feature: the new york times discusses “fashion’s racial divide”

One thing that is evident at this year’s New York Fashion Week (aside from the lack of black models) is the lack of black designers showcasing their work. The New York Times is tackling the issue in a new article, profiling notable Black designers Tracy Reese (pictured above), Carly Cushnie, co-designer of Cushnie et Ochs, Shayne Oliver of Hood by Air and Public School’s Maxwell Osborne. Read the full article here; excerpts, below.

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor 

The schedule for New York Fashion Week, which begins on Thursday, tells a different story. Of the 260 shows on the men’s and women’s wear schedule, only three with any global reach are by African-American designers: Tracy Reese, Public School and Hood by Air. If you count Cushnie et Ochs, which is based in New York but whose co-designer, Carly Cushnie, is Afro-Caribbean, you can get to four. Throw in smaller brands with annual revenue of under $1 million, such as Harbison, Pyer Moss and LaQuan Smith, and it goes up — to just over 2.7 percent. This mirrors the percentage of African-American designers who are members of the Council of Fashion Designers of America: approximately 12 out of 470.

When Maxwell Osborne, an African-American designer who is one-half of the men’s wear brand Public School, stood on stage at Lincoln Center with his business partner, Dao-Yi Chow, to receive the 2014 CFDA Award for men’s wear last June, he was, he realized, “the first designer of color on stage accepting this award since Sean Combs won it in 2004 for Sean John.” “It was mind-boggling,” he said, “both in a good way, because we had won it, and in a bad way, because it was crazy that there had been no one else of color up there in all that time.”

“There were more high-profile black designers in the 1970s than there are today,” said Bethann Hardison, founder of the Diversity Coalition, ticking off the names: Willi Smith, Stephen Burrows, Arthur McGee, Scott Barrie, Jon Haggins. “We’re going backwards.”

Though no one would say that the ethnic makeup of every industry needs to reflect exactly the ethnic makeup of the population at large (African-Americans represent just over 13 percent of the United States population), and the American fashion industry is no less diverse than the British or French or Italian fashion industries (indeed, it may be more so), the lack of African-American representation in the New York establishment is striking for a number of reasons. First, the very vocal and active way the industry finds “inspiration” in African-American culture, from the music world (Rihanna was awarded the CFDA Fashion Icon prize last June, while Vogue named her the single biggest influence on the spring 2014 catwalks) to street culture; second, the buying power of the African-American consumer, which Nielsen estimated will reach $1.3 trillion by 2017; and finally, the fact that it is a basic tenet of fashion in a global world that the more diverse points of view on a design team, the more broadly relevant and (probably) desirable the end product will be — and hence the more successful the brand.