![]() ![]() “The faces that you see in the film, the beautiful faces of many people you come across in the street, that beauty has its own life.” With so many miles and layers of technology separating us, something, anything, that felt real also felt profoundly valuable the ordinary, in other words, is enough. “I tried to find what would define ordinary beauty,” he said. ![]() I all the forms of strange beauty.” In its marketing, Gucci embraced ugly ducklings, the jolie laide and the faces only a mother could love - decisions that influenced other brands to follow this path and to break down barriers.īut for this presentation, Michele had made an even more daring, evolved choice. “I analyzed all the strange faces, the freaks I placed on the catwalk, on the set,” Michele told us through an interpreter. And after the film ended, he settled into a chair in front of a carved mantelpiece set with blue porcelain to explain his eccentric thinking about clothes and casting.įor years, Michele has looked to the farthest extremes of human appearance for his models. He was simply showing 94 new ensembles on 94 models. He didn’t characterize this collection, which marked the brand’s 100th anniversary, as one for fall or spring. Much of what he does goes against the grain and then becomes the standard. Michele is both a contrarian and a prognosticator. ![]() The songs “Gucci Gang,” “Green Gucci Suit” and “Gucci Flip Flops” serenaded the models as they walked. The short movie, set in a make-believe nightclub, was a ready-to-wear mash-up of the brand’s history and its contemporary provocations, all set to a soundtrack that celebrated its influential position in popular culture. While Prada’s runways still aren’t winning any prizes for diversity, Bruna’s appearance in its campaign is a clear indicator that fashion is moving further and further away from the racial boundaries that have limited the scope and impact of the industry during the past century.It was breakfast time on the East Coast one morning in April, and Gucci designer Alessandro Michele was speaking to journalists via Zoom after debuting his new collection in a splashy film, “Gucci Aria,” on the Italian company’s website. Just this past month, African-French model Cindy Bruna appeared in an advertising campaign for Prada, just the third black woman ever to do so. MORE: 7 New Runway Models You Should KnowĪnd-while women of color are still outnumbered by Caucasian women on the runway-the number of high-profile black models is ever-increasing. Eventually, however, Beverly Johnson became the first black woman to cover American Vogue in 1974, and the black It Girls of the sixties and seventies gave way to mainstream black supermodels like Veronica Webb and Naomi Campbell in the 1980s and ’90s, who were succeeded in turn by contemporary superstars like Joan Smalls, Jourdan Dunn, and Chanel Iman. Cleveland and Luna were undisputed darlings of the mod YouthQuake fashion scene of the sixties, and they set the stage for more and more black models to break into the industry.Įven then, a runway show might contain one black woman to thirty white women, and it took a long time for black models to become widely accepted. In the 1960s and ’70s, ground-breakers like Luna, Pat Cleveland, Grace Jones and, eventually, Iman, started appearing on the scene, oftentimes championed as one designer’s muse. Slowly but surely, black models began to break through the racial divide in fashion. ![]() MORE: From Cindy Crawford to Karlie Kloss: The 18 Hottest All-American Models In 1966, two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Donyale Luna became the first black model on the cover of any Vogue, when she was photographed for the magazine’s British edition. While Ebony and other publications targeted at a black demographic are still very much part of the picture today, the racial exclusion practiced throughout the industry finally began to dwindle with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. MORE: The 5 Plus-Size Models You Should be Following on Instagram Together, they provided a much-needed outlet for black women systematically excluded from the pages of white-targeted fashion publications like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. African-American lifestyle publication Ebony magazine was launched in 1945, and its cross-country runway show, the Ebony Fashion Fair, was launched a decade later, in 1958. In an era defined by the prejudicial treatment of black Americans and the concurrent rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the black community started to develop outlets for exploring the impact of fashion, entirely separate from the unwelcoming environment of the fashion industry at the time. MORE: Underwear Models Through the Decades: 25 Sexy Photos From the 1940s to Now How To Get Invited To Fashion Week, No Matter Who You Are ![]()
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