Mara Brock Akil’s Forever has taken the world by storm since its May 8 release, and as much as this is about the tale of first love, it’s also a love story to the culture.
The show is centered around Justin Edwards (Michael Cooper Jr.) and Keisha Clark (Lovie Simone), as they navigate the highs and lows of adolescent love in the modern world filled with social media, text scandals, and just about everything that teenagers of this time grapple with all while falling in love.
A reimagining of Judy Blume’s beloved 1975 novel, “Forever,” the latest Netflix craze, is a product of Mara Brock Akil, the writer known for classics like Girlfriends, Being Mary Jane, The Game, and other sitcoms that have tugged at the heartstrings of the culture since the 2000s. In addition to the characters of Akil’s latest masterpiece, the city of Los Angeles, her hometown, is as much of a character in the show as the people, and it’s evident in the fashion brought forth by costume designer and LA transplant Tanja Caldwell.
“First of all, working with Mara is always a pleasure,” she told Madamenoire. “You’re working with someone who has a really strong hold on, I think, not just Black culture, but specifically LA culture, and like young, adult culture. She really studies, and I think that’s part of the process for me, always with any project I do, is studying it and understanding it fully.”
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“For this one, I feel like, you know, I’m not originally from LA, but I’ve lived here for so long that I can look like I understand that culture, and I’ve embraced it myself,” Caldwell continued. “It’s always a pleasure when I get to showcase that in a really honest, true, genuine way, especially Black LA culture. When I was first approached by Mara and Regina [King], that was one of the first things that they said, like, ‘We really want to make sure it speaks to a part of LA and feels really genuine and true to young, Black people. That they can look at it and really see themselves reflected back to them, which really attracted me to the project, and was 100 percent a part of our process from the beginning. How do we make this genuine and true to real LA culture, young Black culture? And, so I feel like we did that.”
