Fashion Blackout

BET News takes an inside look at one of fashion’s industry’s lasting weaknesses: The lack of Black models at major fashion shows and ad campaigns.After keeping its silence on the issue, the Black Fashion World is moving to action after last fall’s shows at New York’s fashion week. Their mission is to keep Black models from becoming extinct in a business they, at one time, were near dominating. So why have images of Black models been in sharp decline in high fashion for more than a decade? What does this mean for society at large? At the helm of the issue is Bethann Hardison who has modeled, run her own modeling agency and handled casting over the years. At her recent town hall meeting, “Out of Fashion: The Absence of Color,” she said, “In the United States of America, this is the one industry that still has the freedom to refer to people by their color and reject them in their work.”

According to Targetmarket News.com Black women in the United States spend more than $20 billion on apparel each year. However, the runways, magazine spreads and the image/beauty industry at large is increasingly ignoring their buying power and their existence, choosing instead to market an eastern-European form of beauty as the standard. At the spring 2008 collections at Fashion Week in September 2007 in New York, the runways were dominated by white faces. In fact, Black faces were more absent from the runways than some fashion insiders have seen since the ‘60s.

source: BET