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Diss prep - Creating my question

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Do Black owned labels help or harm Representation in the fashion industry ?

do they leave Black business in a different category or rank

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Black owned brands

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Shop Black-owned brands

in partnership with

The Fifteen Percent Pledge is a call to action for major retailers and corporations to join us in creating sustainable and supportive ecosystems for Black-owned businesses to succeed. We work with companies to comprehensively re-evaluate their org structures, ways of working, funding, and resourcing in order to implement meaningful change and create greater equity for Black businesses.
Find a Brand
About the Pledge

The Pledge is an invitation to retailers to give their valued community what they are asking for: variety and economic equality. The Pledge allows us to learn and grow together, led by a sustainable model for long-term change.

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in partnership with The Fifteen Percent Pledge is a call to action for major retailers and corporations to join us in creating sustainable and supportive ecosystems for Black-owned businesses to succeed. We work with companies to comprehensively re-evaluate their org structures, ways of working, funding, and resourcing in order to implement meaningful change and create greater equity for Black businesses.

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- history or racism and discrimination i nthe industry
- talking to black brands
- change behind the camera

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finding Black brands to talk to

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what is it like owning a brand today ?

What do labels mean to you?

Has the BLM movement in 2020 affected your business?

What does representation mean to you in the fashion industry?

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black in carnaby is a community empowerment platform curated by my runway group to offer black businesses from under-represented backgrounds the commercial visibility they deserve.

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how do you feel about representation in the industry?

what do labels mean to your brand?

How does your race affect your brand?

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Black Owned London - Find Black excellence in the Capital & the UK

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We are thrilled to bring back the Spotlight Sessions.

This ground-breaking set of sessions isin collaboration with Camden Councils Black History Season.

We have partnered with Bacardi who have paired four of their most iconic brands with each session.

We're talking vibes and talent, these are The Spotlight Sessions!!

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We are thrilled to bring back the Spotlight Sessions. This ground-breaking set of sessions isin collaboration with Camden Councils Black History Season. We have partnered with Bacardi who have paired four of their most iconic brands with each session. We're talking vibes and talent, these are The Spotlight Sessions!!

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Black designers are leading the way when it comes to new and exciting fashion, with voices that demand to be heard (and clothing that demands to be worn). Want to know about the Black British fashion brands making waves in the industry? These are the names to know now.
Black-Owned British Fashion Brands to Discover Now

April & Alex

Statement garms are the norm at April & Alex, the London-based womenswear brand founded by award-winning journalist Didi Akin. The brand, which has kitted out the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Lucy Hale and Lyric Ross, was built on the principles of slow fashion and diversity - cultivating an aesthetic designed to empower its wearer using premium reclaimed fabrics. aprilandalex.co.uk

Wales Bonner

Grace Wales Bonner is a young designer with an impressive resume. As the winner of the 2016 LVMH Young Designer winner, a Dior collaborator and Central St Martins lecturer, she's been making some pretty big waves in recent years. Her brand, Wales Bonner, is known for its interweaving of European and Afro Atlantic characteristics, with an emphasis on earthy tones, funky patterns and attention to textural detailing. walesbonner.net

Casely-Hayford

Founded by father-son duo Joe and Charlie, Casely-Hayford is a London-based menswear brand known for its sleek design and classic silhouettes. Charlie founded the brand with his father, Joe Casely-Hayford OBE, when he was 22 and continues to lead at its helm today. casely-hayford.com

Farai London

For lovers of bold, bright colour, Farai London is quite the treasure trove. British designer Mary-Ann Msengi founded the brand with the goal of creating garments that are both adventurous and stylish. All of the brand's pieces are designed in East London, but have quickly attracted an international audience spanning Kylie Jenner and Megan Thee Stallion. farailondon.com

Maison Bent

Conscious-minded fashion label Maison Bent was founded by Central Saint Martins alumna Shanna Bent, who presented her first solo show with her brand in 2020 before bagging a regular spot at London Fashion Week. Bent, who specialises in luxury womenswear, has described her work as 'combining vintage Caribbean aesthetics with modern glamour'. maisonbent.com

Kemi Telford

Nigerian-born and raised Yvonne Modupe Telford moved to England in 1996, where she built a fashion business inspired by her heritage and the clothing she saw Nigerian women wear while growing up. kemitelford.com

Lisou

Stunning silk creations await at Lisou, which boasts a vividly colourful collection of suits, coats and dresses in a wash of fun patterns. The brand was founded by Rene Macdonald, a former stylist who spent much of her youth travelling between the UK and Africa to visit family. Rene designs all of her prints in-house, taking inspiration from her former home in Tanzania and her rich cultural heritage.

TOVE Studio

Founded by friends Camille Perry and Holly Wright in 2019, TOVE is known for its minimal aesthetic and emphasis on classic design. Pieces are made to be worn year after year, trendless in design but in no way lacking when it comes to style. tove-studio.com

Bianca Saunders

Award-winning designer Bianca Saunders is known for playing on conventional boundaries, blurring the lines between tradition and modernity as well as masculinity and femininity. Bianca actively draws on her background, which spans both Britain and Jamaica, for each collection - creating a visual language that brings cross-cultural connections to the fore. biancasaunders.com

Duro Olowu

British fashion designer Duro Olowu is a name to know if you have a soft spot for maximalism and vibrant print. Duro, who was born in Nigeria, began a career in law before turning back to fashion - launching his womenswear label in 2004 to high praise. Expect a masterclass in colour blocking, print clashing and sleek tailoring. duroolowu.com
Featured image: April & Alex

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10 Black-Owned British Fashion Brands to Discover Now

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Black designers are leading the way when it comes to new and exciting fashion, with voices that demand to be heard (and clothing that demands to be worn). Want to know about the Black British fashion brands making waves in the industry? These are the names to know now.

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Black-owned fashion brands you need to have on your radar

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From darker-toned underwear to chic jewellery and divine dresses

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Reaching out through email at Black brands 

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Reaching out through email at Black brands 

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Looking into influential models and activists in the fashion industry 

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Looking into influential models and activists in the fashion industry 

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https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/women-of-color-revolutionized-fashion

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Feature Shoot showcases the work of international emerging and established photographers who are transforming the medium through compelling, cutting-edge projects, with contributing writers from all over the world.

Explore modeling history with seven stunning women of color who changed modern high fashion and carved a path for future generations.

When Pat Cleveland was growing up, she looked at fashion magazines and didn't find anyone who looked like her. Early in her career, when she traveled to the American South as part of the Ebony Fashion Fair, she endured threats of violence from members of the Ku Klux Klan. She and her fellow models were attacked while trying to use the bathroom.

Still, Cleveland persevered. In the 1960s, she and other women of color made history by becoming the supermodels of a new generation. They revolutionized fashion, but they also helped reshape the country and the world. By the 1970s, the model Iman had redefined what "the girl next door" looked like in America.

Let's take a look back at some of the iconic supermodels whose beauty, strength, and courage made a permanent mark in magazines, in our imagination, and in the pages of history. "The world has changed," Cleveland ​ told​ ​Harper's Bazaar​ a couple of years ago. "We're all part of one world now. Fashion has to be for everyone."

1. China Machado

Sometimes called "the first non-white supermodel," this mixed-race, Shanghai-born model made waves in 1959, when she appeared in ​ Harper's Bazaar​. As ​ the story ​ goes, the magazine initially debated featuring the now-famous photographs, but Richard Avedon threatened to quit if they didn't run. The photographer later called her "probably the most beautiful woman in the world."

Machado ultimately went on to serve as the magazine's Senior Fashion Editor and Fashion Director. She returned to modeling at the age of 81, appearing in campaigns for fashion brands like Barneys and Cole Haan.

"China Machado was one of the first great pioneers in the firmament of haute couture," fashion journalist André Leon Talley told ​ The New York Times ​ in 2016. ​"Internationally, she paved the way for diversity and other races, as well as paving the way for the rise of the black model in print and on the runway."

2. Pat Cleveland

This supermodel got her start after a chance encounter with Carrie Donovan, assistant fashion editor at ​ Vogue ​, on a subway platform. She was a teenager on her way to school. Unfortunately, Cleveland faced an uphill battle with racism and prejudice.

In the late 1960s, Eileen Ford of Ford Models told her she doubted she'd ever make it in the business due to the color of her skin. Of course, Cleveland proved her wrong, and her presence on magazine covers marked a change in the nation.

She went onto work with the preeminent designers, editors, and photographers of the time-Karl Lagerfeld, Halston, Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, Christian Dior, Diana Vreeland, Guy Bourdin, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, etc.-and on several occasions, she also posed for Salvador Dali.

Sadly, Cleveland was diagnosed with colon cancer earlier this year, shortly after modeling in Paris Fashion Week. Designers, stylists, photographers, and fellow models ​ rallied around her ​ to show their support-a powerful testament to her enduring influence.

3. Naomi Sims

In 1968, ​ Ladies' Home Journal​ published its first cover featuring a Black model. Her name was Naomi Sims, and more than forty years later, ​ The New York Times​ would ​ call it ​ "a consummate moment of the Black is Beautiful movement."

Early in her career, Sims had trouble finding representation, with more than one agency turning her away for being "too dark." Instead of allowing them to dissuade her, however, she'd reached out directly to photographers, landing her first major appearance in ​The Times fashion supplement.

Sims went on to become a prominent author and businesswoman, serving at the helm of a multimillion-dollar wig company. She also mentored the next supermodel on our list, Beverly Johnson. "Naomi was the first," the designer Halston said in 1974. "She broke down all the social barriers."

4. Beverly Johnson

When this model first started, the owner of her agency told her she'd never be on a cover. But growing up during the Civil Rights Movement had helped shape Johnson into the fearless woman she was, and despite the naysayers, she didn't give up.

In 1974, Johnson didn't just land ​a​ cover; she landed ​ the​ cover of American ​ Vogue. She was the first woman of color in the fashion magazine's 80-plus-year history to do so. "Beverly's cover was history," André Leon Talley would ​recall​ on the 40th anniversary. "It was groundbreaking."

Since then, she's made a career in business, acting, and music, and of course, she's still an icon. "Once a supermodel, always a supermodel," she told ​​ in 2017. When Tyler Mitchell became the first African-American photographer to shoot a cover for American ​ Vogue, she saw the movement she helped start come full circle. "This is our Oscar," she told ​. "This is our gold medal."

5. Bethann Hardison

This model/activist was first "discovered" by the fashion designer Willi Smith in New York. The year was 1967, and at the time, she was working in the Garment District. Looking back, she says she got her "​ big break ​" when she delivered a dress to the merchandising executive Bernie Ozer, telling him, "If you really want to have a great show, you'll have me in it."

She was onto something. After her time in front of the camera, Hardison went on to build her own management company, where she mentored a new generation of models. In the 1980s, Hardison turned her focus to activism, and she continues to advocate for diversity in the industry today.

When asked in 2016 whether she saw a connection between social movements and fashion activism, she responded, "Yes, of course! The fact of the matter is that everything is consciousness. This conversation is important."

6. Billie Blair

Known for her "dancelike strut," this supermodel made history as part of The Battle of Versailles Fashion Show in 1973, a face-off between American and French designers. Blair, Bethann Hardison, Beverly Johnson, Pat Cleveland, and Iman were among the ten women of color included among the 36 American models-a landmark number.

A year later, ​​ dubbed her "New York's newest superstar model" and "this season's standard of female beauty." Halston chimed in, adding, "She is more like a starlet than a mannequin. I love her walk, her fantastic body, her dramatic delivery."

7. Iman

This model's career took off in 1975 after the prominent American photographer Peter Beard spotted her out and about in the streets of Kenya. At the time, she was twenty years old, a Somali refugee studying political science at university. Beard asked her if she'd ever been photographed, and, she ​ later admitted ​, she "had no idea what he was talking about." She asked for $8,000 for her first modeling job-the price of her tuition.

