Diane von Furstenberg, Tory Burch, and Marc Jacobs, among many other designers, went to bat for Hillary Clinton, creating T-shirts for her campaign emblazoned with phrases like “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.” In Ireland, when the country was set to vote on a bill to decriminalize abortion, local designers created luxurious hats and sweaters with the word “repeal” embroidered on them. And when Trump threatened to ban people from majority Muslim countries from entering the United States, designers took a stand by sending models down the runway during New York Fashion Week in outfits covered with words like “immigrant” and “human.”
The fashion community has shown, over and over again, that it is willing to fight for social justice and progressive causes. So it’s worth asking why it hasn’t done more to grapple with the racial injustice within its own ranks. The numbers alone tell a story: Within the Council of Fashion Designers of America, one of the industry’s most prominent trade organizations, only 3% of members are black. Less than 10% of the designers at the last New York Fashion Week were black. And only 15% of the models that walked the runway were black
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