When Sabrina Nelson and I meet, I tell her that when I pitched an article on her for Hour Detroit’s MI Style series, I likened her look to Erykah Badu’s.
“You know, I’m older [than Badu], so her style is like mine,” she says with a lighthearted chuckle.
Befitting for someone whose life is enveloped in and infused with art, Nelson’s style is purposeful and communicative. Her grandmother — well traveled and sharply dressed — was one of the first to introduce her to the power of presentation. She’d make the children clothes; Nelson would use the scraps to make her own paper dolls.
A lifelong artist who has rich relationships with the Detroit Institute of Arts and the College for Creative Studies, Nelson cites her traveling exhibition Frontline Prophet: James Baldwin as a recent career high point. Having stopped in five cities, including Paris, it explored the writer and civil rights icon’s legacy through paintings, projections, and more.
My fashion mantra is … When dressing is a sport, that is art and medicine.
If fashion is a sport … The sport is you competing with yourself.
Fashion is art because … I like to paint myself first.
Fashion is medicine because … I’m not just dressing my body. I’m dressing my heart. I’m dressing my head. I’m dressing my third eye and my soul. I’m putting on armor; it’s spiritual armor.
How my art converges with the way I dress: I’m thinking about [my art] series She Carries. I want to make a dress with many pockets that hold many things. We carry so much. I’m just thinking that’s an intersection between art, installation, makers, craft, and also fashion.
Detroit is infused into my wardrobe because … I like the way I wrap myself, but I also like when people ask, “Where are you from?” when I’m not home. There is a certain thing here when you grow up a certain way. And maybe it was a part of the middle class, or maybe it was a part of that industrial, blue-collar family. If they worked hard to give us the things we have, I want to do the best that I can to represent them very well, and that means wrapping it nice.
This story originally appeared in the August 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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