The next year, Iman appeared in ​ Vogue, and she soon drew the attention of leading designers of the time, including Yves Saint Laurent, who famously dubbed her his "dream woman." In the following decades, she would grow to become one of the most influential supermodels in the world, establishing herself as both a businesswoman and a philanthropist.

She has since spoken out about her experience as a refugee. "My parents left with one picture of each of us," she ​ told​ The Enough Project in 2010. "One picture." As an adult, she would collaborate with her generation's greatest photographers-Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and many more-and her pictures would grace the covers of magazines around the world.

Want more modern history in images? Check out these photo tours:

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7 Women of Color Who Revolutionized Fashion in the 1960s-70s

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Feature Shoot showcases the work of international emerging and established photographers who are transforming the medium through compelling, cutting-edge projects, with contributing writers from all over the world. When Pat Cleveland was growing up, she looked at fashion magazines and didn't find anyone who looked like her.

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First black women to be on a magazine cover
be on runways and accepted in mainstream advertising

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As HBO releases a new documentary about Donyale Luna's incredible life, revisit her daughter Dream Cazzaniga's personal essay about her mother's legacy from the May 2019 issue of British Vogue.

A few years ago, my father found the diaries that my mother kept leading up to my birth, containing the delighted entry when she first realised she was pregnant. Nine months later, in the autumn of 1977, she started labour in the wild and enchanting Tuscan countryside. At that point, it was still rare to see a woman of colour have a child with a "native" Italian like my father, but on that day, my mother no longer cared about racial stigmas. Her sole thought was of giving life. It had been 13 years since she said goodbye to her emotionally tumultuous childhood in Detroit and become Donyale Luna, beginning a journey that would see her change the nature of the fashion industry - and our understanding of beauty. Yet, just 18 months after I was born, my mother passed away from drug-related complications, leaving me to be raised by my father and his family in Europe.

I now live in France with a young family of my own, and even though I have only a few blurred memories of my mother, I feel her presence with me - and within me - more strongly every day. As a girl in rural Italy, I never fully appreciated the cultural legacy that she had bequeathed to me. It was only in my early twenties that I started to look deeper and ask more questions about her life, and the stories were even more remarkable than I could have imagined. Over the next two decades, I studied her face in photographs of 1960s icons and read about her in newspaper clippings, many of which came with sensational headlines. It has been a difficult process, trying to separate my mother from the myths around her. The people who were actually close to her, including my father, Luigi Cazzaniga, struggled to describe her; nobody could quite keep the fantasy and the reality of her in their heads at the same time. Yet, as her daughter, I couldn't accept that her pioneering work remained forgotten: how could I help her be remembered in the way that she deserved?

To set the record straight, it helps to start at the beginning. My mother was born Peggy Ann Freeman in Detroit in 1945, giving herself the name Donyale Luna as a teenager. She was the middle daughter of three: very bright, her life revolved around school, church and local theatre productions. Her father worked in manufacturing while her mother acted as a secretary for the Young Women's Christian Association. In 1963, the fashion photographer David McCabe was visiting Detroit on assignment when, outside the city's famous Fisher Building, he spotted my mother - already nearly 6ft tall and with her trademark willowy frame - in her plaid Catholic-school uniform on her way to a rehearsal. As he tells it, he felt compelled to let her know that if she was ever interested in modelling, she should come to Manhattan and he would help her.

By her 19th birthday, a year later, she had decided to move to New York. This was the autumn of 1964, just months after the Civil Rights Act was passed - legally prohibiting racial discrimination for the first time in American history - and the coming years would see the assassination of Martin Luther King, the race riots that devastated her home city and the founding of the Black Panthers. There were virtually no modelling opportunities for non-white faces anywhere other than dedicated African-American publications such as Ebony. I'm still amazed at how brave my mother was to leave home for Manhattan at that point in history, with no clear plans or steady income - just a telephone number hastily written down by a stranger. As a girl of colour at that time, simply believing in her own worth and following her true calling were great revolutionary acts.

Luckily, as soon as she called him, McCabe made good on his promise, taking her to meet a host of fashion editors. I read a letter she wrote to Mary Ann, her childhood friend, just after she moved. "New York is a dream... a man danced me down Fifth Avenue, and all up and down Broadway men were eyeing and whistling at me... As soon as possible I'll send you a picture of the new me. I'll be on top of the world if it takes every breath I have, every muscle of my skinny body. I feel it, I know it. I'll be some kind of star real soon. Real soon." She was right. Within a few months, my mother had been contracted to work with Richard Avedon, and he photographed her for editorials alongside the likes of musician Bob Dylan and a young and wide-eyed Jean Shrimpton. Overnight, she became the girl du jour - with newspapers across the country declaring her the first Black star model. Outside Avedon's studio, she fell in with the beautiful crowd. When I look at photos of her from back then - an era in which she joined the late-night Motown parties hosted by Sammy Davis Jr, danced with Veruschka, and attended dinners given by Miles Davis at his brownstone - I can simultaneously feel how clearly she belonged there but also how ahead of her time she was.

As the civil rights movement gathered pace, so too did society's fascination with the "exotic" and "alien". The world was in the middle of a cultural revolution, and my mother was on the front lines of the Swinging '60s. Almost against her own will, she became a symbol. Some people declared her a Masai warrior, Gauguinesque, Nefertiti reborn. Others claimed she was another species entirely - or from outer space! In fact, she was irreducible, and entirely herself. By the spring, she was firmly within the galaxy of stars who orbited Andy Warhol's Factory - one of the only African-American girls to be part of that world. He captured her electric beauty in his Polaroids and 16mm Screen Test, but he was also inspired by her vision. She contributed to many of his projects, including the film Camp, Warhol's 1965 satire of his own world, in which she dances in a backless dress and fur stole to The Ramsey Lewis Trio's hit "The 'In' Crowd".

It seems glamorous, except that my mother could never quite escape prejudice. On the one hand, people longed for her to become a symbol of the African-American resistance - a role she struggled with as someone who identified as mixed race. On the other, Southern advertisers pulled funding and readers cancelled their subscriptions when she graced a magazine's pages - with Avedon eventually told to stop photographing her because of the backlash. There's no doubt, however, that she shared the highest message in Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, where she also found inspiration for my name. But in the end, no matter what she did, in America she was always going to be limited by the colour of her skin. So she made another leap - this time to Europe, where discrimination was less prevalent. Years later, in an interview with my father, she said of her decision: "I wouldn't have to be bothered with political situations when I woke up in the morning; I could live and be treated as I felt, without having to worry about the police coming along."

In December 1965 she arrived in the London of the Youthquake, a world of Beatlemania, Vidal Sassoon bobs and Mary Quant miniskirts. Again, she immediately became part of the scene. She was always drawn to radical creatives and vice versa, appearing in films such as Blow-Up, Antonioni's 1966 satire of the enfants terribles of fashion photography, which opens with her being shot on a rooftop in east London. By 1968 she was playing an assistant to a fire-eater in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, the period when she was rumoured to be involved with Brian Jones. It is surreal to watch her move in these motion pictures; it's as if she's vibrating at a different frequency from those around her, with an otherworldly quality to her beauty.

On a professional level, her first real break came just after she arrived in the UK. In March of 1966 she became the first model of colour to grace the cover of Vogue in a shoot with David Bailey, wearing a Chloé dress and dramatic gold Mimi de N earrings. Inspired by Picasso's ocular-centric portraits, only a single heavily lined eye is visible through her fingers, which form a V for Vogue. Inside the magazine, she is on display in all her glory, posing in the spring fashions from Paris alongside fellow models Moyra Swan and Peggy Moffitt: printed silk tunics from Christian Dior; mod shifts by Pierre Cardin; a glittering silver dress from Yves Saint Laurent. I appreciated the comment of editor Beatrix Miller, later on, saying of her decision to put my mother in the magazine: "She happens to be a marvellous shape - angular and immensely tall and strange. She has a kind of bite and personality."

Overnight, she became an international celebrity, not to mention one of the most in-demand models in the world. Time dubbed 1966 the Luna Year. "She is a creature of contrasts," the magazine wrote. "One minute sophisticated, the next fawnlike, now exotic and faraway, now a gamine from around the corner." That spring, Paris Match had 11 different photographers shoot their vision of my mother. It's telling that there are no two portraits in which she looks alike. Meanwhile, her chameleonic tendencies and fearless disposition extended to her work on the catwalk. In Paris, where her success was compared to Josephine Baker's in the 1920s, she modelled for André Courrèges, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino and, perhaps most notably, Paco Rabanne, when he presented his 12 robes importables, made from Rhodoid discs, at the George V hotel. She brought her own hypnotic energy to the runway, crawling like a lion, grooving to the music or suddenly freezing and making direct eye contact with journalists.

It was a landmark moment for the fashion industry. Reflecting on the spectacle in 1979, Bill Cunningham wrote: "Her body moves like a panther, her arms, the wings of an exotic bird... The audience responds with shattering applause -- for the model's performance rather than the designer's clothes. It is the birth of a new fashion era - that of the spectacular show that rivals any on Broadway." As ever, my mother was propelled forward by her creativity, even in the midst of her success. She travelled to Salvador Dalí's home in the Catalonian village of Cadaqués, where he promptly declared her one of his muses. Look at the photos of that trip and you will find my mother cradling the baby ocelot that Dalí kept as a pet, or standing on a grand piano in the middle of a lake near his house. (The artist had rolled it in there himself.) Most beautiful of all are the portraits of her in a cream gown, with Dalí sketching directly on to the fabric.

In the end, it was those sorts of partnerships that fulfilled her. "I never planned to be a model when I was in Detroit," she told a reporter in 1966. "I wanted to be a starving actress in New York." And so, at the close of the 1960s, she moved to Rome for a part in Fellini's Satyricon (1969) and, later, Carmelo Bene's Salomè (1972). It was during this period that she met my father, an up-and-coming photographer and the twin soul who shared her vision. The two of them fell in love, indulged their creativity and travelled the world. In one of their many shoots together, my father photographed her for Playboy as characters of her own devising - as an angel soaring over the Los Angeles skyline or as a mermaid perched on a rock by the Pacific Ocean. Some of their best work, however, has not been published yet: a hand-illustrated fairy tale, avant-garde film scripts and beautiful coloured prints - painstakingly made in their own darkroom. Even now, when I look at those objects, their creativity strikes me, and I can hear her heartbeat reverberating down through the decades.

My mother's death in 1979 was a tragic accident. Despite stories in the press about the last years of her life, my father has told me that she was dynamic and creative until the end. I see how true that is when I look at photographs of her stretched out theatrically on top of a pile of notebooks and diaries on a Long Island beach. You can feel how vibrant, present and totally connected to life she is.

She leaves behind a great story, one that I am proud to tell my daughters. On 17 May, it will be 40 years since my mother left us. On that day I will honour her legacy and reflect on her memory with my family. Most of all, though, I will be hoping that the world is finally ready to celebrate a young African-American girl from Detroit who didn't let others define her. In the end, these pages contain many of the real facts about her extraordinary life - and this is how she deserves to be remembered. At last.
Donyale Luna: Supermodel is out now on HBO

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Donyale Luna Changed The Face Of Fashion In The '60s. Now, The Revolutionary Black Model Is Finally Getting Her Due

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As HBO releases a new documentary about Donyale Luna's incredible life, revisit her daughter Dream Cazzaniga's personal essay about her mother's legacy from the May 2019 issue of British Vogue.

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Disrupts economic inequity. BJE brings a knowledgeable perspective of various industry markets; their elite brands, companies, product and service they offer, to deserving yet underserved women; young and ageless.

