It was the summer of 1926 at the Folies Bergère in Paris. Hordes of white Parisians flocked to the famed theater to see La Revue Nègre, a musical show that emerged from France due to the country’s fascination with jazz culture. And there, wearing little more than strings of pearls, wrist cuffs, and a skirt made of 16 rubber bananas, Josephine Baker descended from a palm tree onstage, and began to dance. This dance—the danse sauvage—is what established her as the biggest black female star in the world. She became an overnight sensation: Thousands of dolls in banana skirts were sold all over Europe; beauty editors advised women to rub walnut oil on their faces to darken their skin like Baker’s; postcards, featuring Baker with a glossy, slicked-down hairstyle in her famous banana skirt with jewelry strategically placed over naked breasts, were widely distributed. But beyond her beauty and charisma, Baker, who would have turned 110 today, radically redefined notions of race and gender through style and performance in a way that continues to echo throughout fashion and music today, from Prada to Beyoncé.
On June 3, 1906, Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in the slums of St. Louis. Growing up, she cleaned houses and babysat for the wealthy; one employer burned Baker’s hands as punishment for putting too much soap in the laundry. But at the age of 15, Baker was recruited for the St. Louis Chorus vaudeville show; from there, she went to Harlem where she performed in musicals. Eventually, she landed a gig in France as part of an all-black revue, at a salary of $1,000 a month; she emigrated there in 1925.
Baker’s arrival in Paris coincided with a newfound obsession with black culture, a generation of French men and women who collected African art, jazz, and danced the Charleston. Aside from these surface-level interests, there was a much deeper and disturbing fascination with the widely accepted belief in black people’s inherent primitiveness. When she swung onstage in that fiercely swinging banana skirt in 1926, Baker brilliantly manipulated the white male imagination. Crossing her eyes, waving her arms, swaying her hips, poking out her backside, she clowned and seduced and subverted stereotypes. By reclaiming her image, she advanced her career in ways unprecedented for a woman of that time. And though, in later years, her banana skirts would transform from rubber fruits to a powerful, aggressive spike version, that initial design remains revolutionary. Beyoncé paid homage to Baker by wearing a banana skirt in her 2006 Fashion Rocks performance. At the 2014 CFDA Fashion Awards, Rihanna memorably wore a sheer Baker-inspired dress. The Spring 2011 Prada collection and most recently Marc Jacobs’s Fall 2016 runway notably referenced Baker’s signature gelled hair.
Offstage, Baker’s style grew ever more elaborate: Paul Poiret and Madeleine Vionnet, two of the leading couturiers in the ’20s, dressed Baker. For baron and fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, she posed nude, draped in a diaphanous veil. In 1927, interviewed for Vogue, Baker was reportedly “swathed in a full blue tulle frock with a bodice of blue snakeskin,” wearing an “enormous diamond ring with a very impressive diamond bracelet.” And for the Parisian fans who wanted to attempt to emulate her look, she sold Bakerskin, a skin-darkening lotion, and Bakerfix, a hair pomade. With the profits, Baker moved into the Château des Milandes, a 24-room mansion in southwestern France; adopted 12 children from around the world; and kept a menagerie of exotic companions such as a cheetah named Chiquita.
And yet—and fascinatingly so!—she remained a woman of the people, for the people: During World War II, Baker aided the French Resistance by smuggling secret messages in invisible ink on her musical sheets. She hid Jewish refugees and weapons in her château that Bakerskin had helped pay for. In 1963, she was, notably, the only official female speaker to give an address at the March on Washington. She received the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille de la Résistance, and Légion d’Honneur. After she died on April 12, 1975, more than 20,000 people crowded the streets of Paris to watch the funeral procession on its way to L'Église de la Madeleine. The French government honored her with a 21-gun salute, making Josephine Baker the first American woman buried in France with full military honors.
Nearly a century may have passed since that revolutionary dance, but its legacy remains as relevant as ever. Could it be that the banana skirt paved the way for Lemonade in 2016? Happy birthday, Josephine Baker!
