NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Henry Adams had reached a fashion crossroads by the early 1970s: As bell bottoms and afros became the trend and the look of film figures like John Shaft and “Super Fly” became style prototypes, the teenager felt unrepresented.
But a previous trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for its “Harlem On My Mind” exhibit, had already begun to lay down his fashion foundation.
“When I saw those photographs of elegant Harlemites promenading up and down Seventh Avenue and Lennox Avenue … the raccoon coats and fox coats, and spangled gowns, and bowler hats … I thought, ‘Oh! There is another way for me to be authentically Black,’” recalled the New York-based cultural and architectural historian, now 69, of the fashionable splendor…