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learning how do do an introduction in class

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Looking into civil rights and the beginning of People of colour in new cities  

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Looking into civil rights and the beginning of People of colour in new cities  

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The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War had officially abolished slavery, but it didn't end discrimination against Black people-they continued to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century, Black Americans had had more than enough of prejudice and violence against them. They, along with many white Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades.
WATCH: The Civil Rights Movement on HISTORY Vault
Jim Crow Laws

During Reconstruction, Black people took on leadership roles like never before. They held public office and sought legislative changes for equality and the right to vote.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they'd once enslaved were now on a more-or-less equal playing field.

To marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they'd made during Reconstruction, " Jim Crow " laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Black people couldn't use the same public facilities as white people, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most Black people couldn't vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests.
READ MORE: How Jim Crows Limited African American Progress
Jim Crow laws weren't adopted in northern states; however, Black people still experienced discrimination at their jobs or when they tried to buy a house or get an education. To make matters worse, laws were passed in some states to limit voting rights for Black Americans.

Moreover, southern segregation gained ground in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that facilities for Black and white people could be "separate but equal."
READ MORE: When Did African Americans Get the Right to Vote?
World War II and Civil Rights

Prior to World War II, most Black people worked as low-wage farmers, factory workers, domestics or servants. By the early 1940s, war-related work was booming, but most Black Americans weren't given the better paying jobs. They were also discouraged from joining the military.

After thousands of Black people threatened to march on Washington to demand equal employment rights, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It opened national defense jobs and other government jobs to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans were met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a stark contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with-to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. These events helped set the stage for grass-roots initiatives to enact racial equality legislation and incite the civil rights movement.
READ MORE: Why Harry Truman Ended Segregation in the US Military
Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks found a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus after work. Segregation laws at the time stated Black passengers must sit in designated seats at the back of the bus, and Parks had complied.

When a white man got on the bus and couldn't find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested.

As word of her arrest ignited outrage and support, Parks unwittingly became the "mother of the modern day civil rights movement." Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr., a role which would place him front and center in the fight for civil rights.

Parks' courage incited the MIA to stage a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. On November 14, 1956 the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional.

Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the civil rights movement gained momentum when the United States Supreme Court made segregation illegal in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for volunteers from all-Black high schools to attend the formerly segregated school.

On September 3, 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by the Arkansas National Guard (on order of Governor Orval Faubus) and a screaming, threatening mob. The Little Rock Nine tried again a couple of weeks later and made it inside, but had to be removed for their safety when violence ensued.

Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened and ordered federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to and from classes at Central High. Still, the students faced continual harassment and prejudice.

Their efforts, however, brought much-needed attention to the issue of desegregation and fueled protests on both sides of the issue.
READ MORE: Why Eisenhower Sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock After Brown v. Board
Civil Rights Act of 1957

Even though all Americans had gained the right to vote, many southern states made it difficult for Black citizens. They often required prospective voters of color to take literacy tests that were confusing, misleading and nearly impossible to pass.

Wanting to show a commitment to the civil rights movement and minimize racial tensions in the South, the Eisenhower administration pressured Congress to consider new civil rights legislation.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.

Woolworth's Lunch Counter

Despite making some gains, Black Americans still experienced blatant prejudice in their daily lives. On February 1, 1960, four college students took a stand against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina when they refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter without being served.

Over the next several days, hundreds of people joined their cause in what became known as the Greensboro sit-ins. After some were arrested and charged with trespassing, protesters launched a boycott of all segregated lunch counters until the owners caved and the original four students were finally served at the Woolworth's lunch counter where they'd first stood their ground.

Their efforts spearheaded peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations in dozens of cities and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to encourage all students to get involved in the civil rights movement. It also caught the eye of young college graduate Stokely Carmichael, who joined the SNCC during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power."
READ MORE: How the Greensboro Four Sit-In Sparked a Movement
Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, 13 " Freedom Riders"-seven Black and six white activists-mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C., embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional.

Facing violence from both police officers and white protesters, the Freedom Rides drew international attention. On Mother's Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, where a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The Freedom Riders escaped the burning bus, but were badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the group could not find a bus driver to take them further. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother to President John F. Kennedy) negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson to find a suitable driver, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort on May 20. But the officers left the group once they reached Montgomery, where a white mob brutally attacked the bus. Attorney General Kennedy responded to the riders-and a call from Martin Luther King Jr.-by sending federal marshals to Montgomery.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi. Though met with hundreds of supporters, the group was arrested for trespassing in a "whites-only" facility and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, who reversed the convictions. Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued.

In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals
HISTORY and Google Earth: Follow the Freedom Riders' Journey Against Segregation During the Civil Rights Era
March on Washington

Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington. It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 200,000 people of all races congregated in Washington, D. C. for the peaceful march with the main purpose of forcing civil rights legislation and establishing job equality for everyone. The highlight of the march was King's speech in which he continually stated, "I have a dream..."

King's " I Have a Dream" speech galvanized the national civil rights movement and became a slogan for equality and freedom.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964-legislation initiated by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination -into law on July 2 of that year.

King and other civil rights activists witnessed the signing. The law guaranteed equal employment for all, limited the use of voter literacy tests and allowed federal authorities to ensure public facilities were integrated.
READ MORE: 8 Steps That Paved the Way to the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Bloody Sunday

On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as " Bloody Sunday." Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions.

It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.

Part of the Act was walked back decades later, in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated.

Civil Rights Leaders Assassinated

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders in the late 1960s. On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam leader and Organization of Afro-American Unity founder Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room's balcony. Emotionally-charged looting and riots followed, putting even more pressure on the Johnson administration to push through additional civil rights laws.
READ MORE: Why People Rioted After Martin Luther King Jr.'s Assassination
Fair Housing Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act became law on April 11, 1968, just days after King's assassination. It prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.

The civil rights movement was an empowering yet precarious time for Black Americans. The efforts of civil rights activists and countless protesters of all races brought about legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory employment and housing practices.
READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement Timeline
Six Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement
10 Things You May Not Know About Martin Luther King Jr.

Sources

A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation.
Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library.
Document for June 25th: Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. National Archives.
Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. African American Odyssey.
Little Rock School Desegregation (1957). The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford.
Rosa Marie Parks Biography. Rosa and Raymond Parks.
Selma, Alabama, (Bloody Sunday March 7, 1965). BlackPast.org.
The Civil Rights Movement (1919-1960s). National Humanities Center.
The Little Rock Nine. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site.
Turning Point: World War II. Virginia Historical Society.

Photo Galleries

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The civil rights movement was a struggle for justice and equality for African Americans that took place mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. Among its leaders were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Little Rock Nine, Rosa Parks and many others.

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first time people of colour were looked as an asset in society and given a level of respect and representation

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Julia L Sandy-Bailey, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

This dissertation examines the "Negro market" and consumer activism within the context of the black freedom movement in New York City from 1930 to 1965. The "Negro market," a term used by the advertising industry to indicate a racially defined consumer market that was separate from the mainstream one, first emerged during the Great Depression. It expanded during World War II when the government gave more attention to racial matters and actively supported corporate attention to black consumers. In its first three decades, "Negro market" advertisers sought to reach African Americans without alienating whites, and strategies were shaped by advertising agencies, corporations, black media, and black marketing experts. During these years "Negro market" campaigns were conducted solely in black media. Although this reinforced the segregation of the consumer market, it did result in positive advertising images of blacks in the black press. Black protests in the early 1960s resulted in the integration of a small number of ads in mainstream media, changing the exclusively segregated approach of advertisers. Black New Yorkers used their consumer power as a tool in the black freedom movement, a movement that included campaigns for employment, integration, and positive black cultural portrayals. They also worked for consumer rights such as integrated commercial spaces, fair prices, and quality merchandise, and understood these rights as an important part of their struggle for racial equality. Groups from a variety of political perspectives---including housewives leagues, the NAACP, CORE, the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, and the National Negro Congress---took part in these activities. Consumer weapons such as picketing and boycotts were only one aspect of black rights campaigns, and were often very effective. But there were limits to the usefulness of consumer action. By looking at business trade journals, the black press, advertisements, and the records of civil rights organizations, advertising agencies, corporations, and governmental agencies, this study traces the early history of the "Negro market," demonstrates the importance of consumer rights to black New Yorkers, and also shows the limitations of consumption as a method for achieving racial equality.

Subject Area

American history|African Americans

Recommended Citation

Sandy-Bailey, Julia L, "The "Negro Market" and the black freedom movement in New York City, 1930-1965" (2006). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI3216961.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3216961

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The "Negro Market" and the black freedom movement in New York City, 1930-1965

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This dissertation examines the "Negro market" and consumer activism within the context of the black freedom movement in New York City from 1930 to 1965. The "Negro market," a term used by the advertising industry to indicate a racially defined consumer market that was separate from the mainstream one, first emerged during the Great Depression.

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Growing research

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society wanted to appeal to the black consumer so they could make sales and targets since the big influx of Black families making money 

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society wanted to appeal to the black consumer so they could make sales and targets since the big influx of Black families making money 

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Representation and systemic racism

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It wasn't too long ago that a lot of people were talking about a post-racial America. We had elected a Black president for the first time, and then went ahead and re-elected him four years later, and the country was feeling pretty good about itself.

While Barack Obama's presidency was indeed a profound and meaningful mark of true progress, racism, of course, never really went away. The presence of a Black president, hockey star, or movie-franchise superhero, however welcome and exciting, cannot reverse centuries of racial injustice.

In fact, racism is built right into every level of our society in ways that might surprise you.

Racism at Every Level of Society

Racism of this kind, racism that infects the very structure of our society, is called systemic racism. And at first glance, it may be difficult to detect.

Since the election of Donald Trump, hate crimes have been on the rise. White supremacists have been emboldened. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has intensified. We condemn these awful examples of prejudice and bias and hate, but systemic racism is something different. It's less about violence or burning crosses than it is about everyday decisions made by people who may not even think of themselves as racist. As sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has said, "The main problem nowadays is not the folks with the hoods, but the folks dressed in suits."

Systemic racism persists in our schools, offices, court system, police departments, and elsewhere. Why? Think about it: when white people occupy most positions of decision-making power, people of color have a difficult time getting a fair shake, let alone getting ahead.
We all have to do a better job of calling out systemic racism. Here are seven ways we know that it's real.
WEALTH

According to one study, white families hold 90% of the national wealth, Latino families hold 2.3%, and Black families hold 2.6%. Not only that, the Great Recession hit minority families particularly hard, and the wealth gap has increased. Think about this: for every $100 white families earn in income, Black families earn just $57.30. That's almost unbelievable-and it's a huge racial-justice issue.

EMPLOYMENT

It's next to impossible to build wealth without steady and rewarding employment. But the Black unemployment rate has been consistently twice that of whites over the past 60 years, no matter what has been going on with the economy (whether it's been up or down). Hmm, maybe higher education would help with that? Well, according to the data, Black people with college degrees are twice as likely to be unemployed as all other graduates. That may be because, as one study found, job applicants with white-sounding names get called back about 50% more of the time than applicants with Black-sounding names, even when they have identical resumes. (This seems to be a widespread problem: even guests with distinctively Black names get less positive reviews from property owners on Airbnb.)

EDUCATION

Let's discuss education a little more in depth. If you thought that preschool, at least, was a racism-free zone, well... consider that while Black children constitute 18% of preschoolers nationwide, they make up nearly 50% of suspensions. When all age groups are examined, Black students are three times more likely to be suspended than white students, even when their infractions are similar. Overall, Black students represent 16% of student enrollment and 27% of students referred to law enforcement. And once Black children are in the criminal justice system, they are 18 times more likely than white children to be sentenced as adults.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Given this, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that even though, as we said, Black people make up 13% of the population, they represent about 40% of the prison population. Why is that? Perhaps because if a Black person and a white person each commit a crime, the Black person has a better chance of being arrested. It's also true that, once arrested, Black people are convicted more often than white people. And for many years, laws assigned much harsher sentences for using or possessing crack, for example, compared to cocaine. Finally, when Black people are convicted, they are about 20% more likely to be sentenced to jail time, and typically see sentences 20% longer than those for whites who were convicted of similar crimes. And as we know, a felony conviction means, in many states, that you lose your right to vote. Right now in America, more than 7.4% of the adult African American population is disenfranchised (compared to 1.8% of the non-African American population).

