sustainability regulations in the Netherlands require the fashion industry incorporate a minimum 16.5% recycled material into their wares by 2030. Similar Europe-wide rules have been proposed as well. Key to recent improvements in the industry's ability to comply may be two technologies being developed by companies in the US and Europe. In the latter, they include La Roche in France, Rester in Finland, Valvan in Belgium, Reju in Germany, the Swedish Waste Management Association (Sysav) and Wieland Textiles, a company just outside Amsterdam owned by Brightfiber Textiles BV. To recycle clothing waste in a way that doesn't do further damage to the environment, different colours must be separated. Otherwise, the raw materials and yarns produced from recycled clothing end up with an unappealing grey hue that, while suitable for mops and stuffing, aren't the foundation of a sustainable clothing line. But Brightfiber and Sysav have come up with something called an optical sorting machine. Since different colours and materials reflect light differently, the machine allows items to be differentiated simply by bouncing light off of them. The ability to separate fibres is also improving, thanks to chemical processes now deployed by Frankfurt-based Reju, a company started in 2023 by Patrik Frisk, a former chief executive of Under Armour and president of Timberland. The company has found a way to separate cotton and wool from polyester or elastane-the material which gives yoga pants, underwear waistbands and skinny jeans their stretch. La Roche, Rester and Valvan meanwhile have developed machines that tear clothing items into small pieces, cleaning them of buttons, zippers and labels. Taken together, these new technologies may enable recycling at a volume never before possible. But the open question is will it be enough for clothing companies to sacrifice the easier, more destructive path to fast-fashion? Brightfiber said it is the first European company to successfully bring together optical sorting, cutting-cleaning and raw material production to make high-quality substitutes for virgin cotton, wool or blends of organic and sustainable fibres and synthetics like polyester. Its factory is located just a few miles northwest of Kalverstraat, shoehorned into a logistics centre near Amsterdam's western port. The company said it began with €5mil (approximately RM24.2mil) invested, including a €1mil (RM4.8mil) grant from a Dutch government sustainability initiative. The first thing you see when entering Brightfiber's building is a small showroom of sweaters, shirts and pants-made from recycled clothes, of course. Rather than being obviously repurposed or rough to the touch, they appear and feel similar to the lightweight retail sweater worn by a reporter during a recent visit. Producing such soft, fine yarn is a recent advance from the more primitive cable-knits of earlier designs, said Ellen Mensink, Brightfiber's founder and CEO. To be clear, no one has figured out how to make usable materials that are entirely recycled old clothing. Brightfiber, like its rivals in the growing space, makes material from a combination of recycled fibers, new material and waste pieces. To note, waste cloth comes from the factory floor – as much as 40% of material fed into clothing production lines ends up discarded. The mixture is necessary to deliver the longer fibres needed for quality yarns, the company said. Mensink said Brightfiber's production is derived from between 40% and 70% post-consumer textiles. Also added in are organic and sustainable fibers like lyocell and alpaca-or polyester from recycled bottles. As for colour separation, when seen up close, it's clear that a green Brightfiber sweater is not uniform in colour, but composed of yarn of many similar shades of green. While making clothing often begins in a cotton field, recycling it begins in a donation bin. Brightfiber buys old clothes by the pound from both charities and companies that gather discarded items from collection points across the Netherlands. Currently around half of textile waste in the country comes from dropoff bins. In Germany, the rate is even higher, at 70% according to Bartl. But worldwide efforts to recycle textile waste sit at only 15%, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. When old clothes arrive at Brightfiber, its optical sorting machine uses near-infrared light to detect a garment's material and colour, and then separates the stream into 90 different combinations. There are ten colours and nine material combinations, including cotton-polyester, polyester-elastane and cotton-polyester-elastane. A second machine developed by Valvan chops these into pieces the size of an adult's palm, cleaning them of buttons, zippers and labels. The resulting swatches are then transformed into a fluff similar in look to virgin cotton, thanks to a third machine developed by Brightfiber and Turkey-based Balkan Textile Machinery Ltd. That fluff is in turn spun into yarn for fabrics and end-products that Brightfiber sells to other brands, including the Dutch chain King Louie. The