Khadejha McCall was a rising design star in New York before her life changed course.
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.
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