Does Being Black In Fashion Come With An Expiry Date?
The lack of progress, meaningful change and the disappearance of allies
We all saw it happen. In 2020 fashion brands, businesses and organisations, along with other industries, responded to the global Black Lives Matter movement by pledging allegiance on socials and posting black squares. Hundreds of companies called for an end to systemic racism, along with high-profile individuals, and seemed committed to levelling the playing field for minorities and the Black community. But three years later, what's changed? Well as it turns out, not that much.
Fashion brands have caught onto having Black and brown faces across their advertising, featured in social media posts, attending high-profile events and anything else that's public-facing so they can tick the diversity box. But if you work in the industry you notice that it's slipping back into old patterns and regressing. It’s things that the general public would never notice, but when you have access to what goes on behind closed doors, you’d be hard-pressed to miss what's going on.
If anything we’ve taken one step forward and ten steps back, as evidenced by the only Black designer belonging to Italy’s fashion council withdrawing from MFW due to a lack of commitment to diversity and inclusion, and the backlash she received after making a speech about the price she’d paid for highlighting racial injustice. “You can’t sit with us” is an insidious attitude that underscores fashion, and Black creatives are worried that they’ll be the ones left to carry the load and do all of the work.
Token gestures
The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 changed the way people thought about race and the injustices suffered by the Black community. Amid the noise and chaos, the fashion industry vowed it would change and stood in support of what was happening. But despite the foundations laid out by prominent Black individuals working in fashion, many Black and minority designers still face the same challenges they’ve been grappling with for decades, and the gatekeepers of the industry still deny access, limit resources, and make being Black in fashion an impossible obstacle to overcome.
The New York Times conducted a survey to see what was really going down. It asked companies identical questions about how many Black people were on their boards, how many Black employees they had, as well as how many Black faces were in their campaigns, on their runways and in their magazines. Christian Siriano, Coach, Kate Spade and Tory Burch were the only four out of 64 brands that tried to answer each question fully, 16 more brands answered half of the questions, including Burberry, Calvin Klein and Oscar de la Renta, nine European brands provided no answers and eight companies declined to participate.
It’s no wonder that people were frustrated, are still frustrated, when they saw businesses share messages of solidarity at the peak of the BLM movement, but have done little to follow up since. Posting on Instagram is a tokenistic gesture if you haven’t implemented change from within. Racial diversity at fashion weeks is on the decline, and according to The Fashion Spot in September 2020 there were 57.1% models of colour on the runway versus at NYFW 2021 when that figure dropped to 50.7%. When the businesses that could make a difference resist progress, where does that leave the Black community who suffer at the hands of the industry?
Cultural clout but no credit
For the Black community, fashion goes beyond the superficial. It’s personal. It’s political. And it’s tied to a broader sense of heritage and identity. Black culture has long set trends and influenced the fashion landscape, but this comes with its fair share of setbacks. Hello culture vultures, aka anyone that profits off of Black culture without giving credit where credit is due. How can you remix and reinterpret Black style without including Black people in the conversation? Believe it or not, it happens more than you think. All the while taking away funds that could go back into supporting Black designers and talent.
The industry would have you believe we’ve made progress and in some ways this is true. Take Edward Enniful, the first Black man to become editor-in-chief of British Vogue. Or Virgil Abloh, the first Black man to become artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, and Tyler Mitchell, the first Black man to shoot a Vogue cover (that cover was Beyonce and it was epic). And that’s not forgetting icons of yesteryear such as Ann Lowe, the first African-American woman to become a renowned fashion designer from the 1920s to the 1960s, and Willi Smith, the king of streetwear, whose label grossed over $25 million in sales by 1986 according to The Guardian.
On paper, these figures being given increased visibility dots the i’s and crosses the t’s, but we need to look beyond surface-level optics if we want to enact real-world change from the inside out. From Afrometals in Botswana giving an updated take on the Western trend via bullet belts, band t-shirts and studded leather, to “swanking” in Johannesburg where informal fashion shows take place to find out who has the best style, Black consumers tap deeper into the culture of fashion by putting the people first. And if fashion wants to incorporate Black culture into its aesthetics the right way, it needs to start including these communities in the conversation.
Where do we go from here?
The fashion industry needs a reset. While the front-facing side of fashion, you know, the stuff you see in magazines, across social media, in campaigns and on the runways looks like it changed to the outside world, behind the scenes paints a very different picture. Actual allyship is practically non-existent. Companies may have hired DE&I specialists, and magazines may have written articles about their favourite Black designers, but these things were supposed to be the jumping-off point that created a ripple effect of progress across the industry. Sadly, this hasn’t been the case.
But groups are forming to tackle this complex issue. Fashion designer, creative director and activist Aurora James founded the 15 Percent Pledge, a non-profit organisation that calls for major retailers and corporations to dedicate 15% of their shelf space to Black owned brands and businesses. The Black In Fashion Council represent and secures the advancement of Black professionals in fashion and beauty to strengthen the progress of the diaspora, and The Kelly Initiative petitioned and called on the CFDA to conduct an industry census and make public its findings on the racial make-up of the employees of its member organisations.
Collectively, we’re tired of talking about this. Black fashion professionals are tired of shouting about the lack of inclusion while trying to create support systems for their work, minorities in this space are tired of feeling like outsiders, myself included, and I’m sure you're tired of reading about a subject that’s hit the brakes when it should have been going full steam ahead. We need Black people in executive roles in the industry, we need Black people to be given a seat at fashion tables, and we need Black culture to be respected and valued for what it is. Black squares aren’t just for hashtags and social media trends, they’re for life.
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