And while the world events that sparked the outrage were unpredictable, the way in which the indignation was expressed could not be more formulaic—through the extended Twitter thread, Instagram caption, and Facebook status update.
Everyone is an activist, a changemaker. Influencers tag it onto the backs of their bios. But are they really? Are we?
In her rethinking of Black women’s activism, Patricia Hill Collins described how a “Black mother who may be unable to articulate her political ideology but who on a daily basis contests school policies harmful to her children may be more an ‘activist’ than the most highly educated Black feminist who, while she can manipulate feminist, nationalist, postmodern, and other ideologies, produces no tangible political changes in anyone’s life but her own.”
Similar observations can be made today, when we have more language than ever before to articulate what we believe and what we don’t—and are spoiled for choice about ways to voice it, a dizzying array of platforms in the palms of our hands.
What I’ve learned about activism is this: it must stay active. And the person I’ve learned this from is Bethann Hardison, a woman who over the course of many decades worked to get Black women greater visibility within the fashion world, a fight that to some might seem frivolous but in reality is one that ultimately impacts the way we see ourselves.
I developed my deepest sense of self at a time in my life when I felt most like a fly in a bowl of milk, my Blackness and Americanness solidifying in the most un-Black and un-American of settings: the fashion world in London in the early 2010s. James Baldwin once wrote that a lot of Americans moved away in order to get closer to themselves. This was certainly the case for me; the distance provided a mirror of sorts. But it was an opportunity I would not have had were it not for Bethann’s strong encouragement as I agonized over two job offers: a senior editor role at a women’s magazine housed in a large, cushy American publishing company or a global style director position abroad with a lesser-known title but an even bigger reach, a position that promised a working life traversing the global fashion circuit. “Publishing jobs will always be here,” she told me. “But an offer to move you across the world and see another kind of life doesn’t come so easily.” I took her advice and moved.
This was at a time when diversity and inclusion—with a capital D and capital I— were not yet the thing they would become and people still talked openly about adopting high-protein, low-carb diets in order to carve out thigh gaps large enough to make their legs look model small in jeans. The terms body positivity and nonbinary were largely unheard of. And young upstarts were more likely to refer to themselves as bloggers rather than influencers or activists, as is their wont now.
When I attended my first big runway show in Paris, I counted two other identifiably Black faces in a room containing hundreds. One of them, a prominent, older Black American journalist sitting front row, did not return my nod as we brushed shoulders on our way out of the crowded venue. I say this not to criticize the journalist but rather to illustrate the time, one in which any sense of overarching community was replaced by competing, concentric circles of tightly knit colleagues. Brand, rather than culture or ethnicity, was the shared experience that created alliance.
The business was largely filled with overwhelmingly White, mostly posh daughters of well-connected families or highly connected alumnae of a small pool of influential fashion schools. People who could afford to be broke, their nearly nonexistent entry-level income supplemented by flush parents for the first two to ten years it would take for them to earn a more livable wage. Fashion was tribal, and I didn’t necessarily fit into any one of the tribes.
I knew only one activist in the entire industry, Bethann, a godmother figure to virtually every Black person in fashion I know, including myself. And Bethann didn’t even consider herself an activist. But she had been methodically advocating for and working toward a single goal for decades. She looked like an activist to me. And today she remains the woman many activists in the creative industries cite as an influence.
The steps in Bethann’s activism looked quite different from the performative actions many take today.
Bethann came of working age in the Garment District during the sixties, as the Black Panther Party, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Nation of Islam rose to national prominence. She later became a model, walking the runways of a new wave of icons in Paris, including Issey Miyake, Claude Montana, and Kenzo, as well as pioneering Black designers such as Willi Smith and Stephen Burrows. If the Grandassa models amplified Black beauty to the Black community, Bethann and her peers, Pat Cleveland, Billie Blair, Alva Chinn, and Amina Warsuma, became an unofficial coalition of women who broadcast Black beauty to the entire world. When they walked in the Battle of Versailles, a historic fashion event that pitted French designers such as Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy against American ones including Halston and Bill Blass—the models of color numbering a groundbreaking ten—they introduced to the luxury fashion world a reality Black women had known all along, that Black is indeed very beautiful. This was 1973.
When she started her own model agency in the eighties, she became known for her impeccable eye for new talent as she discovered and made the careers of a series of Black supermodels, from Tyson Beckford to Veronica Webb. The founding publishing director of ELLE magazine, Regis Pagniez, credited Bethann with helping the new magazine earn a reputation for being more diverse and representative of modern life than its older competitors. In a New York Times article in 1986, ELLE is described as having “refined the standard fashion magazine format” using “many models of mixed ethnic heritage” and encouraging them to “pose like they are in life.” Paper magazine exclusively used Bethann for their castings because her roster was more diverse than that of the other agencies. Paper’s editor in chief, Kim Hastreiter, praised Bethann for never ghettoizing people but instead showing that “beauty and fashion were (and still are) about all different colors. You represented girls of all ethnicities, including many White girls.” As other magazines scrambled to catch up, she founded the Black Girls Coalition to celebrate a new school of Black models who had come through, including Karen Alexander, Cynthia Bailey, and Naomi Campbell. This was 1988.
But when Bethann closed her business a decade later, moved to Mexico, and took a break, the tide turned. A new wave of models washed in and swept Black models out of favor, kicking off a new era defined by a different look, one that problematically conflated the term aesthetic with race. This was a time when hugely influential designers began showing their clothes on casts of exclusively White models—wispy, pale women from Eastern European countries rather than the diverse mix of women from Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, Angola, China, and more who regularly star in it now. It was a samey, blank canvas that permeated every nook and crevice of the fashion ecosphere. “Designers wanted this ethereal girl that had no particular personality or look so that you only paid attention to the clothes. So they looked to Eastern Europe, which no one could really do before because the Wall was up. And it was a look that caught on like a brush fire. Other designers started to do it too, and it kept going on and on and on until eventually the girl of color was wiped out. I saw it happening; I saw how it happened,” Bethann explained to me. Few openly questioned the shift. This was 1997.