HOUSING

When the government sought to make mortgages more affordable back in the 1930s, thereby jumpstarting the epoch of suburban living, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (and thereafter private banks) ranked neighborhoods all around the country, giving high marks to all-white neighborhoods and marking those with minorities in red as risky investments. Redlining, which essentially barred Black people and other minorities from sharing in the American Dream and building wealth like their white counterparts, was officially outlawed in the '60s, but the practice really never went away. In fact, during the Great Recession, banks routinely and purposely guided Black home buyers toward subprime loans. A recent study demonstrated that people of color are told about and shown fewer homes and apartments than whites. Black ownership is now at an all-time low (42%, compared to 72% for whites).

SURVEILLANCE

If you're white, you don't usually need to worry about being monitored by the police. But the day-to-day reality for African Americans is quite different. More than half of all young Black Americans know someone, including themselves, who has been harassed by the police. Statistics also show that Black drivers are about 30% more likely than whites to be pulled over by the police. (So African Americans can expect to be monitored wherever they go-but did you know that they can't even expect to safely cross the street? Black people are twice as likely to die in pedestrian accidents than whites, perhaps because, according to one study, motorists are less likely to stop for Black people in the crosswalk.) And of course it's well-known that Muslims are under increasing and often illegal surveillance.

HEALTHCARE

African Americans in particular face discrimination in the world of healthcare too. A 2012 study found that a majority of doctors have "unconscious racial biases" when it comes to their Black patients. Black Americans are far more likely than whites to lack access to emergency medical care. The hospitals they go to tend to be less well funded, and staffed by practitioners with less experience. But even Black doctors face discrimination: they are less likely than their similarly credentialed white peers to receive government grants for research projects. And it seems that facing a lifetime of racism leaves African Americans vulnerable to developing stress-related health issues that can lead to chronic issues later in life.

Let's be clear: systemic racism is a corrosive and widespread problem in our society, and we all need to do a better job of confronting it-in our towns, in our neighborhoods, and in ourselves.

Want to be part of the solution? Here's how you can take action:

Watch the totally amazing video below from our friends at Demos about the roots of systemic racism

Start a conversation. Once you know the truth, it's hard to keep it to yourself. So tell a friend, a sibling, a roommate, your kooky uncle...that systemic racism is real, and we all need to be fighting to end it.

Recent Articles

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Yes, systemic racism is real. And people of color - African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other minorities - face it every day. We still have a lot of work to do, America. The good news: by speaking up about it, you can be part of the solution.

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How fashion was built and structures that still are enforced   today  

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How fashion was built and structures that still are enforced   today  

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It’s Time to End Racism in the Fashion Industry. But How? (Published 2020)

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Everyone thinks the industry needs to change. They don’t yet agree on how.

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Black lives matter and the effects it had on the industry

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They might seem like disparate worlds, but throughout history, fashion and political activism have gone together. Campaigners have long recognised and wielded the power of clothes, from the suffragettes sweeping through the streets in white dresses to their second-wave sisters famously binning their bras. However, no group has better understood how to channel personal style for political gains than the Black Panthers, the radical political party formed during the US civil rights movement, known for its instantly recognisable military-like uniform. The group's signature black beret held particular symbolic weight - co-founder Huey Newton was said to have been inspired to wear it by a film about French Resistance fighters. He described the party's accessory of choice as "an international hat for the revolutionary".
More like this:
- The birth of Black is Beautiful

- The clothes that shook the world

- A new way of living and dressing

The worldwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd earlier in 2020 have sparked renewed interest in the Black Panther Party and its dress codes, as campaigners today look to movements of the past. British Vogue's September issue, which was dedicated to "activism now", saw supermodel Adwoa Aboah appear on the front cover dressed all in black, her beret a clear nod to the Panthers, while dancer and presenter Ashley Banjo later appeared in British GQ in a similar outfit. At marches too, protestors could be spotted in clothes that harked back to those worn by the likes of Fred Hampton and Kathleen Cleaver.

This revival of the Black Panther look not only points to an embrace of the more radical politics that the party championed, but also an understanding of how clothes can be used to further the cause. "When you see Black Panther Party members in the all-black ensembles, it sends this message of unity as well as conveying a powerful statement through photography," fashion historian Darnell-Jamal Lisby tells BBC Culture. "It's similar to the suffragettes... Everyone was fully aware of the impact."

Fifty-four years on from the party's founding, amid scenes of police brutality that are eerily reminiscent of the 1960s, the sense of urgency among black people has been encapsulated in the slogan T-shirt, in some ways the unofficial uniform of today's activist. In 2020, celebrities and athletes have joined grassroots campaigners in sporting shirts emblazoned with punchy, powerful statements: basketball star LeBron James in "I Can't Breathe"; actor Sterling K Brown in "BLM" and a Black Power fist; racing driver Lewis Hamilton demanding that authorities "Arrest The Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor"; British football teams in various anti-racist slogan T-shirts.

While clothes have long been viewed as a tool for communication, the BLM slogan T-shirt eschews subtlety, delivering its message instead with blunt conviction. For some, it's simply a show of solidarity; for others, it's about forcing people to face up to the pressing issues, using whatever platform you might have. "[Slogan T-shirts] can be worn in day-to-day life - the protest can resonate not only during a march but also when you're at a grocery store or getting your hair cut," says Lisby.

Even for those who consider what they wear to be entirely apolitical, the huge international industry behind our clothes has long been tied up with wider issues, from workers' rights to the climate crisis. And this year, the ripple effect of George Floyd's killing forced the fashion industry - like many others - to respond. Not long after protests erupted in Minneapolis and spread like wildfire, brands rushed to express their support, releasing statements, announcing donations to bail funds, and selling slogan T-shirts. Probing the role they may have played in upholding - and often perpetuating - structural racism, however, has proven somewhat trickier.

After years of glacial progress, a number of initiatives striving to tackle racism in fashion have sprung up within months. Among them is the Black in Fashion Council, launched in July by Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner and fashion publicist Sandrine Charles, with a mission to "represent and secure the advancement of black individuals in the fashion and beauty industry". In a widely shared article edited by Wagner for The Cut in 2018, dozens of black people working in fashion spoke of micro-aggressions, fetishisation, tokenism and difficulties ascending the career ladder.
Long-lasting change
"Fashion is very elitist, and people tend to get employed when they look like the people that are already in those positions," says Bemi Shaw, a London-based stylist who has worked on photo shoots with stars such as singer-songwriter Jorja Smith and designer Victoria Beckham. Before this year, much of the conversation around race within fashion was centred on the need for more diverse models - the most visible faces of the industry, albeit not the ones pulling the levers of power. Through its directory of black editors, stylists and executives, as well as its equality index that scores companies on inclusivity, the Black in Fashion Council is striving to shake up an industry that still favours those who are thin, wealthy and white.

While some of fashion's most prestigious brands are now scrambling to save face, British Vogue has emerged as a beacon for the industry. When Edward Enninful, the son of Ghanaian immigrants and the first black editor-in-chief in the magazine's history, took the helm in 2017, he spoke of his desire for his Vogue to be inclusive - the previous editor had drawn criticism for the dearth of black cover stars and an all-white workforce.

Alongside the magazine's September issue that spotlighted black activists, 2020 alone has seen cover stars including Serena Williams, Rihanna, Beyoncé and Lupita Nyong'o. The Vogue website offered extensive coverage of the protests, and now has a dedicated anti-racism section, while people of colour make up a quarter of staff. As Diana Evans writes in her profile of Enninful for Time, "British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform".

Attuned to the importance of capturing their increasingly diverse cover stars outside of a white gaze, British Vogue has also begun commissioning black fashion photographers, who, until recently, had been virtually invisible. (In December 2018, Nadine Ijewere became the first black woman to shoot the cover of any Vogue, ever.) This year, Enninful and his team have tapped lesser-known names like Misan Harriman, who captured some of the defining images of the London protests, as well as 21-year-old Kennedi Carter, whose work seeks to highlight the "overlooked beauties of the black experience".

In an industry that still suffers from 'snowy peaks', uplifting black creatives in fashion often means taking the time to seek out and nurture new talent, rather than relying on the usual go-to names. "It's just about not being lazy, because there is so much talent out there," says Shaw. "Where we stand in fashion at the moment, it's so stagnant because it's the same eight people doing the same thing over and over again."

Shaw herself is keen to pay it forward in her own work by championing black designers too. "I love when I get an editorial opportunity and I can put people on that wouldn't necessarily have got that light to shine," she tells BBC Culture. This year, designers who'd long been overlooked have suddenly been thrust into the spotlight as the Black Lives Matter movement encouraged the support of black-owned businesses. In the US, accessories designer Aurora James launched the 15 Percent Pledge, asking retailers to ensure 15% of their stock come from black-owned brands, in line with the African-American population.

Fashion buyers who commit to the pledge have a growing contingent to pick from, among them CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winners Christopher John Rogers and Kerby Jean Raymond. Many of these designers are not just creating beautiful clothes, but rewriting the rules of luxury altogether, shunning elitist, Eurocentric ideals. Jewellery designer Jameel Mohammed's pieces draw inspiration from West African masks and the horns of Kenyan cattle, while Telfar Clemens's accessibly priced 'Bushwick Birkin' has shown that an It-bag needn't be exclusive.

2020 has undoubtedly felt like a watershed moment. But fashion is a famously fickle industry, and the sudden rush to stand against racism after decades of helping perpetuate it has left many sceptical. "Honestly, I didn't keep up with it because so much of it felt so deeply performative," says Aja Barber, a fashion activist whose work focuses on making the industry more inclusive and sustainable. "Black Lives Matter has been a movement for years. Why is it only socially 'acceptable' now?" Likewise, there have been debates around the role of T-shirt activism, seen by some as an exercise in 'virtue signalling' that allows one to outwardly express solidarity while doing little to effect real change. (Breonna Taylor's killers were not charged over her death, and the once-ubiquitous slogan tee about her has now been consigned to the back of the wardrobe.)

As 2020 draws to a close, and #BlackLivesMatter is no longer trending, it remains to be seen whether fashion's support for the movement goes beyond publicity statements and politically charged T-shirts. As Barber succinctly puts it: "The fashion landscape will have long-lasting change when power is passed from the hands of those who have traditionally held it to those who have not."

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How Black Lives Matter changed fashion in 2020

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This year protest dressing has made a statement and brought progress, with celebrities and the public alike making a point with their clothing. But is it enough, asks Fedora Abu.

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How brands made effective change during BLM 

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How brands made effective change during BLM 

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seeing effective change or just trends set 

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seeing effective change or just trends set 

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models telling their stories and their perspective in the industry 

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models telling their stories and their perspective in the industry 

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Fashion's silence may have something to do with the systemic racial inequalities it has yet to reckon with. After 13 years in the business, Smalls has seen the discrimination that happens first-hand. Though she's now one of modeling's top stars, she spent years having to convince magazines that she could carry the coveted solo stories that elevate a model to household name status. "I was fighting tooth and nail," she says of her beginnings in the early aughts. "I would see my contemporaries getting those jobs left and right, but the few times I was able to, it was a battle. On the outside, it may have looked easy, but there were a lot of conversations convincing people to give me those opportunities. I had to [prove] that I can hold a story on my own and not share a page." The reluctance of brands to book models of color for fear of alienating white consumers served as an additional hurdle. "I've been up for so many jobs where I was turned down because the client said we're not ready to go in that direction," says Smalls. "Which means they're not ready to shoot a black girl. I've heard those conversations and seen the emails from companies saying, "Yeah, we don't need any more black girls; that position has been filled'."

