Overview:
Daveed Baptiste, a Haitian American designer raised in Little Haiti and living in Brooklyn, received the CFDA’s Empowered Vision Award on Dec. 11. Though honored, Baptiste emphasizes that visibility does not equal security, advocating for collective care and early support as essential to sustaining creative life.
On the day of the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s most prestigious honors, celebrating the designers, brands and cultural figures shaping fashion today— Daveed Baptiste, one of four finalists for their emerging designers award, was seated in Anaiz Hair & Beauty Braiding Salon in Downtown Brooklyn.
Surrounded by mirrors, the hum of conversation and scent of heated hair, and feeling the touch of quiet, skillful fingers, he let himself feel grounded in the communal life that made him before entering one of American fashion’s most visible rooms.
Even during moments of peak recognition, Baptiste prefers to be grounded in the everyday spaces that shape work in fashion, photography and immersive experiences. His work moves between worlds, after all: high fashion and neighborhood life, institutional acclaim and communal memory.
“Fashion isn’t larger than culture,” he said over a phone interview. “Culture comes first. “I’m making work from real-life experiences, I want to humanize us.”
Later that Thursday evening, during a cocktail reception at the W Hotel Union Square in Manhattan, Baptiste, 28, would stand behind the podium as the 2025 Empowered Vision Award (CFDA ) winner, championing emerging Black designers. The honor comes with a $100,000 prize and a year-long mentorship focused on business development and brand growth, valued at an additional $100,000.
“I started my brand two years ago with love, hope and the pursuit of creating epic, beautiful designs,” an ecstatic Baptiste said, displaying his signature toothy grin.
“This feels like a big hug from the fashion crowd.”
Known for his unmistakable smile, Baptiste is careful not to romanticize it.
“What I can say is that some things in my life were broken in ways that couldn’t really be fixed. It wasn’t a choice. It was about money. It’s something I carried with me into adulthood.”
The material realities he grew up navigating influence his personal life.
“I’m always in the studio, and I don’t really have time to date. It’s just me, the work, and the people around the work. I’m hesitant to pursue anything romantic, it feels too close to home. When the time is right, money’s good, and energy’s right, I’m definitely open to love.”
For Baptiste and those who know him, the moment is less about arrival than affirmation. Considered part of a generation reshaping how Haitian identity appears in contemporary fashion, the multidisciplinary artist sees the recognition as a sign that the work he began in community, memory and imagination had found resonance far beyond it.
Steven Baboun, a photographer, sees in Baptiste’s recognition significance far beyond the runway.
“[It] marks a real shift, recognition that Haitian creativity and cultural intellect are essential to the future of fashion,” Baboun said.
“Through perseverance and brilliance, he broke through doors never built for us, honoring the Haitian body, spirit, and style with work that is innovative and deeply rooted.”
A path, not just a pastime
Born in Haiti, Baptiste immigrated to the United States at six years old after his mother, Marie Agenor, unable to secure the immigration paperwork to travel, made the painful decision to send her children ahead of her to live with his father. In North Miami and later Little Haiti, Baptiste said, he and his three siblings Louis Baptiste, Naica Baptiste, and Annie Baptiste essentially raised themselves.
Baptiste didn’t grow up with his parents in any conventional sense. His older sister and brother became his guardians, providing structure through trust rather than rules.
“We had a simple rule: don’t misbehave,” he recalls. “When there are no parents in the house, the biggest fear is separation, so the expectation was just to be good.”
That absence of rigid authority gave him something rare: space. “Because of that structure or lack of it, I had room to explore who I was.”
It grounded him in everyday life and the experiences of living between worlds, embedding the grit and refinement that define his aesthetic.
“You’d see chickens running down the street and a Ferrari driving right past them,” Baptiste recalls.
As he grew, Baptiste found belonging in lakou culture, and gravitated toward art, music and fashion. As a teenager in Miami, that curiosity found structure at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, where he took classes while still in middle school. A teacher at ASPIRA Arts DECO Charter School encouraged him to audition for Miami Arts Charter, then a newly arts-focused school, an opportunity that shifted his trajectory.
“That became my entry point into a fully creative life,” Baptiste says.
After-school programs followed, learning to sew, taking photographs, experimenting freely. There a woman named, Noelle Théard, became his first true mentor. Now a Senior Photo Editor at The New Yorker, Théard taught him how to read, make, and trust images.
“She taught me everything I knew about images,” he says.
By the time he was a teenager, he had won several local art competitions tied to anti-drug campaigns while attending Design and Architecture Senior High School (DASH) in Miami.
The cash prizes were modest, but they revealed a powerful truth: creativity could be a path, not just a pastime.
“It was the first time I realized you could make money from creative work,” he recalls.
