Korin Miller goes live from Fashion Week with the skinny on the models, the runways and more.
“I would hope some of the designers would mix it up this season. Unless you were Eastern European, white, extremely skinny … you didn’t fit into the shows last season,” says Nigel Barker, the photographer and judge on TV’s “America’s Next Top Model.” “Some shows had just one black model,” Barker says, adding that he found the shows monotonous, visually unexciting and depressing.
“Fashion is about fantasy, and everybody’s fantasy is not to be 6 feet and white.” “I think designers will be more mindful,” says Jasmine H. Chang, executive fashion editor of O, the Oprah Magazine. Chang says the absence of black models last season made her feel “uncomfortable.
Here I am seated in an audience with every ethnicity in the world, and I did feel it was wrong.” If there is a change, it will be in no small part because of the efforts of former model and agent Bethann Hardison, who has organized three panel discussions since September on the lack of diversity on runways. And it’s a problem that’s been building, she says.
“It’s not just a bad year, it’s been a bad decade.” Who does she blame for the runway whiteout? “I blame us all - the designers, the agents, myself. … But for me it all starts with the fashion designer,” Hardison says. “They’ve gotten very ‘Stepford Wives,’ lost in commerce, very conservative. …