PARI PASSU: EQUAL FOOTING
Pari Passu is a Latin phrase meaning “on equal footing.”
For Davinci Couture, the phrase becomes more than a definition. Pari Passu examines what equal footing means when history, race, labor, commerce and representation have rarely begun from equal positions.
The collection uses clothing, graphic design and visual storytelling as surfaces for those conversations.
From neighborhood institutions and Black-owned businesses to advertising, film, religion, stereotypes and consumer culture, each piece takes something recognizable and asks the viewer to look again.
THE COLLECTION
SAMBO TEE
The Sambo Tee confronts racist commercial imagery, caricature and the historical packaging of Black identity for entertainment and consumption.
Rather than separating uncomfortable imagery from its history, the piece places that history directly into the conversation. It draws from Black history, satire, 1970s Blaxploitation and the visual language through which stereotypes have been created, circulated and challenged.
804 PIZZA TEE
The 804 Pizza Tee is inspired by pizza shops, carryouts and independent mom-and-pop businesses embedded throughout Richmond and surrounding Black communities.
These businesses are more than places of commerce. They become neighborhood landmarks, meeting places and pieces of the visual identity of the communities around them.
The piece documents an everyday part of the 804 that can easily disappear without being formally recorded.
SOFT PACK TEE — QUIT TODAY!
The Soft Pack Tee examines cigarette culture through imagery associated with Newport cigarettes and the communities in which menthol tobacco became culturally recognizable.
The work connects consumption with Black cultural history, targeted marketing, health stigma and questions surrounding the labor systems behind consumer products.
Its “Quit Today” message intentionally promotes the cold-turkey approach: stop today rather than allowing the product to continue determining tomorrow.
The piece asks us to consider both sides of consumption — the person purchasing the product and the systems of marketing, production and labor that made that consumption possible.
PAWN TEE
BUY. SELL. LOAN.
The Pawn Tee uses the familiar language of neighborhood pawn shops to examine value.
Who determines what something is worth?
What happens when financial necessity forces ownership back into the marketplace?
Pawn shops operate at the intersection of possession, scarcity, survival and opportunity. The piece transforms the language of buying, selling and loaning into a larger conversation about economic value and unequal footing.
WHOOP-TY DOO TEE
The Whoop-Ty Doo Tee draws from the visual history of American minstrelsy.
Minstrel imagery played a major role in constructing and circulating degrading caricatures of Black people throughout American popular culture.
By referencing that visual language rather than pretending it never existed, the piece confronts the relationship between entertainment, stereotype, performance and representation.
BELLY TEE
The Belly Tee draws from the visual and cultural world surrounding the 1998 film Belly and its place within late-1990s Black cinema and hip-hop culture.
The film's imagery, fashion, music and portrayal of ambition, violence, loyalty and survival became part of a larger visual vocabulary that extended beyond the screen.
The piece examines the influence film can have on how a generation remembers itself.
PREACHER MAN TEE
The Preacher Man Tee examines the relationship between the church and the hood through imagery influenced by film and Black cultural experience.
The Black church has historically operated as a place of faith, leadership, organization, refuge and community.
At the same time, the realities immediately outside its doors can include poverty, violence, inequality and survival.
The piece sits inside that tension — faith beside hardship, prosperity beside scarcity and spiritual authority beside the realities of the neighborhood.
PARI PASSU
Each piece in Pari Passu enters the conversation from a different angle, but they all circle back to the same question: what does it really mean to be on equal footing when everybody ain’t starting from the same place?
Pari Passu treats clothing as more than something to wear. It becomes a record—preserving references, challenging what we’ve been taught to tuck under rugs, and making room for conversations about culture, history, value, power and representation. Some things get consumed so routinely that we stop asking where they came from, who benefited, who paid the cost, or why they still feel familiar.
The work is asking us to look again. Not just at what survived, but at how we survived it; not simply at what was taken, but at what we made out of what was left. Equal footing, then, is not the assumption that everybody had the same road. It is the demand that our histories, labor, imagination and presence be given their proper depth..
This is not nostalgia for nostalgia's sake.
It is an archive in progress.
DAVINCI COUTURE
Richmond, Virginia