The belief deepened when Baptiste became a YoungArts recipient of the Ashley Longshore Excellence in the Arts Award, connecting him with a national community of artists and affirming his voice. It was further reinforced when he was selected as a recipient of the Fashion Scholarship Fund Virgil Abloh™ “Post-Modern” Scholarship recipient in 2020, which supports Black and African American students in the industry.
A fashion brand is born
Baptiste first moved to New York to attend Parsons School of Design to study Fashion Design, and discovered more community among Haitians, queer people and artists, as well as making a name for himself in photography, immersive environments and some fashion. He was later part of exhibitions at MoCADA, and the Aperture Foundation, and was featured in Vogue, The New Yorker, WWD, Office Magazine, Essence, Hypebeast and The New York Times.
Though visual art and photography came first, fashion became central during a 2023 residency at Silver Art Projects, as he prepared for his first solo museum exhibition at MoCADA in Brooklyn.
By then, he had already worked at Nike and for Kerby Jean-Raymond at Pyer Moss, sketching and prototyping ideas for his own brand for years. But when his first garments arrived and friends began trying them on, something clicked.
“That was the moment I understood that fashion wasn’t adjacent to my practice,” he says. “It was my practice.”
Baptiste says he treats clothing as narrative, using garments to tell stories drawn from memory, culture, and lived experience. Projects like Haiti To Hood and Ti Maché explore migration, race, gender, and belonging across the Haitian and Caribbean diaspora. Materials such as denim and gingham appear repeatedly in his work, not as trends, but as fabrics tied to histories of work, resilience, and everyday care.
Before the fashion industry took notice, the Haitian community did. Baptiste’s first New York residency came through Haiti Cultural Exchange. His first buyer was a Haitian nurse in Boston. When his work went viral, Haitian and Caribbean platforms carried the story forward.
Régine M. Roumain, Executive Director of the Haiti Cultural Exchange, recalls first encountering Baptiste during the Lakou NOU residency.
“It has been incredible to witness Daveed rise and soar in the art and fashion industries. He is also a beautiful and kind human. I look forward to seeing the continued development of his career” says Roumain.
Akia Dorsainvil, founder of Masisi and a collaborator on Baptiste’s MoCADA project, sees the CFDA recognition as a collective triumph.
“Moments like this remind us that we are living our ancestors’ wildest dreams and that access, not talent, has always been the real barrier,” says Dorsainvil. “And I’m happy to be along this ride to watch the next big thing in fashion come from a Haitian designer.”
Baptiste centers his experience as a Haitian, Black, immigrant, and queer artist, challenging inherited gender norms and expanding how identity can live on the body. His work treats fashion as memory, care, and celebration, not spectacle alone.
Viral moments at New York Fashion Week, recognition from Harlem’s Fashion Row, KidSuper, and the Black Fashion Council soon followed. Baptiste is clear-eyed about the reality.
“Visibility is not security,” he says. “Making it means paying your bills without checking your bank account.”
Each platform offered exposure, but not infrastructure. Baptiste remains largely a team of one, navigating a high-priced practice without systems or safety nets.
“I wasn’t ready,” he admits. “No systems. No massive orders followed. No team appeared overnight. I have $25 in my account today, but a $12,000 check from Microsoft coming next week,” he said. “The artist’s life is wild.”
Fresh takes on fashion’s future
Looking ahead, Baptiste imagines projects that blur fashion, performance and film, and runway shows shaped by water, ritual and Haitian proverbs.
“Fashion needs a baptism,” he says.
Legacy, he says, is about making contributions—in his case, by expanding fashion’s language rather than repeating it.
“My work can be copied,” he says, “but not the mind behind it.”
For those closest to him, the moment feels less like a win than a release.
“Nou lide. Nou la,” he says in Creole. “We’re leaders. We’re here.”
Java Jones, an artist and in-house designer for Baptiste, describes the recognition as the culmination of years of unseen labor, long nights, quiet summers and ideas held back by lack of resources rather than lack of imagination.
“All of it has come to this,” Jones says, reflecting on what the award represents not just for Baptiste, but for fashion history. With the proper support, Jones believes, the ideas they’ve been waiting to realize the designs, the worlds, the risks can finally take shape.
If Baptiste could redesign one thing about the fashion industry, he said, it would be to have smaller prizes, $5,000 or $10,000 grants, and residencies with free studio space. Early support that meets artists where they are.
“Those huge competitions feel like the Olympics,” he says. “But when you’re starting out, you need something much simpler.”
So, while winning the CFDA award on Friday brought joy, he recognizes that awards don’t sustain a practice. Community does, he says.
And to the community that has carried him, his message is simple.“Nou lide. Nou la,” he says in Creole. “We’re leaders. We’re here.”
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