“I paraded as if to challenge the French, to take them down from their pedestal.” Half a century later, Bethann Hardison still remembers that summit meeting between the old guard of French fashion and the new crop of American ready-to-wear creators called Grand divertissement à Versailles as a true contest.
Held in November 1973, what would go down in the annals as the Battle of Versailles was, if not a declaration of war, at least one of intentions: like the designers who stormed the ancient symbol of the ancien absolutist regime, the models black ones that made them shine were also here to stay.
Of the squad of 36 mannequins hired for the occasion, ten were black, the largest representation of Afro women seen on a catwalk until then. Pat Cleveland, Billie Blair, Ramona Saunders, Alva Chinn, Charlene Dash, Barbara Jackson, Amina Warsuma, Jennifer Brice, Norma Jean Darden and Hardison herself were there to make history. It's a pity that hers turned out, in the end, to be a pyrrhic victory.
There are no official figures, only statistics that dance from time to time, but the fact that rationalized models today barely represent 36 percent of the total that we see in fashion weeks and advertising campaigns is accepted as good, according to a study from the 2019 Fashion Spot portal.
Indeed: the absence of diversity in the clothing and beauty businesses continues to be embarrassing, a burning issue for at least three decades, when the debate returned to the industry. And not only that, the accusations of racism and discrimination continue (last September, a group of Afro models boycotted the Melbourne catwalk, among other reasons due to pay inequality compared to their white colleagues). And yet, the living forces of the system do not stop showing their inclusive chest.
Crowned model of the year last December at the British Fashion Awards, the African-American Paloma Elsesser is the current spearhead of a contingent that includes the also physically non-normative Precious Lee, the very excited Anok Yai, the more alternative Slick Woods, the Muslim Halima Aden (the hijab is part of her identity in the profession), the British Adwoa Aboah, the Canadian Winnie Harlow (who has made vitiligo visible), the South Sudanese Adut Akech or the revolutionary Aaron Philip, trans and disabled. But if they stand out it is, of course, because they are the exception.
“It is true that we have advanced, perhaps so much that I am afraid that the situation will take a radical turn and we will go backwards again,” Hardison ventured in 2013, after returning to action as an activist at the head of the Diversity Coalition, a kind of pressure group for urging racial change in the industry and continuing the seminal Black Girls Coalition that she founded in 1988.
Needless to say, the representation of racialized or Afro-descendant women in fashion – as well as in beauty – has been marked by different sociocultural situations, and their greater or lesser visibility has always depended on the historical context. For that reason, it has something of a legend. The first news dates back to the 1950s, with pioneers like Dorothea Towles, a Texan university student who, on vacation in Paris, decided to try her luck as a model. Signed by Christian Dior, hers was soon a regular presence at Schiaparelli, Balmain, Fath and Piguet.
“For once, no one considered me black or African-American, I was just an American,” she recalled in an interview on WWD, two years before her death in 2006. Returning home in 1954, her career was cut short, beyond appear in publications aimed at black audiences. The same limited record in which Cicely Tyson could shine, before becoming an actress with a long and award-winning career.
It would take another decade for black mannequins to finally find their place, in the wings of the fight for civil rights and the countercultural agitation of the artistic-aesthetic movement Black is beautiful.
The milestone was achieved by the African-American Donyale Luna, the first black model on the cover of the British edition of Vogue and star of Paco Rabanne's Parisian debut, in 1966. With a hypnotic presence and overflowing personality, she came to captivate filmmakers of the reach of Antonioni and Fellini (she is the Enotea of the Satyricon), until, like a supernova, her brilliance was soon consumed, disappearing prematurely at the age of 33, in 1979.
His countrywomen Naomi Sims and Beverly Johnson (first cover of American Vogue, in 1973) took over that, after the Versailles demonstration of power, would continue throughout the seventies, leading to a turn of events: Givenchy even declared that he had traveled to California to imbue his collections with black glamor and Yves Saint Laurent would make the Afro-Caribbean Mounia Orosemane, first, and the ill-fated Guinean Katoucha Niane, later, his muses. For her part, Issey Miyake elevated the wayward Jamaican Grace Jones to the altars.
The oversexualization of Afro women (a long-standing problem) was the dominant note in the following decade, a fetishism that did not escape Karen Alexander, Beverly Peel, Gail O'Neil, Waris Dirie and even Iman, who was to invent a pastoral origin of Nubian royalty. Veronica Webb – almost adopted by Azzedine Alaïa, her stays in Paris were spent at the designer's house – ended up fed up with feeling objectified, so much so that she turned to cinema and then to literature, even though she had a lucrative contract. with Revlon.
Discovered as a teenager in the mid-eighties, Naomi Campbell has also attested to the situation. The only black model in the super pack of the nineties, the business knew how to take advantage of her powerful magnetism to reposition itself among a black consumer who had begun to gain social and economic status. The same one that Tyra Banks (Victoria's Secret angel), Lana Ogilvie, Liya Kebede and the Sudanese Alek Wek next appealed to. And, suddenly, it was over.
“Uniformity replaced diversity,” Bethann Hardison explained in Invisible Beauty, the documentary she directed in 2023, part memoir, part denunciation of racial discrimination in fashion. The need for designers to regain control over their work (prioritize the product, not who wears it or advertises it) and for the industry in general to reach a majority and global audience through a certain neutral physiognomy would be the crux of the issue of whitening that the 2000s brought, also designed for the Asian market, in which identification with Caucasian models is more feasible than with Afro-descendant ones.
That's why Joan Smalls, Jordan Dunn, Chanel Iman, Aminata Niaria or Leomie Anderson barely make a sound from that first decade of this century/millennium. Suffice it to remember that a brand like Prada did not feature a black model in its campaigns until 2013.
