When fashion finally gets diversity right, the presence of people of color in roles from the runway to the boardroom will be commonplace enough that the racial justice conversations reaching a boiling point in 2020 may be rendered obsolete.
“I think the notion that fashion was exclusive is exactly where we went wrong, where we thought only a certain type of person could model on a runway or be shown in ads or be on certain types of teams,” Bahja Johnson, head of customer belonging at Gap Inc., told WWD. “There was this facade that fashion was homogeneous in nature, that there was one standard of beauty and fashion.”
I just think everything is timing. You get the right people to come along and you get the right situations, everything’s timing…but also the encouragement is there, too, no doubt. The encouragement that this is the moment. Don’t miss the moment to show that you are compassionate, that you’re conscious, that you’re not asleep at the wheel. This is a moment — this is a black and white moment. It’s how you manage it. Don’t be Thomas Jefferson about it. Be very thoughtful.
When it gets down to the Gucci balaclava sweater, that was so suggestive to me because…there are people I know who still don’t see that sweater as a blackface, but many people did. You can only go by how people react and, in that case, they saw it as a sweater that was suggesting blackface. Now I saw the sweater two months before and I saw it on Rihanna and it was in orange and turquoise and I said, “What a silly sweater.
I’m so into making things a better place on a big level that I look forward to one day being able to wrap a white girl’s head in a turban and being able to have a Black guy wear a yarmulke and at some given point I want to be able to have Native Indian braids with a headdress. I just want to mix it up and I want us all to get along.
Suggestions: We need to listen. As a brand and as an industry we need to continuously listen to the feedback of our customers and colleagues and be willing to gather external opinions and knowledge. We continuously consult and engage with topic experts, gender equality and women’s rights organizations as well as human rights organizations such as U.N. Women, U.N. Foundation, TENT partnership for refugees, PLAN International, ILO, OHCHR, UNFPA and UNHCR.