Slick Woods launches jewelery line C1V1L

Supermodel Slick Woods has launched C1V1L, a jewellery line that will help fund minority and female-owned businesses.

You probably know her as the model who went into labour during Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty fashion show last year. Now, Slick Woods is stepping into the jewellery business to support a cause close to her heart.

C1V1L is a unisex brand promising to invest 20% of all its proceeds straight back into businesses owned by women and minority individuals. ‘We get treated as jesters,’ she told The Business of Fashion, referring to how white business owners continue to profit from black culture in all reaches of the industry.

Aware of the influence of brands and businesses owned, marketed and designed by people who aren’t from a BAME background, she added: ‘we are supposed to entertain everybody with our words and the way we talk, and we are just supposed to sing and dance. I’m trying to be king, not the jester.’

With this in mind, she embarked upon an entrepreneurial project of her own in partnership with friends and Blakely Thornton (former managing director of Jerry Media) to help bring her ideas to life.

Thornton also believes that there exists an issue of the commodification of BAME culture, saying that ‘the people actually making the money off of this culture are largely white, straight men. We want to focus on selecting financially compelling creative projects, which I see as undervalued in the market and a real space for all of us to harness our cultural leadership for community gain.’

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