Compared to the rapid ascent of white models in the mid-aughts, many of whom moved from making their first runway appearance to landing prominent covers in quick succession, Smalls and other models of color faced an uphill battle. "You have the weight of representing a community," she says. "You're working twice as hard just to be seen as an equal so there is no room for mediocrity. I had to always make sure I was giving 120% because it wasn't just on me. If you do something wrong, it reflects on all you represent. I felt that pressure, and it was limiting."

Though she's seen a marked improvement in runway inclusion over the last few years, Smalls feels that much needs to be done when it comes to diversity behind the scenes, both in the boardroom and on set. "[Change] is about having people in the room who look like me. So many times I'm the only person of color in the room, and if there is someone else, it's an assistant, never someone in a position of power," she says. "Fashion needs to open up and forget the existing hierarchies based on who has a relationship with who. All the politics of working within this industry need to be thrown out because they aren't working. We can't just go back to the way things used to be because it has never been fair."

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Joan Smalls Takes a Stand for Black Lives Matter

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Fashion's silence may have something to do with the systemic racial inequalities it has yet to reckon with. After 13 years in the business, Smalls has seen the discrimination that happens first-hand. Though she's now one of modeling's top stars, she spent years having to convince magazines that she could carry the coveted solo stories that elevate a model to household name status.

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It's been a little over a week since the 2022 Academy Awards, and while I did not watch the ceremony, I did watch the red carpet coverage.

I love red carpets; I always enjoy seeing who the classicists, the innovators, and of course, the fashion victims will be each year. In addition to being an interactive runway, the red carpet is also a venue for celebrities to make political statements. This year, a number of stars sported blue #WithRefugees ribbons in solidarity with the victims of the Ukrainian invasion. In addition to overt political messaging, some attendees made subtle political statements through the designers they chose to wear. While big-name brands like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Valentino dominated the red carpet, a few nominees appeared in clothes from lesser-known designers of color.

After the racial reckoning the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences faced due to the inequities in its nomination process, there has been a growing awareness of racial issues in media and celebrity culture at large. Despite a newfound consciousness of the necessity of prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion in all realms, there is still work to be done. At the 2018 American Music Awards, actress Tracee Ellis Ross chose to wear clothes designed solely by Black fashion designers, in order to raise the profile of Black-owned brands and to highlight the marginalization and erasure of Black designers in the fashion industry.

At this year's Academy Awards, a small minority of nominees appeared in outfits produced by Black designers. When I was brainstorming this piece, I was planning to write specifically about the black clothes made by Black designers on the Oscars red carpet. However, I was shocked by the relative absence of Black-owned brands from the scene. After sifting through six digests of red carpet looks, I was able to identify only seven (out of more than 100) attendees whose looks were produced by Black designers. While representation of Black celebrities at awards shows has improved substantially, it is essential to prioritize increasing representation of people of color in surrounding industries as well: fashion, beauty, styling, journalism, and more.

Will Packer, producer of this year's Oscars, appeared on the red carpet with his wife, actress Heather Packer. He wore a gold tuxedo jacket with black accents by Hideoki Bespoke, while she wore a Jovana Louis emerald green strapless dress with an oversized bow adorning the back. Hideoki Bespoke's founder Diedrick Thomas specializes in custom tailoring, and has designed looks for T.I., Gucci Mane, and Steve Harvey, among others. In his role as producer, Packer hired the show's first all-Black production team and partnered with Black-owned brands for many elements of the ceremony. He says the decision to attend the event wearing clothes by Black designers was intentional, as he hopes to increase exposure for Black brands.

In 2019, costume designer Ruth E. Carter (best known for her work on Black Panther) became the first Black designer to win an Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Carter attended the event in a sculptural ensemble by Jovana Louis, which featured a black and white mermaid gown, and a white jacket with hyper-modern circular sleeves. The brand, founded by Haitian-born fashion designer Jovana Louis Benoit, creates high-quality ready-to-wear couture garments that are intended to fit women with curves. Actress Niecy Nash and her wife, singer Jessica Betts, both appeared in outfits by luxury athleisure brand Richfresh. Actor David Oyelowo wore a yellow and black printed suit by the Los Angeles-based African-inspired fashion brand Kutula.

I both love and study fashion, but sadly, I can only name a few Black fashion designers. While racial diversity of models in the fashion industry has improved substantially over the last decade, there is still a disappointing lack of representation of Black designers and brands. In 2021, Pyer Moss' Kerby Jean-Raymond became the first Black American designer to be admitted to the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the Parisian governing body of the haute couture industry. Only 4 percent of the members of the Council of Fashion Designers, the primary trade association for fashion designers in the U.S., are Black. The organization is currently working to improve diversity in the fashion industry through an in-house employment placement program that is intended to place Black talent in the fashion industry, as well as through educational programs that center equity and inclusion.

Fashion is the way we express parts of our identities to the world. Our garments reflect our cultural backgrounds, ethnic origins, gender identities, and generally, our approaches to navigating our environments. Improving diversity in the fashion industry means creating more every single person to find a way to express their unique stories and lives through the garments that are available to them.

Red carpets are inspiring to me, because in their extravagance, they have the potential to be an especially open forum for self-expression. Events like the Oscars, the Grammys, and the Met Gala are opportunities for visibility for so many people who feel represented by the celebrities and artists who attend them. As Jonathan Michael Square, scholar of fashion and visual culture in the African Diaspora explains in his fashion and justice course, clothing is a way for marginalized people to understand their place in the world and gain access, visibility, and power. Uplifting and supporting fashion designers of color means creating more opportunities for all marginalized people to utilize clothing to define their place in the world.

Onyx E. Ewa '24 is an Art, Film, and Visual Studies concentrator in Winthrop House. Their column "All Black Everything" appears on alternate Thursdays.

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Why Are There So Few Black Fashion Designers at the Oscars? | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson

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It's been a little over a week since the 2022 Academy Awards, and while I did not watch the ceremony, I did watch the red carpet coverage. I love red carpets; I always enjoy seeing who the classicists, the innovators, and of course, the fashion victims will be each year.

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The iconic images of past protest movements bear at least one thing out: that dress is as much a political statement as a fashion one.

In each iteration of the ongoing movement for civil rights, Black people have strategically embraced certain styles in moments of protest, knowing full well fashion's power to communicate distinct messages in the battle to shift American public consciousness on matters of race - whatever message the moment called for.

These moments, as writer and image activist Michaela Angela Davis puts it, mark "the intersection of Blackness, fashion, politics and justice."

From the suits of the Civil Rights movement of the '50s and '60s, when respectability politics took precedence, to the power uniform of the Black Panther era in the '70s and the statement Ts that have outfitted the Black Lives Matter movement, it's hard to separate the symbolism of the clothing from the sentiment of the time.

"Style is a language and reflects history just like any other sort of visual medium," Davis said. "And what's interesting now in the movement for Black lives, what's clear now is within this complexity of Blackness and the complexity of the society and particularly the complexity of Black existence in America, it's reflected in this movement, in the look of this movement because it's so diverse. We can't pinpoint the same kind of items."

While the "look" that defines today's movement may be less distinct, the message has been about ensuring diversity is accepted, embraced and empowered. It's why, as Davis explained, "now we can have Billy Porter at a Black Lives Matter march with a ballgown on...so I think [it's about] having this power in individuality."

When the Civil Rights era began, however, those in the fight needed their clothing to send a different message.
Civil Suits
That message was one of respectability, one that intended to elevate the Black community in the eyes of the greater public. And the rallies and marches that took place in this period of respectability politics saw people pulling out their Sunday best.

"Any Civil Rights movement of that time, respectability and dignity was paramount," Davis said. "Often they would wear church clothes, women with dresses and proper shoes [men in suits and ties] - and everyone had hard shoes, there were no Nikes. Everyone was dressed to promote dignity."

That sense of dressing for dignity was part of the Black experience, both inside and outside of a protest or movement.

"Black folks just like to look good in general," Davis said, "There's this inherent sense of style, because your body was probably the one small piece of real estate, you had some kind of faculty over and some kind of agency. And even then, you didn't, because your body could be beaten and pummeled."

What the collective community understood, as well, she said, was how powerful their appearance would be in shaping the narrative around what was happening in America.

"All of the movements were very savvy around media, that they were creating images that would tell the story, and the horror and the brutality that was illustrated in such a way, like when you are brutally beating a man in a suit, when you're brutally beating a young girl in an A-line skirt...the juxtaposition of violence and elegance was very intentional and very powerful," Davis said. "We see pictures of Martin Luther King in a perp walk in a proper hat with his brim tilted just to the right side. His tie was always straight....Even watching when John Lewis was being honored and we kept seeing the reel of them walking over the [Edmund] Pettus Bridge, the crispness of his trenchcoat and the white shirt and his tie, even his backpack, knowing that he would probably get bloodied by the police, but there was a respectability to it, like they could have been walking to church."

The aesthetics of the period spoke to being non-threatening at a time when Black people could, more easily than now, be beaten or jailed for their mere existence.

"There were different cultural norms and that era definitely embraced what was happening with the times," said Eulanda Sanders, a professor of textiles and clothing, and chair of the Department of Apparel, Events, and Hospitality Management at Iowa State University, who has focused on symbolic meanings of Black appearance. Leaders of the movement, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, as well as Malcolm X and others, she said, drove home the need for respectability to stay the course in the struggle for social justice, and they were outfitted accordingly. "That's how they used fashion to navigate the change that was needed during that time."
Leather's Power
When the Black Panther Party entered the scene, however, the conversation shifted and so did the clothing. Then, with some in the Black community grown weary from politely asking for human rights, the movement became about power and self-defense. And the party's uniform artfully addressed each.

The Black Panther Party, a political organization founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, adopted a uniform for the fight to challenge police brutality: blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets and black berets.

"It was an evolution of the respectability," Davis said. "It was rebellious but also very, very intentional."

The look tapped into the toughness and counter culture connotation that came with leather, and drew on the beret's history as a component of military uniforms.

"They took it to another level of very military-oriented, Black power, black clothing, black leather, very much sending a different message...[it] was using appearance to help tell a message that change was being demanded," Sanders said. "It definitely wasn't assimilation into the culture, it wasn't trying to parallel the appearance with cultural norms. It was a direct way of pushing back against the cultural norms visually, through body, dress, appearance."

The color black, in the Panther era of the '60s and '70s, was being reclaimed as power and pride, as beauty, refuting the stigma of black as bad. That's when the mantras "Black power" and "Black is beautiful" began to surface. And that's when the natural hair movement got underway, with the afro becoming a statement of its own. Rules dictating that only certain looks or behaviors were "right" were abandoned.

"To say 'Black is beautiful' was disruptive, to say 'Black power' was disruptive and their look reflected that. Those beautiful afros; shiny, glowing, radiant skin; hoop earrings - was very intentional, not overdone, not complicated. It was chic," Davis said. "Often people think all Black people look alike, so if you dress alike, it's harder to also single you out, pick you out, pick you off. So there was power and protection in those black trenchcoats, in those black A-line dresses, in the turtlenecks - the silhouette is iconic. And then you put a beret on top of an afro...they were promoting that they were organized, that they were powerful and it was badass."

What the Panthers were communicating with their fashion was a duality of being both radical and regimented, of being determined to solidify civil rights, but also disciplined.

"They were kind of the antithesis of Martin Luther King...it's an interesting tension because in many ways they were so radical but then their clothing was...so uniform, it was so regimented," said Mikaila Brown, fashion anthropologist and professor at Cornell University. "So it was a straddle...it's this cognitive dissonance that most African Americans feel of, 'I can only give you so much of who I am, where I've got to balance it a little bit in order for you to accept me.' That really served the community because [the Panthers] were feeding people and they were organizing in really disciplined ways but then they were also so radical because they were Black men walking in the street with guns in the face of police. That duality is amazing and I think it's just exemplary of the dual psyche that Black people have to have sometimes to operate in America."

