Beautiful Brown Brides: January 2014

Monday, January 20, 2014

Spotlight Wedding Planner: Precious Moments by Kenya

Precious Moments by Kenya
404-419-6933
events@preciousmomentsbykenya.com
P.O. Box 393013
Snellville, GA 30039

You’ve spent a lifetime dreaming about it; now it’s time to plan it. At Precious Moments by Kenya, we take pride in transforming the vision you have of your “BIG DAY” into the wedding you will always remember. Precious Moments help you create a look that is totally “YOU,” our experienced and knowledgeable staff will be your allies from the initial contact to your last dance.
Precious Moments treat our clients like the best friend you’ve never had listening to your wishes, offering advice when it’s needed, and lending a hand when your plate gets too full. Our main objective is to ensure your wedding planning is an “EXPERIENCE”. We handle all the details and make all the calls, then disappear when it’s your time to shine.

Handing over one of the most important days of your life to a total stranger requires a considerable step of faith and trust. Our wedding designers take their responsibility very seriously. We truly love our job and make ourselves available to our couples keeping them constantly updated on progress via email, and via phone. By the time your wedding day comes around, we hope you will have found a new friend in Precious Moments.

A celebration by Precious Moments gets noticed. We create drama, glamour, whimsy and wonder. We create events that exceed expectations, bringing a crowd to their feet, and creating memories you and your guests will treasure.

Precious Moments by Kenya is an event planning gamut, specializing in weddings, corporate and other special events. Our teams of consultants have a wealth of experience in event production, planning, and coordination. We are #1 in customer satisfaction.

Precious Moments by Kenya is a full service boutique event planning company with affordable packages for custom weddings and celebratory events. We enjoy coordinating themed events for weddings, corporate gatherings and religious and cultural celebrations. To provide our clients with exceptional service we only schedule one event per day and limit the number of events we coordinate per year. It is important to us that our entire staff is available and focused on your special occasion.

We offer bundled as well as A la Carte price packages. Contact us for details on our service offerings; we are looking forward to helping you make your dream become a reality.

Enjoy the EXPERIENCE and leave the stress and worry behind; we’re here to help!

Beautiful Brown Bridal Gown Models

Helen Williams-1960s. The first African American supermodel..

In 1950s America Helen Williams became the first black female model to break into the fashion mainstream. Born in East Riverton, New Jersey in 1937, she was obsessed with clothes from an early age, and began sewing her own garments at the age of seven. As a teenager she studied dance, drama and art before getting a job as a stylist at a New York photography studio. While there she was spotted on separate occasions by Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr, who happened to be in the studio doing press shots. Struck by her beauty, they urged her to take up modelling. She was seventeen.

With her trademark bouffant wig, sculpted eyebrows and long, giraffe-like neck, she worked exclusively for African American magazines such as Ebony and Jet. These early years were tough, as not only did beauty’s apartheid system exclude all non-white models from mainstream fashion, but within the black modelling scene itself, the girls were required to be light-skinned, just like the African American chorus girls of the 1920s. “I was too dark to be accepted,” she recalled.

But that was America. The French, by contrast, held a very different view, and by 1960 she’d moved to Paris. “Over there I was ‘La Belle Americaine,’” she said. She modelled in the ateliers of designers Christian Dior and Jean Dessès. By the end of her tenure she was making $7,500 a year working part-time, and she’d received three marriage proposals from French admirers, one of whom kissed her feet and murmured, “I worship the ground you walk on, mademoiselle.”
After Paris she returned to America, where things had not changed at all for dark-skinned models. While searching for a new agent in New York City, she once waited two hours in the reception of one agency, only to be told that they had “one black model already, thanks.” But Williams never-say-die attitude meant that she would not take no for an answer. “I was pushy and positive,” she said. Undeterred at being rejected, the young beauty took her case to the press. Influential white journalists Dorothy Kilgallen and Earl Wilson took up her cause, drawing attention to beauty’s continuing exclusion of black models. This opened things up for Williams, who was then booked for a flurry of ads for brands such as Budweiser, Loom Togs and Modess, which crossed over for the first time into the mainstream press, in titles such as The New York Times,Life and Redbook. By 1961 her hourly rate had shot up to $100 an hour. Fashion’s lily-white membrane had finally been breached.

It was a pivotal moment for black beauty, as Williams’s success broke the tradition for only using light-skinned models. “Elitists in our group would laugh at somebody if they were totally black,” said model-turned-agent Ophelia DeVore. “And when she [Williams] came along she was very self-conscious because she was dark. She gave people who were Black the opportunity to know that if they applied themselves they could reach certain goals.” Williams was the first beauty to break the four hundred year chain that had branded dark skin as ugly. The same dark skin that was rendered second-class during slavery, that the minstrels once ridiculed, and that had relegated Hollywood’s actors to roles as servants and clowns, was suddenly beautiful.

http://www.arogundade.com/helen-williams-the-first-black-female-fashion-model.html