This course examines the history of African American women’s subsistence ethos as it has been sustained and curated through dress as a reaction to systematic barriers. Through historical and material culture, this course will investigate African American women’s aesthetic practices as influencers and makers in response to institutional racist-sexism during the Jim Crow era through the present context of dressing for the corporation, purposefully obfuscated by the privilege of choice. This course will also examine queer African American cis and transwomen’s, and non-binary African American people’s dress aesthetic as cultural resistance and a provocation for hate violence. Black subsistence in the penal system will also be explored as an identity and cultural preservation practice through dress within a system designed to strip identity and the impulse to resist authority.