When I came along as a young, rising journalist ten years later and wrote my first piece about the paucity of non-White people on the runway and behind the scenes in the industry, few people, with the exception of Bethann, wanted to speak openly to me about their views. And when they did, they did so over the phone and over coffee in hushed tones, whispering the term racism. To talk about race too much, too openly, was to be viewed as a gadfly, a troublemaker. This was 2007.
So Bethann called a small town hall meeting, inviting prominent editors, stylists, casting directors, model agents, and other decision-makers in the industry to discuss the problem. And then she planned an even larger one, at the New York Public Library (which, full disclosure, I helped organize), followed by smaller talks and dinners. The industry responded slowly, the conversation inspiring spurts of progress, including a special issue of Vogue Italia dedicated to Black models.
Bethann kept the momentum going by forming a Diversity Coalition, an anonymous group of professionals of all races whom she gathered to hold the industry accountable. They wrote open letters to the various governing fashion councils in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. They named and shamed the fashion designers and labels who routinized the exclusion of non-White models. Suddenly Black, brown, and Asian models began appearing with greater frequency in larger numbers than the tokenistic one or two. There were four at Celine, six at Calvin Klein, and five at Prada. Gradually the conversation became mainstream. Bethann no longer had to call out brands for exclusion. Consumers did, regularly and loudly.
And as I’d travel back to New York to cover the runway shows twice a year, I’d watch the cast of models and professionals filling the audiences slowly, incrementally, become more inclusive. Bethann’s daily, persistent activism over more than four decades changed the look of fashion, but she also helped change the culture of it as well. And while her work has commanded the attention of very famous people, brands, and media platforms alike, the majority of the work was done quietly. “When I addressed it, I never thought I couldn’t change it. There’s something in that,” Bethann told me one day over the phone as she prepared to head to Milan.
“If I thought someone wasn’t doing the right thing, booking exclusively White girls, I would just speak to them about it. I noticed that Brides magazine never seemed to have brides of color, not even a bridesmaid. I had to say to the editor, ‘You must think that Black people never get married.’ I’d say it just like that.”
In her address “Learning from the 60s,” Audre Lorde famously noted, “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses.” Bethann understood the “unromantic and tedious work necessary” to forge the “meaningful coalitions” Audre spoke about. The steps in Bethann’s activism were not complicated. They were repeated ad nauseam and refined with time. They did not dissipate when the news cycle moved on, as it inevitably does.
One need only scroll through the past year’s worth of headlines in the fashion trades to understand that the business is still overwhelmingly White and that brands and designers still regularly get inclusion wrong. Bethann remains, doing the work. But now, so does a loosely connected coalition of Black women, and men, across the world—editors, stylists, models, and agents who would likely not be in their roles if Bethann hadn’t kickstarted a conversation about why more of us weren’t. And like so many, I’ve tried to emulate Bethann in my own life. One day I am seeking out job candidates from outside the bubble of White privilege in British fashion, the next day questioning an editor’s observation that it would be odd to feature Black models in more than one fashion shoot in a single issue. Yet another day I am picking up the phone to talk a young Black assistant through the frustration of being overlooked for a promotion. Day after day, month after month, year after year.
“I concern myself about how it will matriculate into being what we want it to be. Will the change remain? Will it stay? You can have a conversation in 2007, but what’s it going to look like in five years?” Bethann says. It’s a conversation that has grown and evolved to include Muslim people, Asian people, Latinx people, disabled people, trans people, poor people, and the list goes on. This is 2020.
“I worry because I see how the same people who decide these trends are leaning so heavily into the West African girl. It’s the way it’s being done in which one girl looks so much like the other. My concern is balance, diversity. I want to see a Black girl and a brown girl and an Asian girl and a blonde girl. I always believed it would be okay. I just knew the work had to be there. Coming up against people, that ain’t easy to do. It takes energy.”
I think about this most days as I swipe through an endless scroll of fury and outcry and wonder how we might use lessons from the activism of old to get the most impact out of the very powerful tools at our disposal, tools that the Sixties could only have dreamed of. How to take the best of both worlds—“the power those who came before us have given us” as Audre said—to problem solve, which is essentially what activism is, in a better way.
I decided my form of activism would be the grassroots approach of lifting as I climb. During dinner with a group of girlfriends one evening, women who were all an Only in their respective jobs in fashion and media like me, I decided to stop waiting for the big companies and governing bodies to fix the industry’s homogeneity and use my platform to pull others in as I rose up the ranks. I contacted an old friend who is head of fashion at the Royal College of Arts and reached out to course leaders at Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion, telling them to send me their Black and brown students who showed talent and could benefit from mentoring. I in turn paired the students with my friends, women who had high-profile roles at top publishing houses, agencies, and ready-to-wear brands. We helped them navigate school, internships, job interviews, and entry-level positions. We showed them how to network properly and how to manage their finances. We bolstered their confidence. The mentees formed their own bonds with each other and became a support network separate from me and the mentors, using each other’s talents to grow their own businesses and launch their own projects. Now, five years later, several of the mentees have become mentors. And many of them, including a West Indian designer from Lewisham and a Pakistani fashion writer from Croydon, are flourishing in high-profile roles of their own.
Beyond providing the satisfaction of playing midwife to a wave of new talent breaking through, the mentoring has helped me rekindle my own sense of optimism when the news cycle becomes overwhelming, which it always does.
Chapter 19
On Queenie
by Candice Carty-Williams
There’s a lot to be said for the fact that when I started writing Queenie, I’d just turned twenty-six. I wrote the majority of it in a small, damp studio flat in Streatham. My housemates were mice and slugs, and the black mold that covered the walls was so thick that for the first time in my life, I had asthma. One very cold winter, my boiler broke and I had to get Environmental Health to call the landlord and force him to send a plumber out. When I started to write the book, I had no aspirations for it, or for myself. I wasn’t thinking about money, and I wasn’t thinking about Twitter followers. I only thought about who I was writing it for: the first audience was myself, and the second was all of the lonely Black girls and women who had been through some or all of the things Queenie would go through and had nobody to speak to about them.