It would be quite some time before I actually saw Naomi Campbell walk on a high-fashion runway (Dolce & Gabbana 2009) or attended my first couture show (Chanel 2010). Back then, Black faces on the runway were fairly rare and even more so on the front row.
But that has all changed in incremental steps. We have gone from the fringes to the forefront of the conversation, but we still aren’t the primary storytellers, and we remain criminally underpresented in positions of power behind the scenes.
Much has been made of the fact that we are at long last “in.” Black women are “in,” but so too are a variety of women who exist beyond the old narrow standard of beauty: Muslim women, nonbinary women, women over the age of fifty, little women, women with Down syndrome, bigger women, women in wheelchairs, and more.
But this language is inaccurate, because our emergence is not a fleeting trend in the manner of incoming skirt shapes and outgoing hemlines. Instead, it represents a paradigm shift away from fashion’s entire history so far. Going back to its earliest days, when Charles Frederick Worth created custom gowns for queens and princesses in the midnineteenth century, fashion has long existed to serve the famous, influential, and aristocratic. And until recently those groups were exclusively White.
But fashion has spent the past decade slowly and finally opening its borders to communities of people who weren’t included or even considered. If you ask these women, their inclusion is not a “moment” but the result of tireless campaigns and organized efforts to break through mind-numbing homogeneity.
All it takes is a cursory glance at the landscape to get the gist. We’ve never had more visibility than we do now. This is particularly so with Black women, where our presence finally goes beyond the tokenistic one or two on the runways (Alek Wek, Liya Kebede, Adut Akech, Ajok Madel, Selena Forrest, Lineisy Montero, Imaan Hammam, the list goes on) and the covers of magazines (Beyoncé on ELLE, Rihanna on Vogue, Serena Williams on Harper’s Bazaar, Lupita Nyong’o on everything).
As I write, the women who rank among the industry’s most in-demand models include Adut Akech, a South Sudanese native born on the way to a refugee camp in Kenya who now counts supermodel Naomi Campbell and Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli as her biggest champions, and Halima Aden, a Kenya-born, hijab-wearing Somali raised in Minnesota who just four years ago was moonlighting as a cleaning woman, scrubbing toilets in St. Cloud Hospital during her big debut runway season, in which she walked for Kanye West’s Yeezy in New York and Max Mara in Milan. When the month of shows ended, Halima returned to her custodial job in Minnesota until she reached a level of fame where she could afford to live on her model earnings.
There’s also Paloma Elsesser, a London-born African-Chilean-Swiss American cover star of Vogue who wears a size 16 and actively campaigns for body positivity. And Indira Scott, a Jamaica Queens local best known for her waist-length, bead-embellished braids, a hairstyle she used to get bullied for wearing in school but is now a trademark that has gotten her runway jobs with Christian Dior. If one were to distill the shift in fashion down to a single visual symbol, Halima’s hijab, Paloma’s full, relatable figure, or Indira’s box braids would do. Each sparks conversation and headlines, yes, but each also runs counter to the long, wispy, Western ideal. Each also signifies a compelling story that has dominated not just the runways but also ad campaigns, magazine covers, and social media impressions.
The beauty is in the breadth and the nuance of the representation—not seen since the sixties and seventies, when the Grandassa models and an overall rise in Black consciousness inspired a diverse movement in European fashion. The beauty is also in what this means for the waves of young girls who know this moment of heightened visibility only and nothing else, girls who will consider this the norm. Girls who will grow into women with a healthy sense of entitlement because of course they can be cover stars and supermodels and creative directors and CEOs.
It can be easy to boil it all down to trending, like a hashtag that gathers steam and then becomes yesterday’s news. But this would be lazy. We are here, living, creating, and flourishing, whether the fashion world chooses to tune in or not. Declaring a group of people “in fashion” implies another group is out. And the suggestion that a group of people are out of fashion leads to the conclusion, no matter how knotty, of a scarcity complex and the feeling that there isn’t room for all—not to mention the implication that we are present not based on merit but purely because we are trending.
This thinking undermines the power of the moment and the positive gains made by an industry that prides itself on progressive politics. It’s the Alaia-clad elephant in the room that reveals itself when the opportunity arises, as it did a year ago when an editor casually remarked to me, “We blondes are out of style right now,” as we waited for a runway show in New York to begin. This thinking is the Achilles’ heel of the well intentioned, exposing the fact that declaring a group of people in fashion means one was likely complicit in that same group being out of it.
Chapter 18
Modern Activism
What good is a virtue signal, really? Modern outrage tends to follow a series of steps that usually take place on the internet. We read something. We get angry. We write a response. And post it. Maybe we sign a petition and post that. Or make a donation and post a prompt to do the same. Or post a callout to meet somewhere and march.
We do something, and then we move on, as does the news cycle. Modern outrage is transient.
But no matter what, its spurring call-and-response usually takes place on social media.
One kind of modern activism, like the outrage that mobilizes it, is grand, loud, and performative—even when the action behind it is quite small. It’s also the most popular kind, particularly in my network of passionate, outspoken opinion formers (some by trade, some by hobby) in the worlds of fashion and media. People who like to broadcast their actions and feelings.
The most long-lasting change though, tends to come from the relentless, everyday activism, the kind that happens unnoticed in the day-to-day marathon of life—the small, sustained, daily acts of resistance that undermine forces of oppression and ultimately change shit. The kind that worked for countless of generations before mine and will work for those that follow.
The outrage usually comes fast and furious. It’s unpredictable, popping up like tornadoes. What looks like a routine thunderstorm turns into something much worse, very quickly, decimating fields big and small. During a six-month stretch in 2019, the tornadoes of outrage that popped up in my feed included but weren’t limited to the following: a series of wildfires in the Amazon rainforest; Boris Johnson’s suspension of Parliament; the seizure and separation of families at the American border; a six-year-old little girl arrested and jailed by Florida police for throwing a tantrum in class; the premiership of Boris Johnson; a series of Gucci turtleneck balaclavas that resembled blackface; restrictive abortion laws in Alabama; an H&M campaign featuring a little Black girl with undone hair; a Twitter war between Donald Trump and John Legend and Chrissy Teigen; a young Black cisgender man’s suicide after being bullied for dating a trans woman; mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio; a Prada keychain that resembled the old racist character Sambo; the lack of press coverage of atrocities in Sudan; the lack of press coverage of atrocities in Kashmir. The list goes on and on.