whole line can run 5.5 million pounds a year, according to Mensink. She contends two lines would give the company the capacity to process all of metro Amsterdam's textile waste. Read more: Known fashion brands bought cotton grown by children in India, says report Even with these advances, chemical separation will likely remain central to repurposing the vast majority of textiles that aren't made of 100% natural fibres. The ubiquity of polyester in modern clothing makes separating it from other materials inescapable. "It's extracting the polyester and then depolymerising it-breaking it down back into its monomer, and then polymerising it again to make it back into polyester,' explains Reju's Frisk, who said his company has optimised this process. Reju's method adds a catalyst to one of three existing chemical recycling methods. "This makes it faster and more efficient,' Frisk said. Reju's end product becomes feedstock for its owner, France-based Technip Energies NV. The company said its technology is used in about 1,000 polyester factories around the world, representing a third of all polyester manufacturing. Brightfiber and Reju hope to benefit from European Union regulation. So-called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) mechanisms are already in place in several countries, aimed at forcing textile producers to internalise the cost of waste. In February, the EU Council Presidency and Parliament representatives reached a provisional agreement to harmonise frameworks already existing in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere, with a goal of placing an EPR scheme across all 27 member states. The rules would require manufacturers pay into a fund that will be used to develop recycling infrastructure, with the fees "eco-modulated' so that more-sustainable products cost producers less. Bartl expressed concern though, saying whatever policy comes out of Brussels shouldn't impede existing efforts in Austria, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands. The EU should not "destroy a system that is quite efficient in sorting textiles', he said. Frisk and Bartl agreed that requiring minimum repurposed content for garments might be the best way to jumpstart clothing recycling. "Let's just put it at 5%-whatever, just so the industry knows that this is coming,' Frisk said. – Bloomberg
Miami Herald
5 days ago
- General
- Miami Herald
Cracking the code of making old clothes new again
At the height of the holiday season on Amsterdam's Kalverstraat last December, thousands of shoppers who regularly descend on the popular shopping district came face to face with the grim reality behind humanity's sartorial excess. A local activist group had deposited an enormous pile of clothes on the sidewalk, in sight of stores such as Adidas, Zara and the popular Dutch casual fashion chain Cotton Club. Some seven feet-tall and 25-feet around, the garment dump drew puzzled looks from passersby, some of whom stopped to read handwritten signs poking out the top. "Every 10 minutes we throw away this much clothing in the Netherlands," read one. The intent, the organizers said, wasn't just to draw attention to clothing waste, but to urge companies to reveal how much clothing they make-a first step toward addressing what's long been a disastrous side-effect of the phenomenon known as "fast-fashion." But while a local newspaper ran an article on the protest, not much else came of it. It was however emblematic of a now-well understood problem across Europe, and its seemingly intractable nature. Tied to the arrival in the 1990s of fast fashion-which for the uninitiated is essentially the ability to churn out new clothing lines at cheap prices-the environmental destruction caused by discarded and disintegrating clothing cannot be understated. Attempts at reuse and recycling have only put a small dent in the worsening problem, hindered by a thorny set of technological obstacles to making old clothing new again. But not far from where that pile of discarded pants and tops befuddled Amsterdam shoppers, there is a company that says it may have hit upon a solution. It's one of a handful across the globe trying to crack the code to clothing waste. According to the European Commission, consumers in Europe discard around 5.8 million tons of textiles every year. Globally, that figure comes to 92 million tons. Clothing consumption almost doubled between 1975 and 2020, according to Textile Exchange, a nonprofit that organizes textile and apparel manufacturers and brands around sustainability. It's projected to leap another 25% by 2030. The genesis of (and indeed collateral damage from) fast fashion has been well documented. Global clothing chains such as Zara and H&M pioneered the trend of re-supplying stores with new, low-priced clothing every four-to-six weeks instead of with the seasons, enabling more consumers to follow trends without committing too much cash. Add to that rising incomes in developed nations and low wages in exporting countries, and fast fashion became a winning business model. But those low prices and monthly