Stylists are still facing challenges when it comes to dressing non-white, non-sample-size clients.You might remember, two summers ago, when Leslie Jones tweeted that she could not find a designer to dress her for the "Ghostbusters" premiere. "It's so funny how there are no designers wanting to help me with a premiere dress for movie," she wrote.
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The red-carpet struggles of celebrities like Leslie Jones are inextricably linked to the difficulties many, non-sample-sized "real" women also face when shopping. The average American woman wears a size 14, yet sample sizes run from 0 to 4, all while high-end fashion brands still notoriously kowtow to a demographic of thin, white and moneyed women. Why?
Mindy Kaling has found a workaround by working with "The Mindy Project"'s costume designer, Salvador Perez. Before working with Kaling, Perez had years of experience designing garments for Hollywood productions, including "Titanic" and "Stargate." Prior to working with Bolden more exclusively, much of what you had seen Kaling in, whether on- or off-screen, was custom-made by Perez.
"Designers make clothing for the community that they surround themselves with," says McCharen-Tran. Chromat's runways, for its part, are always among the most inclusive of New York Fashion Week, and the brand has cultivated a diverse following of #ChromatBABES who include Whoopi Goldberg, Amandla Sternberg and even Beyoncé.
But despite a handful of designers who have answered the call for greater size and racial diversity, many starlets still encounter difficulties when trying to acquire high-end designer pieces. Everyone agrees there is a change afoot — it's just evolving at a snail's pace.
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