10 Magazine Issue 77 Harlem cover story sends fashion editor Karen Binns and photographer Jimi Franklin to New York for what the magazine describes as an epic fashion story shot on local legends and a cast of models, with Ajah Angau on the cover in Louis Vuitton. The issue, themed Future, Legacy, Heritage, reaches newsstands on 18 September.
10 Magazine Issue 77 Harlem: the shoot and its cast
The production plants itself firmly at the Renaissance Harlem New York Hotel, a location that does the thematic work quietly and without fuss. The casting reaches beyond the usual model roster: alongside Ajah Angau and Lameka Fox (both at The Lions Management), Dolly Baby at Next Management, Chloe Nguyen at Kollektiv Mgmt and Ran Bi, the credits include Kayra Theodore, Bevy Smith and Bethann Hardison. That combination of working models and cultural figures is, in itself, a curatorial statement about what Harlem means to American fashion.
The wardrobe is a roll call of the houses one expects at this register: Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, Chanel, Mugler, Burberry, Prada, Dior, Loewe, Givenchy by Sarah Burton, Fendi, Hermès, Lanvin, Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, Tom Ford, DKNY, Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood. One credit sits differently from the others: Bevy Smith wears Dapper Dan, the Harlem designer whose hand-stitched, logo-reworked pieces were the original luxury of the neighbourhood long before the luxury houses acknowledged the debt. That single styling choice anchors the shoot’s argument about legacy more concisely than any editorial note could.
Why Karen Binns and Harlem belong in the same sentence
The choice of Binns as fashion editor here is not arbitrary. She grew up in the 1970s with what she has described, in an earlier conversation with 10 Magazine, as a ‘Black and proud’ feeling, developing her sense of fashion from stylish parents who would hang out in Harlem. The neighbourhood is not a backdrop she arrived at through a mood board; it is personal history rendered in silk and sequins.
That same conversation revealed that Binns and Jean-Michel Basquiat shared a mutual love for Comme des Garçons, a detail that tells you something about the particular cultural world she moved through: downtown New York, the early 1980s, the moment before street and gallery became the same conversation. Harlem, for Binns, has always been one coordinate in a larger map of Black American style and creative ambition.
Her professional life has formalised some of that investment. According to WWD, Binns serves as co-lead of the British Fashion Council’s mentoring and talent identification and race subcommittees, under the organisation’s diversity and inclusion initiative. The work in the studio and the work in the committee room are not separate projects; they are the same argument made through different means.
The shoot’s credits reflect the scale of the production. Hair by Rei Kawauchi at Bridge using Mr. Smith; make-up by Roshar using Dior Beauty; manicure by Gina Oh at The Only Agency using Après Nail. Casting by Soraya Taher Zaman; production by Sonya Mazuryk. The fashion assistants are Shelby Green at Noob Agency and Malaika Nasimok; photographer’s assistants Julian Lopez and Casey Weis. That length of credits list belongs to a shoot that has been built rather than assembled.
The theme, Harlem Renaissance, is referenced in the issue’s subtitle. The original Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was, among other things, a renegotiation of who got to be seen as beautiful, cultured, and modern. A fashion shoot in 2025 that puts Bethann Hardison in Loewe and Bevy Smith in Dapper Dan, at a hotel named for that very movement, is making a conscious claim on that history.
10 Magazine Issue 77 is available to pre-order now, with newsstands receiving copies from 18 September.