trends mean the journey from fashion statement to landfill became much shorter-and that's where the environmental disaster began. Clothing as with anything is the sum of its parts. Plastics, dyes and chemicals are leaking out of growing mountains of refuse all over the world, poisoning lands, rivers and oceans. Some of the microplastics inside every human being may easily have originated in a discarded pair of cargo shorts. As for those clothing items that end up in incinerators, well, fast fashion does its part to accelerate global warming, too. And that's just the endgame. The starting point of what many people wear is cotton, and growing it requires tremendous amounts of water, depleting resources in a world where fresh water and arable land are becoming more scarce. Polyester is made from fossil fuels, the burning of which is the prime culprit in climate change-a fact that also applies to the untold number of factories, planes and trucks that make up the global clothing supply chain. Recycling and reuse sound like an appealing solution, but as Bloomberg revealed in a 2022 investigation, much of what's collected ends up overwhelming the usually underdeveloped destinations where it's sent for repurposing, resale or donation. Or the items are "downcycled" into things like stuffing for car seats and mattresses. Producing new clothes from old items hasn't been a workable solution, either, at least not at scale. The processing required reduces the length and strength of fibers, making it hard to turn them into yarn that would be practical for making new clothing. According to a 2024 study in Cleaner Engineering and Technology, the biggest hurdle to recycling clothing is the quality of the end product. Just 1% of old clothes are made into new clothes. But after a decade of attempts, a new wave of recycling tech is taking hold in Europe, with companies and entrepreneurs hoping to break through the barrier between a planet drowning in old clothes and one where everything is effectively a hand-me-down. Andreas Bartl, a senior scientist at Technical University Vienna who studies textile recycling methods and processes, said an inflection point has been reached. "The last two years, technologies have evolved and this is a big jump in quality," he said. "The rate of about 1% will improve in the next years." New sustainability regulations in the Netherlands require the fashion industry incorporate a minimum 16.5% recycled material into their wares by 2030. Similar Europe-wide rules have been proposed as well. Key to recent improvements in the industry's ability to comply may be two technologies being developed by companies in the U.S. and Europe. In the latter, they include La Roche in France, Rester in Finland, Valvan in Belgium, Reju in Germany, the Swedish Waste Management Association (Sysav) and Wieland Textiles, a company just outside Amsterdam owned by Brightfiber Textiles BV. To recycle clothing waste in a way that doesn't do further damage to the environment, different colors must be separated. Otherwise, the raw materials and yarns produced from recycled clothing end up with an unappealing grey hue that, while suitable for mops and stuffing, aren't the foundation of a sustainable clothing line. But Brightfiber and Sysav have come up with something called an optical sorting machine. Since different colors and materials reflect light differently, the machine allows items to be differentiated simply by bouncing light off of them. The ability to separate fibers is also improving, thanks to chemical processes now deployed by Frankfurt-based Reju, a company started in 2023 by Patrik Frisk, a former chief executive of Under Armour and president of Timberland. The company has found a way to separate cotton and wool from polyester or elastane-the material which gives yoga pants, underwear waistbands and skinny jeans their stretch. La Roche, Rester and Valvan meanwhile have developed machines that tear clothing items into small pieces, cleaning them of buttons, zippers and labels. Taken together, these new technologies may enable recycling at a volume never before possible. But the open question is will it be enough for clothing companies to sacrifice the easier, more destructive path to fast-fashion? With its factory just a few miles northwest of Kalverstraat, shoehorned into a logistics center near Amsterdam's western port, Brightfiber said it's the first European company to successfully bring together optical sorting, cutting-cleaning and raw material production to make high-quality substitutes for virgin cotton, wool or blends of organic and sustainable fibers and synthetics like polyester. The company said it began with €5 million ($5.7 million) invested, including a €1 million grant from a Dutch government sustainability initiative. The first thing you see when entering Brightfiber's building is a small showroom of sweaters, shirts and pants-made from recycled clothes, of course. Rather than being obviously repurposed or rough to the touch, they appear and feel similar to the lightweight retail sweater worn by a reporter during a recent