Chicago Tribune

'Midwestern Black girls are so often overlooked': 'Dressed in Dreams' author Tanisha Ford on how culture shapes style and clothing item comebacks

When you look back on your youth, does fashion factor in heavily?

For Fort Wayne, Ind., native Tanisha Ford it does.

A child of 1979, Ford came into the world to parents who raised her in the Black Power, Black is Beautiful kind of way - they taught her to be tough, confident, brilliant, fierce and tenacious.

Ford, an associate professor of Africana studies and history at the University of Delaware, takes readers through her childhood in the Rust Belt during the 1980s and '90s in her latest book, "Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl's Love Letter to the Power

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