Viola Davis, 44 Blue Team Up for Dandy Lions

44 Blue Productions is teaming up with Oscar winner Viola Davis and her husband Julius Tennon’s company, JuVee Productions, for the docuseries Dandy Lions.

44 Blue acquired rights to Shantrelle P. Lewis’s book, Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, on which the documentary series is based. Dandy Lions will chart the history of the Black Dandy fashion and style movement and its impact on pop culture and politics.

“After reading Ms. Lewis’s book, and discovering its incredibly timely themes, we were inspired to bring these fascinating but little-known stories to television,” said executive producer Stephanie Noonan Drachkovitch, co-founder and president of 44 Blue. “We could not have found better partners in Ms. Davis, her husband and business partner Julius Tennon and JuVee’s head of television, Andrew Wang.”

“This project looks at how men dress in the Dandy style across the world and how they influence culture through a powerful positive lens,” said executive producers Tennon and Davis.

“We’re thrilled to join with 44 Blue in showcasing and celebrating the Dandy Lion phenomenon,” said Andrew Wang, head of TV for JuVee Productions. “Dandy Lions ‘dress to express’ and their bold style choices—a mélange of elegant fashions, old and new—are powering a movement that continues to defy stereotypes and redefine traditional notions of masculinity and culture.”

“Dandy Lions presents a fresh, stylistic and at the same time critical look inside a vibrant subculture fashioned by black men across the world but, more generally, witnesses the creative ingenuity of black peoples everywhere,” said author and executive producer Lewis. “Today, when race sits at the center of many conversations, Dandy Lions argues how style has been, and can be, a tool of resistance, while also asserting that Blackness, despite its often one-dimensional misrepresentation in the media, is not a monolith. After publishing Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style with Aperture in 2017, I am overjoyed to bring this project to television, in partnership with Julius Tennon, Viola Davis and the dynamic teams at 44 Blue and Juvee Productions.”