Liberation through Creativity

Have you ever caught yourself doing something with real fluency — noticing every detail, having opinions, feeling it in your body — and still walking around saying I don't really know anything about that?

That's where this episode starts.

In Liberation Through Creativity, Gabby Turner is driving home from a coffee shop at the beginning of the year, listening to Tiffani Singleton and Taryn Delanie Smith on We're Your Girls, when a Coleman Domingo quote from the 2025 Met Gala stops her in her tracks. He said: "I stand here representing so many generations of men who have liberated themselves through style." And something cracked open.

This episode moves through the history and cultural significance of Black dandyism — the official lens of the 2025 Met Gala theme Superfine: Tailoring Black Style — and what it means that Black men specifically used clothing to hold power and softness simultaneously in a world that told them they weren't worthy of both. But it doesn't stay in history. It comes back to something more personal: the ways we deny ourselves entry into creative containers by deciding we're not that kind of person before we ever really try.

Gabby gets into what it looks like to disclaim your own fluency — to have opinions about every fabric choice and proportion on the Met Gala carpet and still say I'm not really a fashion girlie — and what that disclaimer is actually doing. It's not humility. It's a cage. And the key is permission only you can give yourself.

This one is for anyone who has ever limited their own liberation by deciding in advance where it was and wasn't allowed to live. As a Black woman and creative navigating self-expression and identity in real time, Gabby holds the both/and: freedom lives where you already are and in the places you haven't let yourself go yet.

