Diversity in fashion, is the modern fashion industry now embracing it? In an article written by Sarah Mower for Vogue.com, and titled, “Is the Fashion World Finally Embracing Diversity?” The writer took a look at how many designers are beginning to embrace the idea that beauty is not only Caucasians but rather, it is in every race.
And as a result, more and more designers are giving models from others races the chance to walk the runway and showcase their products. See below, an excerpt of the article as published on Vogue.com.
Every so often, a fresh cohort of models arrives and announces a new moment. One of the happiest sights of fashion in 2014: Grace Mahary, Imaan Hammam, and Cindy Bruna (pictured here). With their multinational, multiethnic backgrounds—not to mention their cheekbones, upswept eyes, and long, beautiful limbs—they’re leading the sort of epochal shift that makes editors fight, designers throw money, and agents scramble. At long last, the “white-out” years that have chilled the heart of the industry appear to be on the way out.
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Models of color—from Pat Cleveland and Beverly Johnson to Naomi Campbell, Liya Kebede, Joan Smalls, and Jourdan Dunn, among others—have had a place in fashion since the sixties, of course. But progress in diversifying runways has been slow and at times has even run backward. Now a change seems to be at hand.
Mahary is a 24-year-old Canadian who takes her breezy, down-to-earth attitude from home. “My parents are freedom-fighters from Eritrea who fled the country. Because of that, I’m really proud to be representing.”
Bruna, aged nineteen, is French. A confident child of an Italian dad and a Congolese mom, she says that the notoriously tough career path walked by nonwhite models holds no fear for her. “I have my place,” she says, “and I think black models are the future.”
Hammam, meanwhile, is of Moroccan-Egyptian heritage, a seventeen-year-old studying fashion business at home in Holland. Riccardo Tisci chose her to open his Givenchy spring show, her head held high in a draped tobacco-color dress and flat sandals. And when she says with a shrug, “I don’t know the difference between black and everything else!” it’s an encouraging sign of the nonracial makeup of today’s teen consciousness. Why should people even bother to count whose genes come from where?
This article was written by Sarah Mower for Vogue.com. To read the full article, visit the publisher’s website using this link.
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