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Raury Staged a Protest at His Fashion World Debut
Raury Staged a Protest at His Fashion World Debut

Raury Staged a Protest at His Fashion World Debut

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

The young ATLien on using his first run down the catwalk as a moment to protest a fashion giant

For a 21-year-old, Raury has already seen his share of the entertainment industry's tone-deafness. His fashion world debut proved to be yet another opportunity to observe the machine at work, walking for garment giant Dulce & Gabbana over the weekend at a particularly controversial moment in the company's history, under fire for both dressing the First Lady and doubling down by responding to critics with a "Boycott Dulce & Gabbana" t-shirt. A move any millennial, like the Stone Mountain native, can readily identify as a pretty tasteless, surface-level excuse to undermine an integral tool in every effective protest movement this side of British colonialism.

"Me, as a young man from Stone Mountain, Georgia, the birthplace of the Klu Klux Klan, I really felt this mockery of boycotting. Who knows, if boycotts didn’t happen, if Rosa Parks and M.L.K. didn’t step up…who knows if I would even exist. Boycotting matters. Boycotting is real. Dolce’s entire campaign says it’s not real."

In a recent interview, Raury detailed his trip to Milan, infamously capped with a runway debut that found the artist shedding his shirt to reveal a litany of messages he did stand for, as opposed to D&G's "boycott" mockery. He explains how just the day before the show a quick run of the company's name on the internets revealed their stance on the garbing up Melania, the subsequent campaign, and the responsibility of any artist, regardless of medium, to draw a line between their checks and the cost of cashing them. In this case, it was the line between himself and any possible association with our current burnt squash of a president. Read the full interview via GQ.