Where Are We?” A Reflection on Race, Fashion, and Visibility.

Photo Source : ( Studio Tywon)

Growing up, I was always captivated by fashion—-putting on different styles and looking at myself in the mirror, tearing a piece of fabric off my clothes to create something new and effortless. I believed that fashion was boundless and creative. I saw fashion as a place of expression and somewhere to be inspired, but as I browsed through fashion blogs and flipped through magazines, I often felt that something was missing—racial equity and representation. Though I admired the glamour and creativity in magazines and blogs, I often wondered why there were only one or two people of color featured. I would ask myself. Where are the people who look like me? Who shared the same cultural background? At times when looking at it, I quickly felt that the industry did not want blacks and brown people to belong in high fashion society. Despite the fashion industry being forward-thinking and innovative, I could not ignore the staggering statistics—-only 3% of designers were black and 16.7% of models are black models, which make up only a small fraction of the fashion industry. This really underscored my feeling about the fashion industry still focused on Eurocentric beauty standards and their resistances to real progress. Many trailblazers made it possible for more people of color to grace runways, magazines, and billboards and not be misrepresented based on the color of their skin including Iman, Bethann Hardison, Naomi Campbell, Naomi Sims, Donyale Luna, and even Alek Wek.