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    Love and Justice: A Journey of Empowerment, Activism, and Embracing Black Beauty
    Love and Justice: A Journey of Empowerment, Activism, and Embracing Black Beauty
    Love and Justice: A Journey of Empowerment, Activism, and Embracing Black Beauty
    Ebook241 pages2 hours

    Love and Justice: A Journey of Empowerment, Activism, and Embracing Black Beauty

    By Laetitia Ky

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    About this ebook

    The deeply personal story of artist, activist, and influencer Laetitia Ky, told through the powerful sculptures she creates with her own hair that embrace Black culture and beauty, the fight for social justice, and the journey toward self-love.

    Laetitia Ky is a one-of-a-kind artist, activist, and creative voice based in Ivory Coast, West Africa. With the help of extensions, wool, wire, and thread, Ky sculpts her hair into unique and compelling art pieces that shine a light on, and ignite conversation around, social justice. Her bold and intimate storytelling, which she openly shares with her extensive social media audience, covers issues like:

    • Sexism and internalized misogyny
    • Racial oppression
    • Reproductive rights and consent
    • Harmful beauty standards
    • Shame and its corrosive effect on mental health
    • And more

    Love and Justice is equal parts memoir, artwork, and feminist manifesto. Ky's striking words, combined with 135 remarkable photographs, offer empowerment and inspiration. She emerges from her exploration of justice and equality with a message of self-love, showing readers the path to loving themselves and their bodies, expressing their voices, and feeling more confident.

    Through this celebration of women's empowerment, Ky extends a generous invitation to love ourselves, embrace our unique beauty, and to work toward a more just world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton Architectural Press
    Release dateApr 5, 2022
    ISBN9781648961335
    Love and Justice: A Journey of Empowerment, Activism, and Embracing Black Beauty
    Author

    Laetitia Ky

    Laetitia Ky is an artist, photographer, model, actress, activist, fashion designer, and social media influencer from Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She uses her hair as a sculptural medium to ignite awareness and conversations around the social justice topics she champions: sex-based and racial oppression, harmful beauty standards, and shame and its corrosive effect on mental health, among others. Ky and her art and activism have been featured in NYLON, Ebony, Elle, on CNN.com, and more, and she has partnered with brands such as Apple, Canada Goose and Marc Jabobs on social content creation. Ky was named one of PAPER magazine's "top 100 people taking over 2019." You can follow her art and activism on TikTok and Instagram: @LaetitiaKy.

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      Book preview

      Love and Justice - Laetitia Ky

      My awareness of both love and justice began in what might seem like an unlikely place: the world of beauty and fashion.

      I started experimenting with hair braiding when I was five years old. Growing up, I loved playing with dolls and Barbies. But because there are no doll companies in Ivory Coast—almost all toys are imported—I had only White Barbies, with hair unlike mine. I couldn’t braid their hair because it was so straight and slippery.

      To solve that problem, I bought adult curly hair extensions, cut all my Barbies’ hair off, and then implanted the curly extensions into their heads with a needle and thread! (It certainly strikes me as symbolic that while lots of little girls chop off the hair of their Barbie dolls and leave it at that, I opted to literally sew in new hair instead!) I was very meticulous—it had to be done. I must have improved more than twenty dolls!

      My adventures with hair didn’t end there. I started creating hair sculptures about five years ago, during a period when I was attempt-ing to reconcile myself with my African heritage. As in many parts of the world, urban society and culture in Ivory Coast has been largely Westernized. Most of my beauty and fashion references growing up—through toys, TV, and other forms of media—were entirely influenced by Western culture. Of course, a few characters on television and in film, pop culture figures, and fashion standards were specific to us, but there weren’t enough to provide positive models of what it means to be African.

      Beauty has always been both a passion and a personal struggle for me. Only when I started to love myself as a dark-skinned African woman did I begin to learn more about my culture. Doing so was a radical act, given how embedded White/Western supremacy is in African culture. I researched different African tribes—how they dressed, how they styled their hair, how they wore their makeup, and their aesthetics in general. I wanted to incorporate more traditional African beauty into my own style to express my pride.

      I created my Instagram account in 2015, and began posting my hair sculptures in 2017. In the early days, I made my hair sculptures mostly for my own enjoyment—to express my passion for art and beauty with the people around me. I had been sharing my work steadily on Instagram for a couple of years when a photo series I posted went viral. I had shaped my hair into a pair of hands, and those hands were performing different actions in each photo. There were twelve pictures in that series, and all of them were shared and reposted across the world; the photo that was most widely shared was one in which my hair hands were holding my glasses, while my real hands were holding a book.

