Name: Community Preview
Start: 2026-02-12T11:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-02-12T16:00:00-05:00
Location: High Line Nine

How does one become a legend?
Our answer is not a silhouette, nor a label, nor a camera flash.
Our answer is the archive.
About this Event

Source Code: Fashion as Technology

Featuring the Archives of André Leon Talley and Geoffrey Holder

“What Becomes a Legend Most?”

In 1968—against war, upheaval, and a nation arguing with itself—Blackglama, with Richard Avedon and Bill King, staged a now-iconic portrait series of “legends”: Leontyne Price, Diana Vreeland, Ray Charles, Nureyev. The question implied was not simply who was legendary, but how legend is made—how a life becomes an image, and an image becomes a myth.

Source Code: Fashion as Technology takes the question one step further: How does one become a legend?

Our answer is not a silhouette, nor a label, nor a camera flash.

Our answer is the archive.

Gifted with more than 3,500 books from the personal libraries of André Leon Talley and Geoffrey Holder, the Institute of Black Imagination invites visitors into the quiet engine behind the spectacle: the dataset of references, rituals, languages, and lineages that formed two iconoclasts into cultural weather systems.

Here, fashion is not decoration—it is technology: a tool for becoming. A method for authorship. A way to write oneself into time.

To enter the exhibition is to stand at the beginning of the process—where taste is trained, imagination is fortified, and style becomes a form of intelligence. Not the finished legend—but the source code that made legend possible.

In the space, the archive is not treated like a shrine—it becomes a living interface. Visitors move through a reading room designed to slow the Fashion Week rush: browse curated books and artifacts, scan and explore, or sit and study a single volume in full. With clear consent, guests can also leave a short trace—a line of text or a brief voice note—capturing what the archive unlocked in them. These reflections gather over the run of the exhibition, and reappear in the space as a shared field of language: a public signal that the archive is not merely preserving culture—it is actively producing it.