visit. Producing such soft, fine yarn is a recent advance from the more primitive cable-knits of earlier designs, said Ellen Mensink, Brightfiber's founder and CEO. To be clear, no one has figured out how to make usable materials that are entirely recycled old clothing. Brightfiber, like its rivals in the growing space, makes material from a combination of recycled fibers, new material and waste pieces. (Waste cloth comes from the factory floor-as much as 40% of material fed into clothing production lines ends up discarded.) The mixture is necessary to deliver the longer fibers needed for quality yarns, the company said. Mensink said Brightfiber's production is derived from between 40% and 70% post-consumer textiles. Also added in are organic and sustainable fibers like lyocell and alpaca-or polyester from recycled bottles. As for color separation, when seen up close, it's clear that a green Brightfiber sweater is not uniform in color, but composed of yarn of many similar shades of green. While making clothing often begins in a cotton field, recycling it begins in a donation bin. Brightfiber buys old clothes by the pound from both charities and companies that gather discarded items from collection points across the Netherlands. Currently around half of textile waste in the country comes from dropoff bins. In Germany, the rate is even higher, at 70% according to Bartl. But worldwide efforts to recycle textile waste sit at only 15%, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. When old clothes arrive at Brightfiber, its optical sorting machine uses near-infrared light to detect a garment's material and color, and then separates the stream into 90 different combinations. There are ten colors and nine material combinations, including cotton-polyester, polyester-elastane and cotton-polyester-elastane. A second machine developed by Valvan chops these into pieces the size of an adult's palm, cleaning them of buttons, zippers and labels. The resulting swatches are then transformed into a fluff similar in look to virgin cotton, thanks to a third machine developed by Brightfiber and Turkey-based Balkan Textile Machinery Ltd. That fluff is in turn spun into yarn for fabrics and end-products that Brightfiber sells to other brands, including the Dutch chain King Louie. The whole line can run 5.5 million pounds a year, according to Mensink. She contends two lines would give the company the capacity to process all of metro Amsterdam's textile waste. Even with these advances, chemical separation will likely remain central to repurposing the vast majority of textiles that aren't made of 100% natural fibers. The ubiquity of polyester in modern clothing makes separating it from other materials inescapable. "It's extracting the polyester and then depolymerizing it-breaking it down back into its monomer, and then polymerizing it again to make it back into polyester," explains Reju's Frisk, who said his company has optimized this process. Reju's method adds a catalyst to one of three existing chemical recycling methods. "This makes it faster and more efficient," Frisk said. Reju's end product becomes feedstock for its owner, France-based Technip Energies NV. The company said its technology is used in about 1,000 polyester factories around the world, representing a third of all polyester manufacturing. Brightfiber and Reju hope to benefit from European Union regulation. So-called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) mechanisms are already in place in several countries, aimed at forcing textile producers to internalize the cost of waste. In February, the EU Council Presidency and Parliament representatives reached a provisional agreement to harmonize frameworks already existing in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere, with a goal of placing an EPR scheme across all 27 member states. The rules would require manufacturers pay into a fund that will be used to develop recycling infrastructure, with the fees "eco-modulated" so that more-sustainable products cost producers less. Bartl expressed concern though, saying whatever policy comes out of Brussels shouldn't impede existing efforts in Austria, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands. The EU should not "destroy a system that is quite efficient in sorting textiles," he said. Frisk and Bartl agreed that requiring minimum repurposed content for garments might be the best way to jumpstart clothing recycling. "Let's just put it at 5%-whatever, just so the industry knows that this is coming," Frisk said. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Bloomberg
7 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Cracking the Code of Making Old Clothes New Again
At the height of the holiday season on Amsterdam's Kalverstraat last December, thousands of shoppers who regularly descend on the popular shopping district came face to face with the grim reality behind humanity's sartorial excess. A local activist group had deposited an enormous pile of clothes on the sidewalk, in sight of stores such as Adidas, Zara and the popular Dutch casual fashion chain Cotton Club. Some seven feet-tall and 25-feet around, the garment dump drew puzzled looks from passersby, some of whom stopped to read handwritten signs poking out the top. 'Every 10 minutes we throw away this much clothing in the Netherlands,' read one.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A High School Festival Keeps Duke Ellington Very Much Alive
