In the 1960s, Khadejha McCall had many of the elements of a rising fashion star. She dressed celebrities of the era, like the singer and pianist Nina Simone, and she socialized with others, including the drummer and bandleader Art Blakey. Publications like Life magazine wrote about her, and influential New Yorkers like Andy Warhol visited her store, Khadejha Designs, at 5 St. Marks Place in Manhattan’s East Village.
Ms. McCall, who died in 2020 at 87, was known for making garments with trendy silhouettes using vibrant fabrics inspired by African kanga textiles. Her store and its clothes were “on the cutting edge,” said Ada Calhoun, a writer who interviewed Ms. McCall for her 2015 book, “St. Marks Is Dead.”
“You had all these new designs, these new fabrics, these new silhouettes,” Ms. Calhoun, 49, added. “It wasn’t coming out of the fashion houses. It felt very much like it was coming from the bottom up and not the top down.”
These days, the remnants of Khadejha Designs mostly exist in memories or old articles. Ms. McCall closed the store and moved to Canada in the late 1960s; afterward, she worked mostly as an artist and a teacher. But behind the padlocked door of a rental storage unit in Mableton, Ga., are relics of the business that put her on the fashion map some six decades ago.
“There’s so much here,” Ms. McCall’s son Malik McCall, a teacher and actor in Atlanta, said while going through the unit’s contents.
The items included pattern books with his mother’s handwritten notes, fabric swatches and a hand-painted sign reading “Khadejha’s” in black lettering. There were also boxes full of garments made by Ms. McCall, photos of her wearing her clothes and copies of articles like one published by Life in 1966. Titled “African Trend? The Cut-Up ‘Kanga’ Caper,” the piece showed a diverse group of models in her designs.
Ms. McCall, who was born in Philadelphia, took an interest in clothing design as a teenager and studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York before opening her store. She lived in an apartment above it with the eldest of her five children, George, Cynthia and Cathy McCall; her two youngest, Malik and Stephany McCall, were born later.
“She worked really hard,” Cathy, who is now 68 and works at the Y.M.C.A. of Greater Boston, said in an interview. “I remember her cutting patterns. I would sit and watch her. I still have her big scissors. My job was to press the seams. That’s how she taught me. To this day, I’m the best presser in the family.”
Cathy and George recalled their mother going between their St. Marks apartment, where she would serve them macrobiotic meals, and her store, where she would cater to an eclectic mix of customers.
“Yeah, there were all types of crazies around,” George, now 73 and a real estate agent in Toronto, said jokingly while remembering the time when Mr. Warhol and members of his Factory visited. “Well, I don’t imagine they were crazy,” George added. “I was too young to, you know, take it all very seriously.”
Cathy remembered another visitor, not by name, but by profession. “It was the manager of the Monkees,” she said. “I didn’t know who this man was, but I remember looking out the window and this big black limousine pulled up.”
Performers, specifically jazz musicians, were among the regular visitors, George said. “The guy I remember most fondly was Art Blakey,” he added, noting that Mr. Blakey’s 1966 album with the Jazz Messengers, “Indestructible,” had a song titled “Calling Miss Khadija,” which was composed by the trumpeter Lee Morgan.
Another customer was Aviva Rahmani, who was then a student at Parsons School of Design in New York and taking classes at the Cooper Union, a few blocks from Ms. McCall’s store. “I still vividly remember a navy blue dress with a boat neck and an off-the-shoulder line and then kind of a bell sleeve,” Ms. Rahmani said. “I loved wearing that dress.”
For several months in 1965, Ms. Rahmani worked for Ms. McCall. “I think I might have asked her for a job because I just loved what she was doing,” Ms. Rahmani, now 79, said. “She was inspired, she was creative, she was driven.”
A few years later, when Ms. McCall closed the store and moved to Canada, it was because of a combination of things, said her son Malik, 55, who was born not long after. One reason, he explained, was that his mother had a friend in Toronto and was drawn to Canada after visiting.
Ms. McCall lived in Toronto before moving to Montreal, where she continued to make clothes and started to make art inspired by her life as a Black woman in North America. Her works, which mixed images with paint and screen-printed words on canvases, often involved African motifs and those associated with First Nations, Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Some of her art was featured in a 1989 gallery show in Toronto called “Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter,” which has been recognized as the first Canadian exhibition of Black female artists organized by Black female curators.
While making art, Ms. McCall also taught classes at institutions including Concordia University in Montreal. Alice Ming Wai Jim, a professor of contemporary art history at Concordia, was among Ms. McCall’s students. “I remember her as an amazing artist,” Dr. Jim, 54, said, “but also as an educator who was really trying to increase the representation of artists of color.”
Rikki Byrd, an assistant professor of visual culture studies at the University of Texas at Austin, similarly characterized Ms. McCall’s work as a fashion designer. Dr. Byrd, 33, the creator of the blackfashionarchive Instagram account, noted that Khadejha Designs wasn’t the only store in Manhattan that sold African-inspired clothing but was the rare store that did so downtown.
“There was a store in Harlem during the time called the New Breed that specialized in these types of clothing items,” Dr. Byrd said. “I think that it’s interesting and significant that you have this store in Harlem that’s catering to a very specific Black, residential demographic. And then you have Khadejha, on St. Marks in Lower Manhattan, doing this type of work and introducing it to, I would assume, a whole different audience.”
Ms. McCall’s children now hope that others might find ways to introduce her work to new people. “Dreamer that I am, I would love to see her art, and her story, at the Met,” George said.
Cathy echoed his sentiment. “I personally think that it would be wonderful if it could be in a museum like the Met in New York,” she said. Her mother, she added, “left home in Philadelphia, traveled to New York to pursue her dream with a sewing machine my grandfather bought her, and the rest is herstory.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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