Overview:
Based on a blog she started in college, Moore-Karim’s project features photography, a fragrance line, and Tarot-style readings for clients.
Built on Western beauty standards, with impossibly perfect models and air of exclusivity, the fashion industry seems like the last place to find racial healing for Black women combined with radical social change.
But Amanda Moore-Karim — a Black woman, HBCU graduate, fashion industry veteran and multidisciplinary artist with a certificate from a prestigious fashion institute — has created just that.
As a young person working in New York a decade or so ago, “I started to experience life as a Black woman in the industry and noticed being constantly pigeonholed into these freelance temporary positions and being challenged for my business acumen just because of the way I like to wear my hair,” she says. “And that experience alone led me to create my first project.”
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That project is Luxy’s Haus, an eclectic, long-running, wide-ranging website and e-store that merges fashion, photography, literature and different facets of the Black experience, including exploring traditional gender roles and norms. But it also incorporates elements of somatic healing, with a book, self-produced magazines and an herbal fragrance line on its virtual shelves. Moore-Karim even offers virtual Tarot-like card readings, with Black-themed characters and symbols on the cards..
“Luxy’s Haus is literally like a house for all of my creativity,” Moore-Karim says, noting its content ranges from fashion photos and makeup tips to tales from history and essays on current events. “My tagline is, ‘In my house, there’s always story time.’”
From Accounting to Fashion
It’s quite a project for Moore-Karim, a Howard University graduate from suburban Chicago who majored in accounting and planned on a career featuring ledgers and spreadsheets. “I really liked numbers, so I just knew I was going to be working with figures in some capacity,” she says.
But the fashion industry kept drawing more and more of her attention. At Howard, she started a blog, Amanda Lux, as an outlet for her observations on the fashion industry and its culture.
“It wasn’t like the typical fashion blog, like, ‘outfit of the day,’” she says. “I was sort of giving my hot takes on the fashion industry and how tone deaf they can be.”
Gradually, Moore-Karim’s growing passion for the fashion industry merged with her interest in accounting. After getting her degree in accounting, she left Howard and, rather than find work in an accounting firm, decided to jump feet-first into the fashion industry.
“My intention behind creating art is to convey a message that it’s never too late to heal. And the mediums that I decide to use to promote that message are fashion and literary art.”
Amanda Moore-Karim
“That led me to go to the London College of Fashion to study fashion merchandising” in a 15-week immersive program, Moore-Karim says. When it ended, she relocated to New York City and did a little bit of everything in the fashion universe: purchasing, beauty merchandising, wardrobe styling and journalism. Her clients included Bloomingdale’s, Victoria’s Secret and Target, to name a few.
“I’ve Always Felt Like a Black Sheep”
Despite her keen interest and training, Moore-Karim didn’t feel at home in the industry.
“I’ve always been an outlier when it comes to the fashion industry,” she says. “It can be a very exclusionary, very cold sort of space in terms of the people, in terms of how they treat each other.”
In that world, Moore-Karim says, “I’ve always felt like a black sheep.”
Rather than dwell in her frustration, Moore-Karim says, she thought about creating a welcoming, healing space for Black people who loved fashion, like her. Inspired in part by her college blog, Amanda Lux, the first edition of Luxy Haus was born.
At first, “it was a quarterly fashion magazine where I talked about the same thing I talked about in Amanda Lux, which was the socio-economic structure of the fashion and beauty industry,” Moore-Karim says. “But I made it a little bit more personal,” touching on topics like colorism, the African diaspora, and Black creatives in New York City.”
As the project evolved, “I’ve been redirected from the editorial direction to more storytelling,” Moore-Karim says, blending in racial healing and spirituality. She penned “Who Will Protect Me?” a seven-part Black feminist anthology focusing on chakra alignment and healing for Black women, and “Mama’s Message,” her current project, is inspired by 22 cards in a Tarot deck.
Always Time to Heal
Described as “an ethereal concordant,” she says the book project centers Black feminism, masculinity, femininity, and the “integration” of Black men and women.
“I’ll be focusing on a lot of things, like the integration of the erotic and Black religion, focusing on integrating ritualism back into Black Christianity,” says Moore-Karim. “It’s a very controversial book, but I’m excited about it.”
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While Karim planned her earlier projects, with Mama’s Message she has relied more on intuition and divine intervention — much like her diversion from accounting to fashion.
“There is something so much greater than me that is orchestrating all of this,” she says. “I don’t even know how I got here. I feel like a puppet. I’m like a spirit’s puppet. I would love for my manuscript to be done by the summer, OK, and in an ideal world, I would love to see everything launched by next year.”
Ultimately, however, “my intention behind creating art is to convey a message that it’s never too late to heal,” Moore-Karim says. “And the mediums that I decide to use to promote that message are fashion and literary art.”