What's more, as Davis explained, the look also represented a "cleanliness" against the backdrop of the Hippie movement happening around the same time, which saw an embrace of freedom, at times to the extent of rebelling against dominant norms around personal appearance and hygiene.

"It was never glamorous or fun to be grungy or a hippie because you weren't rebelling against wealth and privilege, because we didn't get that s-t yet. The Black Panther look was a sharp contrast to sort of the white Hippie movement," she said. "We're also watching the society get more complex, so the visual style response was reaching to that...[and] I believe the Panthers, like the Civil Rights movement, knew that they were making iconic images. They were defining a time, they were creating iconography. And I think that's a very African impulse to the idea of symbolism and iconography and using one's body and hair to communicate, political and spiritual messages."
Statement Ts Matter
Today, iconography feeds into the power of social media, too, and that's why the statement T may be the defining apparel item of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"Again, the culture is very aware of images and media, and this is the movement of social media. So, if you're in a crowd and you have a T-shirt that says, 'Black Lives Matter' or 'Naw' or 'Phenomenal Woman' or 'Black Girls Rock' or any of these sort of message T-shirts, you're communicating very quickly very efficiently, what your position is," Davis said.

That the fight for civil rights was reinvigorated after the police killing of George Floyd at the end of May 2020 - in the midst of a pandemic that has greatly altered day-to-day life and dress for a sizable swath of the population - had its influence on the movement, too.

It's, as Sanders explained, "much more casualwear that's then represented all over social media in a variety of ways...that's what people are wearing because they're at home most of the time. But it's also just the more casual view of fashion, and it's very accessible to a wide variety of people as a T-shirt is generally cheaper to buy." Or, in some cases, create - many of the T-shirts worn by protesters bore slogans or messages they wrote themselves.

The Black Lives Matter protests that started last summer and stretched on for months across the U.S. and throughout the world saw the proliferation of the statement T, the statement hoodie, the statement jean jacket and, in a specific nod to the iconography of the moment, the statement face mask.

"The cool thing about BLM is that it's the intersection between a streetwear trend and BLM, so it's going to be much more casual," Brown said. "Were we going to have Black people wearing suits in the same way that we did in the '60s? No. Because people aren't wearing suits every day like that besides Dapper Dandies. I also think it speaks to this break from respectability politics, this kind of 'take me as I am; if you will only listen to me when I wear a suit then I don't want you to listen to me at all.'"

It's also a symbol of clothing that addresses a collective feeling of not being heard, she said. The movement for Black civil rights isn't a new one, despite the seemingly new awareness among the greater public in the country.

"It's very much a response of, we've been screaming into the void and you haven't been listening to us, so I'm just going to put it on my clothing so you know where I stand. Even if you don't want to listen to me...I'm already talking to you. I'm making a statement right away," Brown said. "So, in many ways, I feel like even in conjunction with social media, underrepresented communities have a voice like they never have before."

The population that poured into the streets to proclaim that Black Lives Matter used that voice - and all colors of the rainbow - to support racial equality, gender equality and, broadly, a more inclusive nation.

"In contrast to wearing all black for power and safety, I think having individuality is what this moment is about," Davis said. "It's also very powerful to be queer and trans and clear about that. That kind of individuality was not prevalent in these other two movements."

Today, though Black people are still being unjustly killed and police violence remains a very real issue, there's a greater sense of confidence in asserting individuality, whether through articulation or appearance.

"These are all liberation movements," Davis said. "And I'm seeing that as a sign of progression that you're allowed to have face piercings, or tattoos, that you're not as afraid to be who you say you are and explore your Blackness in such an unapologetic way I think is also a big leap. The respectability and the dignity before were very uniform compared to this moment where you can have any look, that you can be so radical in your beauty, and radical meaning not that it's so othered but that it's signature and singular and I think that's really what's happening in this moment."

Adding to that, Brown said, "We're not censoring ourselves, we're not censoring our words, we're not censoring our clothing."

While the Black Panther movement may have been the contrast to the Hippie one, the Black Lives Matter movement provided stark contrast to the Capitol insurrection in January and drew into clear focus the disparity between how different groups are treated in the U.S. - no matter how they're outfitted for the effort.

The "costume of white supremacy" as Brown referred to it, drew on the red, white and blue of the American (and even, in a few cases, Confederate) flag, the MAGA hat and clothing for combat, like military boots and camo cargo pants. Viking headdresses and fur caps served as some standouts. "In their mind, this is what America is and that shone through their clothing, like I'm not America, you're not America, they're America," she said.

"It's such an affront. And there's a uniformity in what they're doing - everything has 'Trump' on it, there's the MAGA hat - they're connecting iconography, too," Davis added. "[But] this is not fighting for their lives...there's no point, there's no destination, it's just railing against evolution and you're always going to look tacky and left behind."

The outfits of "the hunter-gatherer set" as the Capitol rioters have been called, did not, in Sanders' opinion, reflect the same level of collective intentionality.

"That's also part of the intentionality that Blacks have used with protesting. You want to be taken seriously, so you know that you need to appear serious or send a collective message, so there's some uniformity in that visual message," she said. "Blacks have been personal branding for a long time and using that either through the Civil Rights movement, Black Panthers, now....In all of [the movements] there's been conscious decisions to use fashion and appearance to help move the movement, to help support the movement because I think that's something Black people have always realized, and that's appearance matters."
This feature is the first in a series WWD will roll out over Black History Month, exploring decades of fashion, culture and beauty and the impacts and influences of each.

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Dress and Protest: Fashion Hasn't Been a Bystander in the Black Civil Rights Movement

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The iconic images of past protest movements bear at least one thing out: that dress is as much a political statement as a fashion one. In each iteration of the ongoing movement for civil rights, Black people have strategically embraced certain styles in moments of protest, knowing full well fashion's power to communicate distinct messages in the battle to shift American public consciousness on matters of race - whatever message the moment called for.

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The Fashion World Promised More Diversity. Here’s What We Found. (Published 2021)

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Tracking an industry where Black representation has been rare.

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Black fashion professionals still face widespread discrimination, according to new report

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The Black in Fashion Council Human Rights Campaign has published its findings

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Fashion could do a lot more to make change but because certain structures are in place they do not do enough to break down old fashion barriers for people of colour more people in higher positions are still white and they dictate what is popular

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How fashion responds and tries to make effective change effects how society sees Black people and it gives them hope and opportunities

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How Black beauty can be treated like a trend and they can be ignored and pushed out of the fashion industry

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Is it just me or are waistlines on women's jeans getting really low these days? I also saw a lot more bucket hats around this summer and those velour tracksuits, they're back too. 2022 fashion is really feeling kind of Y2K. It's not just clothing trends. Recent headline declared, "Bye-bye booty, heroin chic is back." Excuse me, heroin chic.

Sabrina Strings: It refers quite simply to the thin ideal. My name is Sabrina Strings. I am a chancellor's fellow and associate professor of sociology at the University of California Irvine.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I sat down with Professor Strings to find out what's behind this sudden declaration that ultra-thin is back in.

Sabrina Strings: This term heroin chic was popular in the 1990s because it was a time period in which the ultra-skinny ideal was making it's so-called return after the 1960s, where we had Twiggy and then there was a brief moment of slightly more voluptuous women in the '70s and '80s, but the '90s was the firm stamp of going back to being so thin it could look like you were addicted to heroin.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For real? Who gets to say what's in and what's out? What do we mean when we say something is in or out of fashion as a body type?

Sabrina Strings: Largely, what people are doing is looking at trends that might be cropping up for a limited amount of time in which women can be slightly thicker. You can have a little bit more weight on your thighs, a little bit more weight in the backside, the chest, but you dare not carry weight in your waist. One of the main things to keep in mind about this trend is that thinness has never not been in fashion in the United States going back to its founding. When people talk about, "Oh, curvaceousness is in," they're not in any way capable of suggesting that thin has ever been out because it is not.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Two decades ago, some researchers were suggesting that ideals of thinness only had a negative effect on white adolescents because young Latinas and Black girls felt less pressure to conform to social norms about body size, but your work really questions that, right?

Sabrina Strings: This is absolutely right. When we look at the history of the thin ideal, it began in Western Europe as a way of adjudicating who should be a top or racial hierarchy, one that they themselves had just constructed. You might not be surprised to realize that as they were trying to identify, "Who has the right to command control over the entire globe and colonization? We think it should be Europeans."

How do we know that Europeans should have the right to control others? Well, their argument was, "Well, we have the most control over ourselves. We have control over our sensuous appetites. We don't overeat and we don't have too much sex. That's why," this is their argument, that they believe that they had fewer venereal diseases and it's also why they were more thin. This is how thinness became part and parcel of what it meant to be a white person just at the time in which whiteness was being articulated in the Western world.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Wait, wait, wait. You got to pause for a second. First of all, that was deep, but also, I'm realizing that what you're talking about here, when you're talking about an era of imperial expansion, are you telling me heroin chic was in in the 18th century?

Sabrina Strings: That's exactly what I'm saying. Obviously, they wouldn't have called it heroin chic the way that we call it today, but of course, when we're even looking back at the 1950s, what we consider thick, Marilyn Monroe would've been considered thick. She wouldn't have called herself that. It's like we have new terms to describe an old phenomenon, and absolutely the thin ideal started in the 18th century.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When we come back, Professor Strings is going to take us all the way back to the 18th century. It's The Takeaway. [silence] It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and I'm still with Professor Sabrina Strings, who's talking with us about the ultra-thin beauty standards in contemporary fashion and media. These ideals may be on trend, but they have a long history.

Sabrina Strings: At the dawn of the slave trade, actually, when a lot of the colonists, this was around about the 15th century, were heading to various parts of Africa, they were actually very impressed with African women's figures. They were so excited because this was a time in which voluptuousness was also in in Western Europe. Over time, as they were trying to provide new and different rationales for slavery, they started to build up the qualities and characteristics that they claimed were associated with whiteness. Part of what they were arguing is that, "White people, we have an inherent sense of rationality and self-control that people of color lack, especially those folks in Africa."

They took a body type that they once valorized and then they claimed, "This is evidence of inferiority," because when a person is voluptuous, we think that they are overeating. Now, we today, of course, know that your body size and how much you eat and how much you exercise, there's no direct link between those things. A person like Lizzo, who is vegan and works her ass off for her shows could still be a fat person.

Obviously, she's also still a beautiful person, but she's never going to be thin, and that's completely fine. The point is there is this misconception that is rooted actually in colonial politics that suggests that if you are a thin person, it's because you have discipline and self-control. If you are fat, you are out of control. The argument was that Black people are more likely to be fat and therefore undisciplined.

There's one person, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and she made that exact claim. She was an English aristocrat in the 18th century and she wrote a book that became popular in the US in the 19th century, in which she talked about the importance of upholding a particular racial bodily standard. She was extremely [unintelligible 00:06:31]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is there any connection between this ultra-thin model ideal of a body reemerging at the same time that the capacity to control our bodies through access to abortion has fallen?

Sabrina Strings: I think that that's absolutely the case. When we think about women having bodily autonomy, we often think about questions of reproductive justice and we often assume that we're moving in one direction to women having more and more bodily autonomy. That's not at all the case, just like it's not the case with concerns of fat liberation.

Throughout American history, what we've seen is that white men overwhelmingly have been working to identify what kind of woman they want to be able to see out in the world. Part of the argument, especially in the early parts of the 20th century in this country was that we want to make sure that the white women that we are looking at are the kinds of white women that we want to see.

