by Crystal P. Smith, TheLoop21.com
The lack of diversity in the fashion industry has been one of those topics we’ve lamented over for years, which is why Halle Berry’s appearance on this September’s cover of “Vogue” was such a huge deal. She’s the first black woman to do so since Naomi Campbell’s 1989 September cover. We thought that perhaps things were changing— maybe the industry had finally gotten the message: People of color wear clothes too.
September also happens to be the season for New York Fashion Week where all of the big designers showcase their Spring and Summer collections. Considering the appearance of Berry on the cover of the most coveted fashion magazine (they call it the Bible), surely the runaways would feature a wider range of models of color. So, we decided to research it and find out. New York Magazine featured slideshows of each of the fashion shows so it was easy for us to literally count the number of times a model of color walked down the runaway. And as you can expect, it didn’t look too good.
Out of 4699 looks, 405 or 8.6 percent models were African- American, 345 or 7.3 percent were Asian, 114 or 2.4 percent were Latino, 149 or 3.2 percent were considered other (we couldn’t decipher their ethnicity but they weren’t Caucasian) and a considerable 3686 or 78.4 percent were Caucasian.
Out of 144 shows, 25 shows featured no models of African-American descent.