While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing. New episodes monthly.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Gabby and you're listening to While I've Got You. Let's start the show. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me. I really want to set up the scene before I get into this moment that we're gonna discuss today. So 2025 was extremely hard for me. Probably the hardest year that I've ever had. I came into 2026 a bit broken and bruised and lost. And as a big dreamer, I felt so behind and really ashamed about the number of times I'd tried to start on the path or start on the journey to get to where I see myself one day, and had sort of failed or fallen off or wasn't consistent or it didn't pick up the traction like I thought it would, so I abandoned it, or I got into a situation where I was just in survival mode and making ends meet, and so my creativity was just beaten down. I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to come back and do a podcast because it just felt like the most correct and direct path for where I see myself in the future. I knew I wanted to come back and do a podcast, and since I'd already had a podcast, I know all the steps to get started, and I still felt very much like I had nothing to say. That I could go through all the steps, I could get everything done, and then it wouldn't matter because I would sit down, pick up the mic, and choke. Because I had nothing to say. I didn't even have a thought of what I could say. So I had gotten into this challenge where instead of trying to create for the public and for like public consumption, instead of trying to create for an audience in which I would potentially run out of ideas because I didn't have one to start with, or I would spend so much time getting amped up and getting excited that I would rebrand and I would find a name and I'd reserve all the domains and I would create a content strategy and I would create content pillars and do all of this prep work and then get to the mic and again choke. Instead of focusing on things that way, I needed time to build trust with myself. I was essentially in a listening to myself, listening to my body, and like trust building exercise. And while I had started noticing things subtly shift in my inspiration and my creativity and my creative expression, trust and trust building takes time. And it probably would have been a really cute little reel idea if I was showing you how I felt then versus how I feel now. It would be a cute before and after 30-second reel and would not account for the bad days where I still felt like nothing was happening, no progress was being made, and I was just really down and hard on myself and carrying a lot of shame for wanting to have big dreams and feeling like a failure for never being able to correctly quote unquote or consistently follow through on them. So that's my generalized mindset at the top of the year. And I've just left a coffee shop that I had been working at and am heading home, driving around my neighborhood, looking for parking. I live in LA, so if you know, you know. And I'm listening to this podcast called We're Your Girls with Tiffany Singleton and Taryn Delaney Smith, who I'm sure many of you know from social media. If you looked them up right now, you for sure have seen their content. You just probably didn't know it was them at the very least. So Tiffany is a fashionista, and she's talking about her relationship to fashion, what it has unlocked for her, and is really talking about how as a black woman her fashion is not necessarily the armor, but it's the thing that represents her and speaks up for her and shows who she is as soon as she enters the room before she ever has to speak, and the importance of that as a black woman. So she's speaking on that, and she brings up a quote by Coleman Domingo that he says at the 2025 Met Gala on which he was he was on the board for, and he says, I stand here representing so many generations of men who have liberated themselves through style. And that quote stopped me in my tracks, specifically the use of liberated, and the fact that the liberation came through style. So Tiffany's visceral reaction to it, she starts tearing up. I immediately start crying because of how beautiful and powerful that quote was to me. And Terrence tearing up, we're having we are the girls who are crying in my Fort Escape. That is the background, that's the moment that is bringing you to me and me to you in this episode. Let's backtrack a little bit. The official theme of the 2025 Met Gala was Super Fine, Tailoring Black Style, which loosely boiled down to Black Dandiesm. I'm not gonna give a full history lesson, though I do encourage you to go and have one. You know, learn about this. It's interesting and very fascinating. But the general summation of this history and this era of fashion is that black dandism, like so many things that are rooted in African American black culture, is rooted in resistance and truthfully resilience as well. It describes a time that black men specifically used clothing to express power and softness, masculinity and femininity simultaneously. And in a world that even today we still see society telling black men that they're not worthy of both, is the same that was happening when black dandies that fashion era in that fashion era. Now, I, as a black woman who very much feels deserving of both power and softness, and who transparently still struggles with how I claim that in our society, really tried to sit in the history of black dandism in Coleman Domingo's quote, and I started to notice very specifically the ways that I limit even myself in the specific creative container of fashion. That very specific creative container of style. Or I can't do online shopping, so I don't know anything about fashion. Like I can't just look at a piece online and say, oh, that would fit me so nicely, and I'm gonna order it because blah blah blah. Whereas I could be at a flea market and I could pick something up and say, Oh, this top would look so good with these pants, these shoes, your hair done like this, and this kind of a bag. I can visualize it that way, but because I don't own a lot of clothes and I'm not going nowhere during the week or barely on the weekends, I limited myself from owning any space in that creative container. And it made me think about how passionate I am about the Met Gala. Met Gala 2026 was just last night, and I have an opinion about every look that walks the carpet, which I'm sure most of us do. I always notice the little tweaks I'd have made, or sometimes I'm even moved to tears a little bit from that place of shame where I'm like, oh, that should be me holding your hand. And my Justin Bieber voice, don't judge my singing. And also in the moments where I'm like, gosh, somebody's living out their dream right now, and they look incredible doing it. They nailed the theme and they look amazing. I notice when the fabric is something that I don't love, or if the proportions were a little bit better, I notice details that I wish were added or taken away, and yet I've spent the majority of my life walking around and saying, I'm not really a fashion girly. I don't really know anything about fashion. Of course, if you've listened to my other episodes, then you probably know that this is not an episode entirely on fashion and me hard-launching my Fashion East Era, but more so about the ways in which we might be self-sabotaging and keeping ourselves from liberation by not giving ourselves permission to just exist flawed and in process in creativity. It's about the cages we put ourselves in by thinking we are not that kind of person. How the disclaimer of the raw expression of ourselves becomes a self-imposed barrier. The disclaimer of, oh, I'm not really a fashion girl, so I don't really know what I'm talking about. Or, oh, I'm just learning how to paint, so it's probably not that good. Or I can't sing like that, so don't judge me. I realized that I wasn't just saying, I don't know fashion. I was actively telling myself, most importantly, that I don't get to go there. I want to challenge that maybe liberation isn't found in one place or by doing one thing. It's not just in the self-expression that feels natural or makes your heart sing. It's in all the little areas you haven't given yourself permission to be known in yet. The freedom comes from permission, only you can give yourself and the courage to actually grant it. To be raw and in progress in a place that feels so unfamiliar. This time, last year, Comen Domingo stood at the Met Gala and represented generations of not only men, but specifically black men, who chose visibility and found freedom in that. It is the choice and the risk and the power and the softness that comes from choosing visibility. Now, of course, all of this sounds so much easier said than done. Being known is scary. Opening up yourself to be seen is so scary. And I'm curious what our lives, mine included, could feel like if we operated under the notion that liberation lives both where you already are and in the places that you haven't let yourself go yet. That's all I've got for you today. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll catch you next time.