An Uptick, but Is It Enough?

Six months ago, Keli Goff, a blogger, political commentator and self-appointed fashion industry watchdog, chided designers for their near-exclusion of black models on the runways. Most shows, she wrote on her Web site, Loop21.com, “were about as diverse as a Tea Party rally.” Of 144 shows last spring, she reported, 25 featured no black models at all, while others included only one or two.
Just days ago, in the wake of New York Fashion Week, Ms. Goff softened her stance, having noticed an encouraging, if modest, uptick in black models on the catwalks. According to her tabulations, more than 90 percent of the 200-plus designers had at least one black model, a jump of seven percentage points over last fall.

A number of those designers seemed to have pointedly embraced diversity: among them Flora Gill and Alexa Adams of Ohne Titel, where 50 percent of the models were black or of mixed ethnic descent; and Gwen Stefani of LAMB, where the figure was 40 percent. Such a stepped-up racial presence is worth noting, since, as Ms. Goff maintains on her blog, pop culture, fashion included, “often has a much greater impact on our attitudes on a subject like race than politics or the law.”

Well and good. But before Seventh Avenue spins into a frenzy of self-congratulation, it is worth noting that some insiders view the recent upsurge as negligible. “An increase is good if it’s proportionate to the population and represents the people that are buying,” said Travis Given, a manager with Major Model agency in New York. “But that doesn’t seem to be happening yet.”

Black women spend close to $23 billion a year on clothes, according to TargetMarkets.com.

Nor does an increase represent any kind of advance over the 1970s, when couture stars like Yves Saint Laurent and Hubert de Givenchy featured black women prominently. “Years ago the runways were almost dominated by black girls,” J. Alexander, a runway coach on “America’s Next Top Model,” told Guy Trebay in The New York Times in 2007. “Now some people are not interested in the vision of the black girls unless they’re doing a jungle theme and they can put her in a grass skirt and diamonds and hand her a spear.”

Alber Elbaz of Lanvin came perilously close to furthering that stereotype last year, stirring a minor tempest when he sent out jungle prints on a procession of black models who appeared almost nowhere else in his show. More politically savvy than that, most New York designers this season took pains to mix things up, showing tribal and tropical prints on women of various skin tones.

It’s tempting all the same to speculate that more than a few employed a larger-than-usual contingent of black women simply because their darker skin made a pleasing canvas for the raucously colorful designs — in short, because they sell the clothes.

Such moves, if they were deliberate, make sound commercial sense. Do they speak to real inclusion? You decide.RUTH LA FERLA