Fashion Industry — Lack Of Diversity

THE LACK OF DIVERSITY DURING

FASHION WEEK.

As fashion 'month' has come to a close, I wanted to talk about something I feel strongly about, in relation of the biggest month in fashion.

During fashion week, you don’t need glasses to see that white models are the ones doing most of the moving down the runway. For one month, twice a year, the disproportionate representation of our global reality is on display atop endless runways. It’s certainly easier to see the lack of diversity here than it is within the industry as a whole.

Fashion activist and former model, Bethann Hardison has been speaking up for years. She founded Diversity Coalition / Balance Diversity to eliminate racism during castings and is trying to get more women of color on the runway and in editorials. She recalled a time when designers, “just weren’t seeing black people.”

The Fashion Spot collected data from 373 shows and 9,926 model appearances across the Spring 2016 runways of New York, London, Paris and Milan and reported that “77.6% of the time models were white.” Although this shows a slight improvement from the 80% they reported from Fall 2015 and 83 the previous spring, the percentage still shows that more than half of the models casted are white and not of color. Derek Lam’s inspiration for his Spring 16 collection was civil rights activist and musician Nina Simone. “the relevance of fashion is always changing,” he wrote, “sometimes the emphasis is more on the frivolity, as an escape, like 1950’s fashion was a response to war time deprivation, and sometimes it is more in tune with social change, like the 1920s and 1970s.” A bit like right now. Diversifying his runway was important to Lam. Lam said of his Spring 16 model casting process that, “I think a credit should go to the model agencies who really dug deep and made the effort to present diversity.”

Aurora James, creative director of Brother Vellies; a brand that employs artisans in Africa, had such a hard time getting agencies to send her models of color for her Spring presentation that she had to go out and find unsigned women of color herself. “I was pissed,” she said in an interview, “I was like, how is this going to make all the people I work with feel? I want them to feel reflected and included.”

The word ‘inclusion,’ might just be the most important word to use in this conversation. Inclusion can mean the difference between celebration and appropriation, as James pointed out, “Black culture is often the inspiration, but black people aren’t apart of the conversation, when we’re included, we’re able to help make a more well-rounded product,” editor and consultant, Shiona Turini said.

When diversity is limited, it means the range of faces within diversity is further limited, which means only a tiny representation of a rich culture or ethnicity is showcased in the images that dictate society’s already narrow perception of ‘beautiful.’ How would you feel if you didn’t get to walk in a fashion show because of your skin tone?

In order to change the industry, there needs to be a change in mind-set, as more people stop looking at increasing diversity in their editorial content and staff as the ‘right’ or ‘cool’ or ‘trendy’ thing to do and start realizing that it is actually in fact the business-savvy thing to do, we might see a meaningful change in the industry. “44.2% of millennials identify as part of a minority race or ethnic group,” meaning, that being more inclusive in the media’s eyes is not about diversifying, it is actually about normalizing to accurately reflect the world we actually live in and treat everyone as equals and show what the world is actually like, and it is definitely not just full of whites and not people of color.

In my opinion I personally think that we should accept people for who they are, no one is better than anyone else and we should be treated as equals. People shouldn’t be labelled as a person ‘of color’ and I really want to see a change in the fashion industry when it comes to diversity, I want to see that there is a mix of race in the newest ‘Yves Saint Laurent’ fashion show and that to be a normal thing. 

People should not be judged and singled out purely for the shade of their skin. Does beauty lie within or does it rely on your skin tone?

In conclusion, to normalize such a strong and powerful topic, we have to keep having these conversations. I personally think that we are forgetting the very real power of words to incite action, as Sophie Thealett; a white designer whose Spring 16 show featured 60% diversity models, said and I quote, “change never comes from the top; but from within.”