On a Thursday in February, Cassandra Bromfield is leading the women of the St. Albans branch of the Queens Public Library through a workshop on “100 years of Black Fashion.” She is part of that history.
Her tools are Wikipedia printouts about the likes of Harlem’s Dapper Dan and Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (who made Mary Todd Lincoln’s White House gowns) and the stuff of fashion collage-making. Glitter, feathers and fabrics mark the worktables. After an hour of art-making and gossip about family and the fall of the Jamaica Colosseum Mall, 2D cutout models pop up, ready for the catwalk.
Bromfield lives for these kinds of creative mashups and storytelling sessions. A Brooklyn-born fashion designer, the 69-year-old has been stitching together pieces of her and other New Yorkers’ history nearly all her life.
Her ready-to-wear fashions beckon with the tag line: “No two pieces are alike.” Her repertoire of patchwork ranges from silk tops and couture dresses to African print placemats.
Bromfield has put her storytelling prowess to work in gowns that have appeared on the Academy Award’s red carpet and as a stand-in during a reenactment of Frederick Douglass’ wedding for the dress worn by his wife, Anna Murray Douglass.
From childhood hobby to the senior fashion show
Bromfield began crafting doll clothes at age 8, the same year her mother bought a two-bedroom apartment in South Williamsburg. Her aunt’s well-functioning sewing machine still sits in the apartment Bromfield inherited. Another major inheritance — an affinity for making clothes — can be traced not only to her mother and aunt but to their mother in St. Vincent.
By high school, Bromfield was adding pizzazz to her jeans with patches and magic markers. At City College, where she studied art, Bromfield continued to make clothes, mostly for parties: “It was a way to get these outfits and not always bug your mother for money,” she said, since fabric was much cheaper than off-the-rack outfits.
Bromfield saw fashion then as a hobby or side gig, not yet a career path. But when she wore her own creations while working at Macy’s, her first job after graduation, a fellow employee, now a friend, noticed and became a client. Soon after, she took a leap and enrolled in a one-year fashion design program at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). There, career options opened up.
Bromfield finished the program at FIT with a literal bright spot — for the senior fashion show, she made a bright yellow linen suit with beaded designs on the collar, and painted some of those same designs on the shoes. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, I’ve made it,’” she said.
Making it in the fashion industry
That confidence served her well when she encountered the realities of the garment industry. Bromfield faked her way into her first job by feigning familiarity with equipment she’d never seen before. She later closed the skill gap as a pattern maker at Jennifer Dale, a fashion brand that was big at the time.
While still selling her pieces on the side, Bromfield officially launched her custom fashion business in the late 1980s. It was tough, though not for lack of representation: by then, Black designers Willi Smith, Patrick Kelly and Stephen Burrows were on the scene.
“It was less of an Italian white boy’s world,” Bromfield said, but added that designers needed financial backing to succeed in the big arena, which remained difficult to secure.
Success came gown by gown. A longtime client commissioned pieces worn to high-profile events, including the Academy Awards and Donald and Melania Trump’s wedding. To “keep the lights on,” she also freelanced sewing, pinning, tucking and steaming dresses for Fashion Week shows and for shoots with “Brides” magazine.
Storytelling and educating
Storytelling is key to Bromfield’s business, as well as workshops like the one in St. Albans. Her process begins with listening to clients’ personal histories and finding ways to weave them into each piece.
“I want to hear about the uncle who made some specific special recipe that had to be at your wedding,” she said.
Bromfield’s wedding dresses have included tributes to scenes from their wearer’s life – one captured a couple’s loss of a baby, another the beauty of a mother-daughter relationship. She has embroidered a baby’s name onto a wedding dress, incorporated a mother’s veil and honored generations of women through stitched names. She documented these heirlooms and details in a bridal wear blog and newsletter. She also chronicled the process a family heirloom underwent before going on display at The Museum of the City of New York.
In 2022, her friend Lana Turner, chair of The Literary Society book club in Harlem, asked her to help recreate the plum-colored silk wedding dress that historical sources described as being worn by Anna Murray when she married Douglass. Bromfield researched period pieces, studying slip garments at museums and learning about whalebone corsets via YouTube.
Bromfield also has to educate others about the value of her work, even if it means declining projects. One prospective client offered a “ridiculous” price for two dresses.
“For a brief moment, I felt really low,” Bromfield said of the gap between expectations and the cost of materials and labor. She could understand if someone couldn’t afford a piece, but what hurt is when a potential customer didn’t feel the worth of her work.
Then another customer ordered a dress and paid her price, and Bromfield got her spark back. It speaks to a lesson about self-doubt: Resist building, or letting others build, a wall of reasons why you can’t do something or ask for your price, Bromfield says.
“You start pulling barbed wire around the wall, and then you bring in the guards and then you bring in dogs and you stop yourself from going beyond,” she said. “Keep on going.”
Shop her collections.
Follow on Instagram at @cassandrabromfielddesigner
Subscribe to her YouTube channel at @CBromfield.
Cassandra Bromfield was recently honored as one of the “Living Legacies,” or women at the Lindsay Park cooperative recognized for their community efforts.
It’s interesting to see how fashion connects different events like the Oscars and a historic wedding. What inspired the designer to blend those two worlds?