In a dressing room behind the stage in the Metropolitan Opera House, Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter and educator, intently watched a live feed of the big band representing the Osceola County School for the Arts, from Kissimmee, Fla. They were playing Dizzy Gillespie's 'Things to Come,' a piece that can expose any weaknesses in a big band. Being a good jazz musician isn't just about playing fast and loud and high, but this song requires musicians to do all of that. The school's lead trumpet player was in the middle of a solo. A dexterous player who could hit the high notes, he sounded like a professional. 'Watch, the director's going to wave off the backgrounds here,' Mr. Marsalis said, using some colorful language to say the soloist had not gotten to his good stuff yet. The director then made a small gesture to the rest of his band, telling them to wait to let the solo develop. It was a chart that Mr. Marsalis had surely heard live hundreds of times, but each time it is full of small decisions like these, making it a new experience. It has been nearly a century since Duke Ellington's orchestra became the house band at the Cotton Club on 142nd Street. Even there, where Ellington and his group of Black musicians played in front of all-white audiences, patrons were expected to be active listeners. Ellington is quoted in the book 'Duke Ellington's America' as saying the club 'demanded absolutely silence' during performances, and that anybody making noise would quickly be ushered out the door. Ellington knew his work had a signature. He wrote with particular members of his orchestra, like the saxophonist Johnny Hodges or the trumpeter Cootie Williams, in mind, and he believed that nobody else could sound like them, no matter how hard they tried. Still, at Essentially Ellington, an annual high school big-band festival organized by Jazz at Lincoln Center and held over the weekend, teenagers from all over the world tried their hardest to channel those musicians anyway. This year, in honor of the 30th anniversary of the festival, 30 big bands of the 127 that sent in application tapes came to New York to compete for top honors, up from the usual 15. The finalists included 27 American groups and bands from Australia, Japan and Spain. Each group selected three songs to perform from the Essentially Ellington library. The top 10 finishers advanced to a second and final, competitive round. The top three then played an exhibition concert — at the opera house instead of at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Room, since the additional capacity was needed — before a winner was announced. But the event's vibe, while exacting, does not feel like something out of the movie 'Whiplash' — at least not anymore. Years ago, organizers felt the competition was getting too cutthroat, and looked to soften its edges. Now, students perform, but also jam with kids from other schools, attend clinics with professionals, and have meals where they're seated not by school, but by the instrument they play. In the hallways, members of different schools spontaneously burst into song together. 'It's like the top arts festival,' said Julius Tolentino, the jazz director at Newark Academy in Livingston, N.J., whose band won the competition in 2024. 'There's nothing that compares to this. They roll out the red carpet for the students. It's changed the way band directors all over the world deal with jazz music.' The organization's work isn't limited to the contest. It runs an annual training program for band directors and sends out professional musicians, often members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, to help guide bands that qualify for the finals. The festival also doubles as a tool for the creation of a big band canon. For 30 years, the Jazz at Lincoln Center team has created sheet music for pieces by Ellington and some of his contemporaries, like Gillespie or Count Basie or Benny Carter, and has sent it out to schools interested in competing, for free. That process is not always simple, and often involves digging through the archives at the Smithsonian to look at existing, handwritten scores and transcribing from recordings. 'There's a philosophy that jazz is a methodology, not an art form that has a canon,' said Todd Stoll, the vice president of education at Jazz at Lincoln Center. 