How is the fashion industry encouraging greater minority representation?

As the New York Times releases a report showing the fashion industry still has a lot of diversity work to do, we look at the ways brands and industry bodies are attempting to increase participation

Last month the New York Times published a brilliant report diving into the numbers behind diversity and inclusion in the fashion and industry and, it’s fair to say, things don’t look great.

Focusing specifically on Black representation, the paper surveyed 64 brands with more than $50 million in annual revenue or 1 million Instagram followers,  alongside 15 major department stores and retailers and the industry's largest fashion magazines. The responses (if and when they came – many European companies cited GDPR and other data protection laws as preventing them from sharing information) suggested a clear picture: diversity has increased where it is most visible but, behind-the-scenes, not a huge amount has changed. A vanishingly small number of major brands, stores and publications count BAME individuals among their senior staff.

And yet, during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, many of these same brands were quick to issue statements recognising their own whiteness, pledging to ‘do better’ and be more representative of the global community. So why the delay and what is actually being done to increase diversity? To answer this it is important to first look at the barriers to entry that minority populations are more likely to face in the fashion industry. Below we break down the factors preventing inclusion and look at how the industry at large is (or isn’t) tackling them.

​Cost of entry

The price of higher education is a hotly contested subject across many fields but in the creative industries – and especially fashion – where good courses are vastly oversubscribed, universities are concentrated in some of the most expensive cities in the world and there’s no guarantee of a high paying career at the end, the prospect of finding the funding, even with the help of student finance, to attend fashion school can be prohibitive to those from lower economic backgrounds.

​The cost of a three-year undergraduate fashion design course at Central Saint Martins, for example, is £27,750 before living expenses, rent, and the cost of equipment, such as sewing machines, materials and art supplies. are factored in. While tuition fees and some living expenses are covered by government-backed loans for UK students, this is not true of international students (for whom the cost rises to £68,760) or for those on Central Saint Martins’ highly coveted MA Fashion Design course, which comes in at £12,920 for UK citizens and £32,900 for international students. Across the pond, Parsons School of Design charges up to $75,690 per year for its undergraduate fashion programme.

Preen AW21. All images courtesy of the British Fashion Council.

Bearing in mind a Masters degree is now considered almost requisite for a job at any big design house, and that Central Saint Martins and Parsons are frequently voted to be the best schools in the world, it’s not hard to see how these figures could easily dissuade a talented student without a wealthy family to support them. And, while this is not an issue that necessarily only affects minorities, a 2020 study by the Social Metrics Commission found that BAME households in the UK were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty as their white counterparts. Just 19% of the 14.4 million people living in poverty in the UK identified as white, demonstrating that the costs associated with higher education are significantly more of a barrier to students from minority backgrounds.

​What is being done?

Scholarships are, and have always been, a key way of opening up higher education to those from lower economic backgrounds. While many arts universities offer some form of bursary or scholarship, these are traditionally awarded on grounds of merit, with a student’s ethnic background rarely taken into consideration. Likewise, of the 25 privately funded scholarships (i.e. backed by brands or foundations) available to fashion design students at the University of the Arts London colleges (the umbrella university behind Central Saint Martins and London College of Fashion) only two dictate that recipients must come from specific ethnic backgrounds. In both these cases, the awards are for international students hailing from specific countries (Hong Kong, China and India). None were specifically aimed at offering aid to Black students.
​
However, on the back of the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, change is taking place. Parsons and the Fashion Institute of Technology have both committed to creating new scholarships and mentorship programmes for Black students (although information about these remains scarce) while Virgil Abloh has partnered with the Fashion Scholarship Fund (along with donations from Evian, Farfetch, Louis Vuitton and New Guards Group) to create the “Post Modern” Scholarship Fund, with a $1 million to support Black fashion students in the US.

Halpern AW21

Gucci too, awarded 20 American fashion students from diverse backgrounds awards of up to $20k each in June 2020 as part of its Changemakers Scholarship. Adidas also launched a scholarship programme supporting 50 Black students per year at its partner schools. It is telling, however, that the overwhelming majority of these scholarships sprang up in response to last summer’s protests and are concentrated in the US. It is, of course, a start, but much more can be done and a more systemic and integrated approach must be taken to address the extra hurdles facing fashion talent from BAME backgrounds.

​Limited funding for small businesses

As the New York Times article highlighted, the majority of BAME people working in the fashion industry hold positions at small brands: only one of the 64 companies contacted by the NYT had a Black CEO and only four had Black creative directors. The NYT even went so far as to suggest that many Black designers had opted to found their own businesses as an alternative to the racial bias they faced trying to work inside the traditional fashion system.

​And while founding your own brand can be a pathway to growth and success, especially with the recent boom in direct-to-consumer brands, fashion is a notoriously difficult business in which to turn a profit. Even Victoria Beckham, with the benefits of star power and millions in the bank, has not been able to make her fashion brand profitable. For young BAME designers, the traditional hurdles of starting a new business are confounded by the fact that they are far more likely to be turned down for business loans that their white counterparts and can also face a lack of support from private investors and major retailers.

