The skin on my arms felt prickly and my stomach tight in the way it does when I feel a conversation taking a particular kind of turn. I found it curious that someone would use the temporal language ascribed to clothing and fleeting fashions to frame an entire people. It felt wrong. It sounded wrong. And yet I kept hearing similar observations while traveling the runway show circuit and doing all manner of panel discussions (so many panel discussions) about diversity and inclusion in fashion in general.
“With so many Black women appearing on magazine covers and catwalks, do you think this is just another trend?” a White news anchor asked me another time midbroadcast.
Runway shows are a dime a dozen. There are shopping mall fashion shows. Church fashion shows. School charity fashion shows. And pet fashion shows. There are entire weeks filled with fashion shows in cities all over the world, among them Tel Aviv, Dakar, Dodoma, Lisbon, Bogotá, Liverpool, Reykjavík, Miami, Moscow, Copenhagen, and Lagos. But only a few hold the kind of power that impacts the way people dress and perceive themselves. And they take place in just four cities: New York, London, Milan, and Paris.
To sit in the front row of a luxury fashion show in one of these cities, home to the world’s oldest and most storied houses, is to experience a unique set of conflicting emotions, particularly as a Black woman.
Because the rise of Black women is the talking point that has been most attached to the label of fleeting trend. One White editor went as far as to describe it to me as a bubble bound to burst.
On the surface, the front row is a thrill. There’s the excitement of gaining entry to a rarefied world filled with the finest clothes human hands can make designed by some of the most skillful couturiers known to woman. A tiny little alternate universe populated by the affluent, influential, and famous, and the insiders powerful enough to determine who will become famous next. The front row is where the people deemed most integral to the success of those clothes—a mix of retailers, celebrities, stylists, journalists, popular internet personalities, and clients—converge. The spaces are limited. The invited are few. You know better than to consider inclusion a form of validation. The idea is intoxicating nonetheless. But below the surface, a seat on the front row for someone like me means a heightened consciousness of the many who are left out.
Navigating the front row can be an isolating and emotionally fraught experience for anyone. Its dramas have been well documented in all manner of books and films to varying degrees of accuracy—Prêt-à-Porter, The Devil Wears Prada, Zoolander, The September Issue, and more.
Will I get a seat? Where will I be seated? Who will I be seated next to? To many, these are all very important questions without an ounce of irony. The answer can determine everything. How you’re viewed by the rest of your peers. Your standing in a $2.4 trillion industry.
It’s a century-old system built on art, desire, commerce, prestige, insider access, and hierarchy. Power, buzz, and influence come and go. One day you have it. Months, years, or, if you’re lucky, decades later, you don’t. One minute you’re in, the next you’re out.
But lately, fashion has been rife with talk of the shift in who gets to be an insider and who gets to tell whose story. Because a dress is not just the covering on our backs but also a story of who we are, what we think, what tribe we belong to, and how we view ourselves.
In the world of fashion, the reality of what is in fashion very much depends on who is in a position of power to declare it. Those who have an influential platform from which to tell the story determine the narrative. Anyone can claim red is the new black. But only a small pool of people have the sway that can make it so. The problem is that the group dominating the storytelling, determining the trends on and off the runway, have been so homogenous, so overwhelmingly privileged and White. And, of the few non-White storytellers there are, even fewer are Black women. Of the prominent designers working at a high level, there are Rihanna, Martine Rose, Grace Wales Bonner, and Tracy Reese, to name a small sampling from a fairly short list. Of the writers, editors, and stylists in high enough positions at powerful enough publications to warrant a front-row seat on the international circuit, just as few are Black women.
I came to fashion as an outsider. My earliest memories of the fashion show were not in Paris, Milan, or London but in my grandparents’ house, listening to my aunt recount her evening out attending the Ebony Fashion Fair, the traveling catwalk expo that operated from 1958 to 2009 and promoted the makeup line by the same name.
She was a bank manager who lived and worked in Tidewater, Virginia, a world away from the runways of Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, and Valentino, and yet she knew who they were thanks to the fair, which introduced luxury fashion to nationwide audiences of stylish Black women like my aunt. Ebony Fashion Fair came to fame in the sixties, as “Black Is Beautiful” became a rallying slogan for growing Black pride. And like the Grandassa Models, a Harlem-based fashion show that celebrated natural Black beauty, each operated beyond the White gaze.
I never actually attended an Ebony Fashion Fair, a source of much personal regret. But as a child, I would study the images of Black and brown models, booted and dolman sleeved, in my grandparents’ old issues of Ebony magazine, which once a year would turn into a promo for the fashion extravaganza. (Long before events became a much-needed revenue stream for magazines, Johnson Publishing Company had cracked that nut with Ebony.) I would read the issues in my grandmother’s house and feel like I was there—at Scope Exhibit Hall in Norfolk or Municipal Auditorium in Charleston, South Carolina, or Hixon Convention Center in Tampa, Florida. I could imagine the smell of perfume, hear the R & B soundtrack, and see the clothes sway and swagger.
My next encounter with the world of fashion was as a teenager attending a runway show at my local shopping mall sponsored by Seventeen magazine. I’d go with my mom and get styling advice about new ways to put together my Gap denim and Express sweaters for school. Meanwhile, pretty, photogenic, wide-eyed, and wide-smiled local teens with names like Misty and Danielle would parade the runway hoping it would be a bridge to even bigger opportunities in Washington, DC, or even New York.
When I was a student at the University of Virginia, we’d have parties and a big annual fashion show during homecoming weekend, a time when the smaller Black student body would have our own lineup of events that ran parallel to the big keg-and-bowtie-filled parties put on by the White fraternities and sororities. The fashion show was the highlight of the Black student body’s social calendar and a kind of imitation of the legendary student fashion shows held at historically Black universities like Howard and Hampton. At UVA, it was less a catwalk show in the traditional sense and more of a sexed-up theatrical production in which students wore the tightest or shortest or sheerest clothing possible (the guys would often go shirtless, their torsos oiled and bronzed to caricature levels). There would be dance interludes involving body rolls, and slow dramatic walks to popular R & B songs like Ginuwine’s “Pony”—the models all at that stage of youth when the awkwardness of hormonal pubescence gives way to spectacular, unblemished beauty.
Students would have to audition by walking for a panel of judges made up of models who had walked in shows years before. Earning a spot in the cast was a badge of honor that secured social cachet and doubled one’s dating prospects. During my freshman year (or “first year,” as all UVA students refer to it), only one girl from our entire class made the cut. I won a place in the show during my second year, along with four other classmates. We practiced for months. And the night of the show, we fantasized that we were models in Paris, Naomi Campbell’s long-lost cousins, twirling in couture.