When Sankara McCain walked across the stage to graduate from Emerson School for Visual and Performing Arts, she didn’t know where her arts journey would take her.
Never did she think it would lead to her working with everyone from Phylicia Rashad to Saweetie to Beyoncé and Blue Ivy Carter for the “Cowboy Carter” tour.
“I’ve probably touched every female rapper,” she said. Through her brand Sankara Xasha Turé — or Sankara XT, as she’s known in the industry — she’s an international wardrobe stylist with an eye for color and fashion.
Her fashion journey started when her parents sent her to Emerson for school instead of those in her neighborhood. From the moment that they brought up the idea, she was against it.
“I did not want to go to Emerson. I thought my parents were the worst parents on the planet,” she joked. Like any other child in her position, she just wanted to be around her friends.
From the point of view of her father, Todd McCain, sending her to Emerson made perfect sense. Seeing the creativity in her from a young age, he said he always taught the lesson: “The best nation in the world is the imagination.”
“I’ve taught Sankara and her two brothers that the worth of any human being is how they make others better, and in her small, humble way, she’s making others better through her styling and creations of fashion,” he said.
Wanting to go against the grain, she purposely failed her auditions for the school, hoping that it would force her parents to send her to another school. Once her parents found out, they went to school stating that they didn’t care what she majored in, but that she had to attend.
“In Africa, they say a mother or father can see more laying on their back than the children can see in the tallest of trees,” Todd said, giggling at memories of his daughter not wanting to attend the school. “She thought she knew what she wanted to do, but being her father and senior, she didn’t see what I saw.”
Band was the only major she didn’t have to audition for, so her parents enrolled her in that program. Realizing that she had no choice, and even being upset with her parents about the forced choice, which she voiced daily, she decided to switch her major to dance.
“I would tell my parents that I hated them every day that summer, but it ended up being the most beautiful time of my life,” Sankara said, feeling remorseful about how she treated them. “I’m so happy that I was forced to go there.”
It was at Emerson that she started to define herself.
Under the direction of Larry Brewer, Emerson’s dance instructor, students learned they could succeed and pursue opportunities beyond Gary. By age 14, she and a few friends traveled every day to Chicago to train with Deeply Rooted Dance Theater. There, they’d train late into the night, sometimes not getting home until 1 a.m. But their dedication created a level of discipline and excellent dance skills. They were so good that another dance company had to be made.
But while dancing was her passion, she worried more about what she wore on stage. She refused to “go out there looking crazy,” she said. Emerson did not offer a fashion program, and she had no idea she could turn styling into a career — until she went to college.
A third-generation college student, going anywhere other than an HBCU was not an option.
“One thing you’re not going to get at Harvard that you’re going to get at Howard is culture,” her father said. He attended Southern University, her uncle attended Florida A&M University, and her grandmother attended Tennessee State. “Culture to people is what water is to a fish.”
It was at Howard where Sankara became who she is today.
Knowing that the school would open the doors she needed, it was easy for her to choose it. Even now, that community with Howard is among some of her clientele because of the community they built.
Sankara began at Howard as a dance major but switched to fashion in her sophomore year, where she met costume designer Reggie Ray.
Seeing her potential, he took her under his wing and created a work-study program for her.
Ray, a Broadway costume designer, took McCain to New York each week to train under his guidance. On a show starring actor Mekhi Phifer and actress Condola Rashad, McCain styled Condola and impressed her so much that Condola introduced her to her mother, Phylicia Rashad, best known for playing Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show. McCain began styling Phylicia, and her career took off.
Determined to pursue her dreams full time, she quit school in her junior year to move to New York. Her first assignment was as an assistant to Jerod McClairn, then-stylist for Nicki Minaj. Afterward, she kept growing and taking on her own clients. Her first clients were cast members from the popular reality TV shows Love & Hip Hop and Black Ink Crew. She joined Instagram at its inception, and her portfolio quickly gained new followers.
However, she still felt the need to finish what she started at Howard. So, she returned to D.C., where she finished her last two semesters while she was pregnant.
After living overseas, where she started to build her portfolio, she moved back to D.C. to further her career. She ended up meeting Kevin Durant’s mother at a grocery store, and started styling her. According to Sankara, styling normal-sized women started ringing bells in the small D.C. fashion community.
People would come to Washington and explicitly ask Sankara to style them. Another major breakthrough came when Saweetie’s team reached out to hire her to style the rapper for the Summer Jam festival in New York.
In 2019, she traveled to Los Angeles for the BET Awards and a few styling gigs. Three weeks later, Saweetie’s team tapped her to style the rapper on her debut tour, and she’s been in LA ever since.
“Every artist is absolutely different,” Sankara said. “So every time I’m designing for them, I have to become them and step into their brains.”
Now, years into the fashion game, she’s worked with everyone from Ice Cube to rapper Latto to singer Ciara. She’s also styled for videos, movies, and tours for several different artists. Her most recent work includes designing a cowboy-inspired gold leather, metallic outfit with a matching cowboy belt and hat for Blue Ivy. An assignment that came from her agent, and working with a former stylist of Beyonce, who saw the impact that her work has had as a black designer.
“I feel like Gary is just such a big part of my journey,” she said. “I feel like being a rose from concrete, that we have always had the blueprint and what can come from hard work.”
And throughout every part of this journey, Sankara still holds Gary in a special place in her heart.
“I hope I am an inspiration for the city,” she said. “Gary is seen in such a dark light all the time, but it shows that we are going to be OK. There is so much hope for the city that does not get highlighted as often.”
Sankara credits her ambition to her father’s uplifting attitude, which pushed her to rise above an environment she later realized was more challenging than she first understood.
“She has turned a negative into a positive,” Todd said, reflecting on the negative stigma around Gary for over half a decade. “When you make something out of nothing, when you can turn lemons into lemonade franchises or even when life gives you BS, you learn how to make fertilizer out of it.”
Like her father, Sankara hopes to show Gary’s kids that they can do precisely what she is doing if they have someone to push them. With Emerson being gone, she recognizes that many students don’t get the experience that she did growing up.
She spent time in her grandmother’s hair shop, which helped her understand how things should look. She watched her father model or her other grandma unofficially style him for shoots while spending the rest of the time shopping for outfits. As a child, she hated it, but now, as an adult, she realizes how exposed she was to the arts.
And that’s something she wants for the city’s youth: to bring the arts back.
“That is my life goal: I want to come back to Gary and rebuild Emerson, but this time it would be a state-of-the-art school where students will be learning how to produce music, learning fashion, to sketch, use AI, etc.,” she said, reflecting on how if she went with what she wanted to do as a child, she wouldn’t be where she is today.