​What is being done?

Fashion industry bodies, such as the British Fashion Council and Council of Fashion Designers of America, have long offered grants and awards for emerging fashion businesses. While few of these are specifically aimed at supporting minority-owned businesses, some, such as the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund and BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, count prominent fashion diversity advocates, including Aurora James of the 15 Percent Pledge (more below) and Edward Enninful, as judges. Despite this, however, many of these long established awards only recognised their first Black recipients as late as 2019. As always, if you are a consumer, the best way to support minority designers is to shop from their brands.

​Geographical industry concentration

While fashion is an undeniably global business, when it comes to the location of head offices and design studios, the big brands more often than not are head quartered in the fashion capitals of New York, Milan, London and Paris. While this shouldn’t necessarily create big barriers in a today’s global world, the reality is that these cities are all based in majority Caucasian countries, meaning individuals who aren’t native (and likely to be from BAMR backgrounds) immediately face the increased hurdles of obtaining visas and funding the cost of international moves. Once there, they, along with their native minority counterparts, are also likely to face cultures which, overtly or subconsciously, can be less than welcoming to minorities. BAME people, for example, make up just 12.9% of the UK population and, staggeringly, just 4% of the Italian population; demographics which can be intimidating to migrants from more diverse countries and in which white is easily read as 'normal'.

​What is being done?

Troublingly this is one area in which immigration policies may result in the industry taking a step backwards. Recent moves by a number of right-wing Western governments to tighten immigration rules mean it is becoming harder and harder for so-called ‘low skilled’ workers, who are overwhelmingly represented by ethnic minorities, to emigrate to America and European countries.

​While there has been a surge in non-traditional fashion capitals hosting their own fashion weeks to raise the profile of homegrown brands, and the rise of direct-to-consumer brands has helped those based outside of the usual cities break through, solving this issue is going to mean the fashion industry at large reassessing its structure. Should the time-honoured fashion month dissolve, as many have predicted may be a result of the pandemic, this could be the first step towards shifting importance away from the geographical location of a brand’s headquarters.

​You can’t be what you can’t see

It may be a cliche but it's a cliche for a reason. There is no doubt that representation of minorities, and particularly Black people, has risen on the catwalks and on magazine covers – with the New York Times finding all the magazines it surveyed had Black models on their September 2020 issues. The majority had also featured more than 50 per cent Black cover models on their recent issues while the 25 brands who answered the NYT survey had all used Black runway models. While data is harder to come by for other minorities, those who closely follow the catwalks will anecdotally confirm there has been greater diversity in recent seasons.

However, there is far more to the fashion industry than being a model and, while the optics undoubtedly matter, in many ways simply using Black, Asian and Hispanic models is the easiest and least structurally challenging thing a brand or magazine can do to show its commitment to diversity. Magazines no longer rely so heavily on newsstand sales to make money and, for brands, hiring freelance BAME models for a one-off show adds a shiny veneer of inclusivity to a house that may be far from diverse. This was demonstrated after the SS21 shows by an Instagram story shared by Jacquemus. While its show had included a number of models from different ethnic backgrounds, the team responsible for creating the clothes and putting the show together was almost entirely Caucasian.

Likewise, the New York Times found a startling lack of diversity among creative directors, leadership teams and board members at the major luxury fashion houses and retailers it surveyed. Ultimately it is these people, not the models, who have the power to make change within the fashion industry.

Art School AW21

​What is being done?

A number of not-for-profits and industry bodies aimed specifically at advancing the careers of minorities within the fashion industry have sprung up in recent years to address this issue. Among them is the Black in Fashion Council, which was founded in 2019 by former Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner and PR specialist Sandrine Charles. The Council works alongside fashion and beauty brands, magazines and retailers to represent and further the careers of Black people in the fashion and beauty industries to, in its own words “create diverse spaces that directly reflect what the world actually looks like at large”.

The Kelly Initiative, founded to honour the life and work of designer Patrick Kelly, similarly works to a four-point plan aimed at creating inroads for Black fashion professionals while increasing transparency and accountability. Its aims include creating an industry wide census for sharing data on diversity, anti-bias training for managers, an audit of recruitment processes in the fashion industry and the creation of the Kelly List – a group of top-tier multi-disciplinary fashion talent who are supported by the initiative in return for pledging to create equitable opportunities for Black talent in the future. Elsewhere, Aurora James’ 15 Percent Pledge has encouraged names including Bloomingdales, Moda Operandi, Vogue and Sephora to promise 15 per cent of their shelf or the talent they work with will be Black individuals or Black-owned brands.

What's next?

While there is still, evidently, a lot of work to be done one thing that is clear is that conversations around diversity in the fashion industry are not going away. It is also clear that this is not an issue that can be solved by brands working in isolation to offer one-off scholarships or hire more inclusive casts of models. Instead it will take the industry at large working in tandem with retailers, governments and business bodies to introduce progress benchmarks, improve access to the industry for young talent and recognise the institutional structures that are currently creating unnecessary and unique hurdles for minorities. Only time will tell if this is truly possible.

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