      In a two-week period, my Instagram account went from 4,000 to 30,000 followers. Several people who reposted my art expressed their amazement. I received messages from people who gushed that they’d never seen anything like that before. Some loved it because it was fun; others loved it because using Black hair to create art made a powerful and original statement. Many people even thought my images were Photoshopped until I began posting videos of myself creating my hair art.

      In addition to feeling surprised at gaining so many followers, I was especially gratified by the people who thanked me because my work helped them love themselves a little more. Back when my posts only reached my friends and family, their reactions were positive and encouraging enough, but no one had ever indicated that my art had helped them or transformed the way they viewed themselves or thought about beauty.

      The more I posted photos of myself and my art on Instagram, the more messages I received from people telling me they were inspired by what I was doing, and by the way I was highlighting my natural hair. I was surprised to see that my work could have this much of an impact. It was a turning point for me. After that, simply creating cute and fun images wasn’t enough. I knew I had to use this new power to spread strong messages that would address topics that were important to me. I wanted to be something so much more than a beautiful face. I wanted to be a force of transformation.

      To give you a sense of why I felt so strongly about using my voice and platform to spread awareness…to be a voice that amplifies themes of unequivocal self-love, social transformation, and justice…it’s important to tell you about my journey.

      For lots of people today, Instagram fame is the gateway to success. Having hundreds of thousands to millions of followers can be seen as a sign that you’ve made it in the world, that you have the kind of social capital to do whatever you want.

      That certainly wasn’t the case for me.

      My beginnings in the world of social media influencing and model-ing weren’t easy. While I had amassed a large number of followers and was collaborating with a few brands, I certainly wasn’t paying the bills with my hair art. My Instagram wasn’t a full-time job, by any means, but I knew I was onto something big. However, many brands that reached out to me in the early days wanted to give me a free product in exchange for the promotion, rather than financially compensate me for my work. I’m happy to say I always turned down those offers; it seemed obvious they didn’t value the art enough. And artists—especially Black women artists, whose ideas may be circulated widely but not compensated fairly— deserve to be paid.

      When I decided that I wanted to live and work in the art and enter-tainment industry, friends and even some family members thought I was crazy. They said I was too intelligent to choose such a path, that I had the potential to be brilliant in another field. They told me over and over again that Ivory Coast isn’t a country where an artist can live decently. I replied that I didn’t want to work only in Ivory Coast, but all over the world. To them, this was unrealistically optimistic.

      After three years of college, I stopped my studies and spent a whole year thinking about what to do next. All I had was a phone, the Internet, and my own creativity. When I decided to use those three tools to open doors, I experienced many ups and downs. Even as I was gaining a lot of exposure on Instagram—even if my posts were liked thousands of times—real, paid opportunities that would enable me to launch a career as an artist were still scarce.

      I have always dreamed of becoming an actress, and when I was looking for ways to pay for acting classes, I started to consider modeling. But I’ve never viewed modeling as simply a stepping stone to something else—it is also something I love, something that enables me to express parts of myself and my identity that might otherwise remain hidden.

      A little over a year ago, I decided to do everything I could to be signed by an agency, which is when I discovered how hard it is to break into the modeling industry. I researched the biggest agencies in the world, then I took a lot of Polaroids—simple, basic pictures that models take without makeup to show their features—with the help of my little sister, and I sent out those pictures. I also used specific hashtags for my posts on Instagram that young models use when they wish to be scouted. I ran into my first obstacle when I realized that many agencies’ minimum height is 5'9—I’m 5'8. In addition, the maximum age for women was twenty-four; I was almost twenty-three. I realized that if I wasn’t scouted that year, I might have to give up just as I was getting started.

      I was thrilled to receive inquiries from several big agencies in the United States, but in the end, each turned me down for one reason or another (my height, my age, my location, or the fact that I couldn’t attend open calls). I was always looking on the Internet for famous and successful models who were under 5'8 to encourage and motivate myself, but there weren’t many of them. And forget about short" Black supermodels—they were practically nonexistent. It was a depressing realization.

      With all of these factors working against me, I became convinced that I needed to come up with a new life plan entirely. I stopped sending emails and using Instagram hashtags and started to think about other ways to pay for acting classes, even as I continued to post my art regularly. Then one day, a few months after I’d given up, I received a DM from Elite Model Management that changed my life. What’s funny is that when I was applying to all the big agencies, I’d skipped Elite because I’d noticed that the models they worked with were generally very tall, so I didn’t imagine they would ever be interested in me.

      I was about to pick my sister up from school when my phone buzzed. When I opened the message and saw it was from someone at Elite, I froze. It took me a few minutes to realize I was being given another chance to do what

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