'The historical viewpoint of this music was, I won't say ignored, but it wasn't something that there was much focus on at the university level. I went all the way through a master's degree at a major conservatory. I never played a note of Duke Ellington's music.' That would be unfathomable now, in part because of the work that Jazz at Lincoln Center has done. Mr. Marsalis bristled at the idea that Ellington was not an international star before the festival existed, but Essentially Ellington, and the work that makes it possible, may do as much as anything to ensure that his work persists. For Mr. Marsalis, who has been at the center of debates about the jazz canon for decades, this could be a victory lap. But he insists on Essentially Ellington as an example of how playing old music does not need to be a backward-looking endeavor. 'We are not cynical,' he said. 'When you're establishing a new mythology, how much time do you have to attack the old mythology? Every band that auditions for a spot in New York is a part of that new mythology, an example of how the music is not a historical document, but something that is alive as long as it is being interpreted.' The experience, however, can be intimidating until you are a part of it. When Dr. Ollie Liddell, the band director at Memphis Central High School in Memphis, first saw videos on YouTube of groups that had reached the finals of the Essentially Ellington festival, over a decade ago, he thought to himself: 'We're never going to have a band that good.' Memphis Central is a public high school, and like most public school band directors, Dr. Liddell is responsible for not just the jazz band, but the marching band and concert ensembles, too. He has to handle fund-raising and convince clinicians to come in and work with his band. None of his jazz students receive private instruction, save one, who receives lessons from a Memphis Central alumnus over Zoom. Essentially Ellington can't always be top of mind. That's not the case for many of the groups that make it to New York, with arts magnet schools and private academies offering instrument-specific instructors, and a number of students taking private lessons as well. But even without those luxuries, a resourceful director and passionate kids can still compete. The proof? Memphis Central took first place at this year's competition. It is a cliché to say that jazz is an interactive music, a conversation. But those conversations aren't confined to the stage. On Saturday, during its final performance for the judges, Memphis Central took the stage and the sound of Ellington's 'Rockabye River' came all at once. The rumble of the drum set's low tom. The shout of the horns. The growling trumpet soloist punctuating each of the written phrases. The work was brought to life and made new. A crowd filled with competitors and rivals sat with wide eyes and open mouths, with some yelping their approval. None of them, clearly, were cynical.
Vogue
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
At the 2025 Met Gala, Keke Palmer Channels the First Black Oscar Nominee for Best Actress
Keke Palmer always knew what she wanted her 2025 Met Gala look—designed by Vera Wang—to be. First and foremost, the actor was resolute in her desire to pay tribute to Dorothy Dandridge, who, in 1954, became the first-ever Black Academy Award nominee for best actress for her role in Carmen Jones. 'Much of [the look] was about the weight of Black dandyism and how it has been used to activate and reshape narratives,' Palmer tells Vogue. 'I wanted to zero in on an inspiration of someone who did that in media from the start, and that was Dorothy Dandridge.' Not only was Dandridge a talented actor (she also earned a Golden Globes nomination for her role in Porgy and Bess), she was also a regular performer at some of New York City's most legendary venues, including the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club. But during her life, Dandridge was subject to racism within the entertainment industry—including losing Black roles to white actors who performed them in blackface, and being passed over for lead roles opposite white men—prompting her to get involved with the NAACP and the National Urban League. 'After seeing her in Carmen Jones, I completely related to Keke's fascination with her,' Wang says. 'Dorothy represented, in parallel, a true moment for African American success and recognition in Hollywood, and this concept felt entirely authentic to both of us.' WWD/Getty Images Courtesy of Vera Wang Palmer was keen on honoring Wang's house codes in her sartorial homage to Dandridge, allowing the two to land on a feminine interpretation of men's suiting—with embellishments galore. 'From the start, it was truly a meeting of the minds,' Wang says. The look is composed of four separate pieces: a fitted ivory silk faille bodice was outfitted with a lapel neckpiece, which she wore with a pair of black pinched-seam tuxedo pants fabricated in Italian silk and wool radzmire. Over the trousers, she wears a sweeping, bubble-hemmed ball skirt, embroidered with Swarovski crystals and glass pearls. 'Story-wise, it's about a Black beauty who used said beauty and fashion to open doors. That, to me, is Black dandyism at its core from an impact standpoint,' Palmer says of the look. 'We also took the tailoring into account and paid homage to the male tuxedo, which was fun because I love playing with the masculine and feminine.'
