Cookie’s clothes also convey important connections to black culture, past and present. This is particularly evident in the choice of furs that McGhee selects. Far from classic black minks, McGhee adorns Cookie in lavish designs that situate her in the contemporary hip-hop fashion aesthetic as embodied by performers like Lil’ Kim, P. Diddy, Kanye West, Cam’ron, and others. At the same time, Cookie’s furs visually reference the fashion of 1970s black culture, such as the opulent designs that Diana Ross sports in Berry Gordy’s 1975 film Mahogany or the fierce jacket that the statuesque Tamara Dobson dons in Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, 1977).7 Yet the fur coats also reference the sartorial emblems of 1970s criminal underworld figures: pimps, drug dealers, and other hustlers. This is fitting given Cookie’s backstory as a drug dealer.
Beyond narrative shorthand, Cookie’s fashions also signify particular meanings about race and class. As Lee Daniels explains, “We’re trendsetting—not just with music, but with costumes and hair design and ghetto fabulosity.”8 Daniels’s use of the term “ghetto fabulosity” is especially important, as “ghetto fabulous” signifies a particular kind of classed blackness along with assumptions about taste. According to Urban Dictionary, to be “ghetto fabulous” indicates “the style of nouveau riche people who have grown up in ghetto or urban areas … the combination of bad taste, an urban aesthetic and desire to wear one’s wealth. Basically, high priced but tacky clothing and accessories.”9 In many ways, the definition of “ghetto fabulous” accurately captures the dimensions of Cookie’s character: She grew up in a poor, inner-city community and now finds herself with sudden wealth as she circulates in the upper-class world of the music industry. While I take issue with Urban Dictionary’s definition of “ghetto fabulous” style as “tacky” (as “tacky” has very specific taste criteria that are based on white, middle-class norms), the second part of the definition does capture an essential idea about the relationship between Cookie’s working-class background and the upper-class world in which she now circulates. Cookie has not grown up with wealth; she does not know the codes of upper-class style. Instead, she has imported the fashion aesthetics of her own black, inner-city environment into the contemporary world of Empire. Her look, therefore, is a “hood aesthetic” done in an expensive way. And her style is in line with the “bling” aesthetic of hip-hop culture, with its emphasis on flashy displays of wealth on the body.
The popularity of Empire’s fashions, spearheaded by Cookie’s wardrobe, quickly led to a collaboration with luxury department store Saks Fifth Avenue for New York Fashion Week in September 2015. The store debuted its Empire State of Mind collection a week before Empire’s season 2 premiere: a series of luxe pieces inspired by the opulence of the show. The collection drew inspiration from Empire’s characters and traded on the overall “feel” of the show’s black urbaneness and late-night soap opera glamor. While not the first clothing store to collaborate with a television show, the Saks/Empire collection is noteworthy because of the wide gulf between the demographic of the show and that of the department store.
The African American viewer that thrust Empire into its vaunted position no doubt bore little resemblance to the typical Saks customer. NY Post writer Robert Rorke noted the disconnect: “When Saks Fifth Avenue announced its partnership with Fox on a promotional deal to feature the fabulous loud fashions of their hit Empire at the department store, I wondered: Would Cookie Lyon, the fierce ex-con played so entertainingly by Taraji P. Henson, even shop there? Could she step off the elevator at the flagship store in Rockefeller Center, walk up to a salesperson and say, ‘Get me a fake fur jacket, boo boo kitty, and I’d like it in grape’?”10
In fact, African Americans, regardless of socioeconomic level, have historically run into problems at high-end stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. In 2013, billionaire Oprah Winfrey asked to see a $38,000 designer handbag at a posh Zurich boutique, only to be rebuffed by a salesperson who told Winfrey that the bag was too expensive for her to afford.11 The same year, African American teenager Trayon Christian was arrested in New York after purchasing a $350 belt from luxury department store Barneys, after the store claimed that he must have been using a fake debit card to make the purchase.12
These instances of “shopping while black” not only point to these stores’ assumptions about black people’s abilities to afford luxury goods but also suggest larger incongruities between blackness and its place in fashion. In a 2013 interview, for instance, rapper and mogul Kanye West described his irritation at the fashion industry rebuffing one of his ideas, only to see them eventually adopt it later: “Brought—brought the leather jogging pants 6 years ago to Fendi, and they said no. How many motherfuckers you done seen with a leather jogging pant?” West’s anger not only stems from his frustration with not being taken seriously as a creative author of design but also is perhaps undergirded by the knowledge that the fashion industry has often co-opted elements of black, urban style (as well as that from other minority groups), while erasing their context and histories. For instance, in 2015 Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci adorned his models with slicked-down “baby hair”: the short, fluffy tendrils found along the hairline. The style, popular in black and brown urban communities for years, suddenly vaulted into the world of high fashion and celebrity, with a number of other white designers in various fashion weeks around the world following suit.13 West’s complaint treats the fashion industry as cultural appropriator, as an institution that has always capitalized on blackness while driving out black creative power.
The Saks/Empire venture, then, fits into a much larger, complicated relationship among fashion, black people, and blackness as marketable commodity. On the one hand, Saks deliberately approximates its own high-end version of “ghetto fabulous” fashion for delivery to its predominantly white, middle- to upper-class customer. Lee Daniels essentially validated this marketing strategy—trading on a flattened-out image of black identity and style in the form of “ghetto fabulousness”—when he relayed his own history with Saks at the fashion premiere: “When I was a kid, I used to boost—boosting is stealing. My sister and I, who Cookie is based on, used to go to Saks and we’d boost.”14 By relaying this story and attending the launch event, Daniels reinscribed a certain measure of black cultural authenticity into the discussion of style.15 Yet at the same time, the entire marketing of the Empire/Saks collaboration, with pieces produced by high-end designers whose clothes would be financially inaccessible to many Empire viewers, erases the contributions of the real-life black people to this “ghetto fabulous” aesthetic.
The eye-catching fashions on Empire carry rich meaning about the characters, their lives, and their world. As a show that takes care to maintain a multicultural address, Empire uses fashion to draw connections to black culture outside of the show itself. In this way, the style functions as narrative shorthand that provides viewers with a host of information that the official storylines omit. At the same time, however, this shorthand also stands in for much more complicated and multilayered issues surrounding race, racism, class, and capitalism. As the show continues to grow in popularity and its style becomes ever more recognizable and profitable, it is important to remember that the attempts to celebrate and commodify Empire’s fashion aesthetic can also erase the contributions of the real-life people that inspired it. For all of these reasons, we should keep in mind that fashion on Empire is never simple window dressing but rather a dense and complicated