We want to encourage white women in particular to have the right type of body for their racial identity, not for nothing, there were plenty of white women who were all too happy to oblige because they too wanted to prove their racial superiority. There's a clear connection between white men being in positions of power and authority telling women, "Hey, we want you to look a particular way, and also, we want your bodies to serve as a particular instrument for our own reproduction," such that women are constantly having to try to mold themselves in order to fit the demands of a cis white heteropatriarchy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering if trans women help us to push back against these narratives of how a body is meant to look when it is a woman's body or if there is so much social, as many trans women talk about, pressure to pass, to be clear based on, oftentimes, safety, right?

Sabrina Strings: Oh, yes. You can hear people like Janet Mock talking eloquently about her experience because on the one hand, she is considered beautiful in the mainstream. I think that very few people would contest her beauty, but this is also her entree into the mass society, because in reality, even as beautiful as she is, she constantly gets questions about her genitalia. These questions are intended to interrogate whether or not she is a real woman. There is this expectation that women's bodies conform to a very narrow ideal of what it means to be a woman, and not for nothing, even cis-Black women fall outside of that routinely.

There have been a number of scholars, and I'm thinking about C. Riley Snorton, for example, who have articulated all of the ways in which Black women's bodies are treated as flesh. Our bodies are treated as vailable, as not worthy of reproduction, even as white women are told they must be reproducing. There are all of these ways in which our femininity is removed by the fact that we are not white.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How do we push back? Both individually and collectively, how do you engage in going to the store or buy something fashionable or rearing a daughter, cis or trans daughter, in ways that affirm the realities of one's body?

Sabrina Strings: I'm so glad that you brought up families, because frequently, families are the first place in which we are learning problematic and toxic orientations to our own bodies. I know, and I've listened to so many people like Lindy West talk about this type of issue, which is that frequently in many families, especially in white families, mothers are trying to encourage their daughters to lose weight.

In Jeanette McCarty's recent autobiography that has just been everywhere, one of the things that she reveals is that her mother was anorexic and her mother was so proud when she saw her also developing her anorexia. If we as women can reject the notion that we should be inculcating our daughters with the very same toxic messages that we received as youth, we will be going in a great direction to undoing a lot of this harm because women are, unfortunately, quite frequently perpetuating this harm against other women.

There's another place where I think we need to truly address the harm of fat phobia, and that is within the medical industry. I do a lot of work surrounding the non-reality of body mass index or BMI, and I think we need a lot more people to address the medical field in the toxic way in which they reproduce bad stigma.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's talk a little bit about BMI since you've taken us there. What in the world do you mean that it's not real?

Sabrina Strings: Body mass index started out as something called the Quetelet Index. It was developed in the 19th century by a Belgian statistician. He was not in any way interested in trying to identify the relationship between fat and health. Instead, he just wanted to have a general way of understanding the distribution of weight across the population.

Fast forward to the 1970s in the United States, and one prominent physician, a white man by the man of Ancel Keys, said to himself, "We need a way of figuring out the relationship between fat and health. Let's use body mass index," which is what he was calling it now, but it was the Quetelet Index. He is like, "Okay, this is actually an arbitrary way of measuring the relationship between fat and health, but it's no less arbitrary than the existing industry standard weight tables we've got. We would be the ones having control over the body of mass index biomarkers."

Over time, they were just creating different random categories for what constituted underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese. We can see over the course of the 1970s through the 1990s, this attempt to identify, again, with very limited science, what constituted a healthy weight. What can explain the fact that they have seen assaults on the very concept of BMI for 15 years at least from places like Nate Silver's blog FiveThirtyEight, from places like NPR, from scholars such as myself and a plethora of other journalists who have pointed out that it cannot differentiate between muscle and fats?

It does not take into consideration bone density, genetics, culture, tradition, none of that. All that it tells you is some phony number that we have to interpret as human beings. We have done that in ways that reify colonial science. BMI is an extraordinarily harmful measure. One other really important thing that people don't often talk about but that absolutely needs to be stated is that there is no such thing as an obesity epidemic if BMI does not exist.

Melissa Harris-Perry: See, I keep thinking the interview's over, but you're going to have to walk me through that one.

[laughs]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Come on. If I watch even 10 minutes of evening news, they're going to tell me how unhealthy Americans are and tell me that there's an obesity epidemic. What do you mean there's not an obesity epidemic?

Sabrina Strings: Obesity is defined as a body mass index of 30 or greater. As we've already discussed, BMI is a completely phony measure of the relationship between weight and health. Without BMI, they have no mechanism of claiming that two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, and one-third are technically, according to them, obese. How would they be able to make these claims without this faulty measure that acts as a drag net for all human beings telling them exactly what they must weigh to be healthy? No, there is no way that they could make the claim that there is a so-called epidemic without relying on a faulty tool rooted in colorblind racism.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Sabrina Strings is the chancellor's fellow and associate professor of sociology at the University of California Irvine. She's also author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. Professor Strings, thank you for joining us.

Sabrina Strings: It's been my pleasure.
Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio's programming is the audio record. terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

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"Heroin Chic": How Racism Created the Thin Ideal | The Takeaway | WNYC Studios

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Is it just me or are waistlines on women's jeans getting really low these days? I also saw a lot more bucket hats around this summer and those velour tracksuits, they're back too. 2022 fashion is really feeling kind of Y2K.

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How have black people fought against Systemic racism ? 

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How have black people fought against Systemic racism ? 

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80s and 90s was a highlight for black beauty

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by SHOWstudio on 22 October 2021

From iconic runway moments to culture as a dirty word, our new must-watch TikTok series spotlights black excellence in fashion history.

From iconic runway moments to culture as a dirty word, our new must-watch TikTok series spotlights black excellence in fashion history.

Mainstream fashion history is a whitewashed affair, just take Ozwald Boateng's tenure at Givenchy or Patrick Robinson's role in creating Giorgio Armani's era-defining power suits. Meet the reputable creatives not usually considered in big picture fashion conversations in our must-watch series of videos on TikTok and feature below. Taking the notion that sometimes the less obvious is the most obvious, we spotlight the impact of names you should know if you're really serious about fashion history and the industry we occupy today. Fashion critic M-C Hill plays host, introducing viewers to an allegiance of talent in his own unique way across the four chapters Catwalk, Notes on Beauty, Black Sass and Culture as a Dirty Word.

Here, we highlight the icons, big and small, who have had a lasting impact.

Fashion Designers

Duro Olowu is a Nigerian-born British fashion designer and curator best known for his innovative combinations of patterns and textiles that draw inspiration from his international background. In 2004, Olowu launched his eponymous womenswear label. An empire-waist multi print silk dress from his debut S/S 05 collection became the dress of the year when editor Sally Singer featured it in the pages of American Vogue, and was helmed as the 'Duro Dress'. In 2005, Olowu won the New Designer of the Year Award at the British Fashion Awards, making him the only designer to do so prior to their first catwalk show. In early 2020, Olowu curated Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, marking the first time the museum hired a guest art curator throughout its history.

Andre Walker, the New York-born fashion designer, has been a prolific force in the industry for over 30 years. His interest in fashion peaked when he staged a show at aged 15 in 1981 in Brooklyn, which was bought by Patricia Field. His first designs were androgynous jackets and pant-skirts, inspired by his school days in London. His professional career began when he designed for Willi Smith's Williwear in the 1980s, before working for the designer Patrick Kelly in Paris. Designers including Marc Jacobs and Kim Jones have since looked to him for guidance, Virgil Abloh implemented his sketches at Off-White, and Walker has also collaborated with Comme des Garçons."That classicism, that purity and that utilitarian spirit is really what I associate with American fashion."

'America: A Design Lexicon', The Met, Andre Walker

Janelle Monae is an American singer, rapper, and actress. Her career began in 2003 and has since led the star to receive eight Grammy Award nominations while winning an MTV Video Music Award and the ASCAP Vanguard Award. Monae was also honoured with the Billboard Women in Music Rising Star Award in 2015 and the Trailblazer of the Year Award in 2018. In 2013, Boston City Council announced October 16 as 'Janelle Monáe Day' in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, in recognition of her artistry and social leadership. Monae made her theatrical film debut in 2016, starring in Hidden Figures as NASA mathematician and aerospace engineer Mary Jackson, and also appeared in Barry Jenkins' Moonlight the same year. Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 89th annual ceremony.

Kenneth Ize is a Nigerian designer whose clothes reinterpret traditional West African fabrics and Nigerian craftsmanship. He works from his studio in the suburb of Sabo Yaba in Nigeria with a small team (although some of his garments are produced in Italy). In 2020 he designed a capsule for the Karl Lagerfeld brand. Ize's celebrity fans include Beyoncé, Donald Glover (Childish Gambino), Burma Boy, Naomi Campbell and Anna Wintour.

Lawrence Steele is an American-born, Milan-based designer who is best known for his unapologetically sexy and feminine designs. Steele graduated with a first-class degree in fine art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and after a stint in Tokyo as a design assistant, he moved to Milan and spent five years as a design assistant for Franco Moschino. In 1990, he joined Miuccia Prada and, in 1994, launched his own label of women's clothing which was highly appreciated by clientele including Madonna, Anna Wintour, Oprah Winfrey, Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston. His collaborative projects include costumes for Vanessa Beecroft's VB48 and costumes for Filippo Timi's Don Giovanni with designer Fabio Zambernardi. He worked alongside his partner Francesco Risso at Marni until late last year, before returning to the label Aspesi.

Ozwald Boateng is a British men's fashion designer of Ghanaian heritage, specialising in tailoring. Initially inspired by the suits his father wore when he was young, his Ghanaian heritage has always been at the core of his creative process, fusing this heritage with classic Savile Row tailoring. He first rose to notoriety in the 1980s dressing celebrities including Mick Jagger, before he opened up his first studio on Portobello Road in 1986. A profile in The Face helped to skyrocket his career, and he became the first tailor to hold a runway show at Paris Fashion Week in 1994, before becoming the youngest tailor to open a store on Vigo Street at the end of Saville Row. He was the creative director of menswear at Givenchy from 2003-2005, and has designed costumes for Sex and the City, Ugly Betty and The Matrix.

Patrick Robinson, the American-born fashion designer, launched a surfwear line whilst growing up in Orange County, LA, before heading to study at Parsons School of Design in New York and Paris. While there, he worked for the designer Patrick Kelly as his first assistant. Early on in his career, he resurrected the Giorgio Armani since Le Collezioni, bringing it back to profitability over 4 years. 'Robinson was responsible for many of the Giorgio Armani power suits that female big shots have relied upon when dealmaking and strong-arming,' wrote the Washington Post's Robin Givhan. Later, he took the helm at Anne Klein and was also the head designer for the Gap, creative director at Perry Ellis and Paco Rabanne, before launching the sustainable activewear brand Paskho in 2013. He has been a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) since 1994.

Casely-Hayford is a fashion brand launched by the late British designer Joe Casely-Hayford and his son Charlie Casely-Hayford in 2009. Produced in Japanese factories, the men's and womenswear label takes its cues from bespoke tailoring and contemporary streetwear and ready-to-wear. Joe Casely-Hayford was previously the creative director of Gieves & Hawkes (2005-2008), having launched his own trailblazing tailoring label in 1984. He died in 2019, and his son has run Casely-Hayford since.

MODELS

Jessica White is an American model, actress and director, and executive director of the Angels Wings Foundation - a charity which supports underprivileged children in Thailand. White has starred in campaigns for Chloe and Jean-Paul Gaultier, landed her first gig for Vogue after one week of modelling following a chance meeting with Anna Wintour, W and Harper's Bazaar and walked as a Victoria's Secret Angel in 2001. She openly speaks about struggling with a cocaine addiction as an adolescent, and mental health. She says modelling helped her to escape an abusive home life.

Anok Yai is a South-Sudanese American supermodel and is considered one of her generation's most successful models. Her career rapidly took off in 2017 after being snapped by a photographer while attending Howard University's homecoming, and after quickly going viral, Yai subsequently received thousands of messages from agencies asking to represent her as a model. Since then, Yai has made history by being the second Black model (after Naomi Campbell) to open a Prada show, which she did for the brand's A/W 18 collection showcased in Milan. Yai has also appeared in editorials for British Vogue, Dazed, V Magazine and AnOther Magazine and covered issues of Vogue Italia, CR Fashion Book and W Magazine.

Jourdan Dunn is a British model who, after being scouted aged 15 while on a shopping trip in Primark, signed to The Squad Management in 2006, leading her to quick newly found fame. It was not too long before Dunn made her runway debut in 2007 at New York Fashion Week, and in February 2008, was announced as the first black model to walk for Prada in over a decade; after Naomi Campbell first opened for the house in 1997. Featuring in May 2009's US Vogue as a 'Face of the Moment', Dunn, along with Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevigne, was one of the most prominent models of her era and has appeared on the cover of several Vogue's alongside an extensive roster of other publications. In 2020, Dunn announced she was leaving fashion behind to start a new career in acting.

Jourdan Dunn, 'A Certain Romance' for British Vogue - November 2019, photograph Nick Knight

Pat Cleveland is an American fashion model known for being one of the first African-American models within the fashion industry to achieve prominence as a runway and editorial model. After being scouted by the notable fashion editor Carrie Donovan's assistant in 1966, Vogue profiled Cleveland as an up-and-coming young designer. Ditching her career in design, Cleveland signed to Wilhelmina models at 18 and went on to be photographed by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel and Andy Warhol, among others. After persistent racism, she relocated to Paris in 1971 and soon became a house model for Karl Lagerfeld, vowing not to return to the US until a black model appeared on the American cover of Vogue. During the 1970s, she modelled for designers such as Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler, Diane von Furstenberg and Christian Dior. She also became one of Halston's favoured troupe of models, nicknamed the Halstonettes, and walked in the infamous 1973 Battle of Versailles show, and also had a brief stint as Salvador Dalí's muse.

Bethann Hardison is an American fashion model and activist, and like Pat Cleveland, is well known for being one of the first high profile black models after her appearance at the legendary Battle of Versailles fashion show in 1973. Concerned with the lack of representation in the fashion industry, Hardison later changed her focus from modelling to activism in 1984, starting the Bethann Management Agency to help diversify the fashion industry. In 1988, she also co-founded the Black Girls Coalition with the model Iman to provide advocacy and support to African-American models, and is on the advisory board for the Black In Fashion Council, founded in 2020.

Pat Cleveland, photograph Irving Penn

BEAUTY

Johnnie Sapong is a groomer and hairstylist based in London. He has contributed to top publications including CR Fashion Book, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Numéro, and L'Officiel and has collaborated with high-profile photographers Guy Aroch, Annie Leibovitz, Ellen von Unwerth, Gilles Bensimon, and Steven Meisel.

Sharmadean Reid is an entrepreneur, creative consultant, stylist and the founder of WAH Nails, Beauty Stack and futuregirlcorp. Having graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2007 with first class honours in fashion communication, Reid began styling for i-D, Qvest and Neo. She has published two books on nail art. In 2019, after 10 years, WAH Nails closed so Reid could focus on the salon software management system Beautystack - a platform launched in 2017 for beauty pros working on a mobile or independent basis to women promote their work, promoting women and tech.

STYLISTS

Matthew Josephs is a stylist and creative director who graduated from the BA Fashion Womenswear pathway at Central Saint Martins in 2009. Establishing himself at a young age, Josephs shot his first i-D story with Alasdair McLellan aged 19 and since has emerged as one of London's most talented stylists working with the likes of Dazed, Wonderland, Garage, GQ Style, Vogue Hommes Japan and L'Officiel Homme. Josephs now leads creative direction for the singer FKA Twigs on her videos, campaigns and editorial content.

June Ambrose is a costume designer and stylist responsible for some of the most iconic red carpet and music video fashion moments during the 1990s and early 2000s. During her work with music video director Hype Williams, Ambrose has styled Busta Rhymes, Puff Daddy, and perhaps most famously, Missy Elliot in 'The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)', whom she dressed to cartoonish proportions in a black blow-up suit. In 2020, Ambrose was announced as the new creative director of Puma.

Misa Hylton is a fashion stylist who has had a lasting impact on style in popular culture and hip hop. Hylton emerged as a pioneering force in the 1990s, crafting the looks of Lil' Kim and Mary J. Blige. Remember that MTV VMAs 1999 Lil Kim purple look? Misa Hylton. 2018's Beyonce and Jay-Z Apeshit video? Custom MCM by Hylton. Her career began when she assisted on a Jodeci music video on the request of her boyfriend Sean Combs, who introduced her to artists at Uptown Records. During this time, looks she created for them were replicated by mainstream brands, with no credit given to Hylton and rarely to her clients.'I was not ever asked until recently to come into any luxury fashion house and create, or any photo shoot that was in a high end fashion magazine...I wasn't invited to style it, but our style was being emulated.' In 2012 she opened Misa Hylton Fashion Academy,

Lil Kim at the MTV VMAs 1999, styled by Misa Hylton

Michael Roberts is a British fashion critic who's just about dabbled in every role of the industry's upper echelons, so much so, his role as fashion director at The New Yorker was created explicitly for him. Having tinkered in collage, writing, painting, styling and filmmaking over the years, Roberts' career began over 40 years ago at The Sunday Times. Referred to as 'the Jean Cocteau of the fashion world' in 1997 by Tina Brown, Roberts has held positions as a style editor at The Sunday Times and Vanity Fair and has worked as a design director of British Vogue, contributing editor of Condé Nast Traveler, Paris editor of Vanity Fair and fashion and art director for Tatler.

Patti Wilson is a stylist and fashion consultant from New York City, fashion editor-at-large for Vogue Italia and senior contributing fashion editor for Dazed. Her first story for Vogue Italia was with the photographer David LaChapelle, who brought her on board after a period of working together, after being introduced by their agency. This would be the first project in a long working relationship with the magazine and editor Franca Sozzani. Throughout her career she has worked with some of the most important fashion photographers in the industry, including Steven Klein, Steven Meisel, Sarah Moon, Peter Lindbergh, Patrick Demarchelier, David LaChapelle, Sølve Sundsbø, Nick Knight, Mert and Marcus, and Terry Richardson. Recent projects include working closely with the American designer Halpern.

ARTISTS & IMAGE-MAKERS

Solange Knowles is an American singer, songwriter, performance artist and actress. The younger sister of Beyoncé, Knowles has carved her own space in the industry in recent years, rising to critical acclaim. In 2013, Solange launched Saint Heron, a firm that produces a website that chronicles fashion and culture aimed at women of colour and also serves as a community organisation, an events company, and a label, Saint Records, which launched the musicians Kelela and Sampha. Most recently, the label created a supporting film showcasing finalists for the The Woolmark Prize 2021.

Toyin Idibapo is a London-based fashion photographer. She has contributed editorial work to magazines including: Doing Bird, Visionaire, Vogue Nippon, Vogue Homme, Arena Homme Plus and Dazed & Confused, and she has also worked with Gucci and Alexander McQueen. She continues to work on The Cult of Boys, her ongoing personal photographic project, which previously featured on SHOWstudio.

Barkley Hendricks was an American artist who painted almost exclusively Black subjects during the 1960s-1980s - his post-modern portraits of aloof, flamboyant and super stylish subjects have gone on to inspire contemporary artists like Kehinde Wiley and Kerry James Marshall. While travelling to Europe in his twenties, Hendricks found himself in awe of Old Master paintings by the likes of Rembrandt and Velázquez, but dismayed by the lack of representation of people of colour in the paintings. His best ever painting? A life-sized self portrait, Brown Sugar Vine (1970), where the artist appears totally nude wearing just sunglasses and a stocking cap.

Gunner Stahl, (real name Jonathan Simmons), is an American photographer from Atlanta, best known for snapping portraits of the world's biggest hip-hop musicians on a 35mm point and shoot camera. Stahl got his start in photography by taking pictures of friends at school, parties and concerts when he was 18 years old, and subsequently made his name creating intimate portraits of musicians like Swae Lee, Wiz Khalifa and Post Malone back when they were on the up. Now, he frequently shoots Playboi Carti, Lil Yachty, the Weeknd, Tyler, The Creator and more, broadcasting the images online to his huge Instagram following.

Marc Baptiste is a Haitian-American photographer who created many iconic hip-hop album covers in the 90s, from Erykah Badu's Baduizm (1997) to Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998). Since then, he has shot Michelle and Barack Obama, Prince, Janelle Monae, Erykah Badu, Spike Lee and more for various magazines including Vanity Fair, Equire, Rolling Stone and Vogue.

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Black Excellence and Fashion History | SHOWstudio

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by SHOWstudio on 22 October 2021 From iconic runway moments to culture as a dirty word, our new must-watch TikTok series spotlights black excellence in fashion history. From iconic runway moments to culture as a dirty word, our new must-watch TikTok series spotlights black excellence in fashion history.

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The fashion industry still has a bias towards white men and they outnumber anyone else in executive roles, a new report shows.

The findings from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) showed that the lack of diversity has made black employees feel as if they "don't belong" to organizations, with two in three black employees (63%) reporting that they are regularly the "only" black person in the room. This, in turn, has led to an increase in pressure to perform and represent their identity.

The report - called the State of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - also revealed that just 57% of black fashion industry employees believed that their company was doing enough when it came to racial and gender inclusivity, compared with 77% of their white colleagues. Less than half of black employees believed that inclusivity measures would result in permanent change.

Last year, following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of police and the Black Lives Matter protests, many fashion brands and shops were called to task for the apparent schism between their statements of solidarity and own their issues of structural racism from the shop floor to the executive level.

Another issue that came from the report was an economic one: 37% of black employees reported having to supplement their income compared with just 23% of their white counterparts. The study also found that the low-paying nature of internships could also affect black employees' subsequent chances of employment.

"After a year like 2020 some may have been falsely under the impression that the old guard was changing. It wasn't," said Amber Nicole Alston, founder of Hyphenate Management. "Like most other industries, fashion has suffered from the Mad Men syndrome - the idea that successful leaders look and navigate the world in one specific way. That affects who is offered a seat at the table and who gains the power to create the kind of change that would genuinely make the industry equitable."

The report surveyed 1,000 fashion industry professionals, across 41 companies and three focus groups, during the autumn of 2020.

The CFDA itself has been solid in its actions fighting racism in the fashion industry.

In August they announced the promotion of CaSandra Diggs, a black woman, to chief administrative and financial officer. She has worked with the company since 2001.

The organisation also joined forces with Harlem's Fashion Row to create the ICON 360 Fund, a million-dollar fund to help designers of color affected by the pandemic.

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Fashion industry biased towards white men, report shows

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The fashion industry still has a bias towards white men and they outnumber anyone else in executive roles, a new report shows. The findings from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) showed that the lack of diversity has made black employees feel as if they "don't belong" to organizations, with two in three black employees (63%) reporting that they are regularly the "only" black person in the room.

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Darkskin Models Talk About Their Struggles In The Industry | Black Like Me

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discrimination in the form of skin colour, makeup, hair treatment 

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discrimination in the form of skin colour, makeup, hair treatment 

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Bethann Hardison: Why Fashion Needs the Black Girls Coalition Again

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‘At a certain point, you hope that compassion and intellect do live within the industry.’

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The black girl coalition are the reason Black women were accepted back in society

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Having subtitles for each person of colour who fought against systemic racism in the industry and how that has affected the future 

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Having subtitles for each person of colour who fought against systemic racism in the industry and how that has affected the future 

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Research is all collected and chapters have a skeleton of info and quotes in each section filling in the body paragraphs