Thus the number of new, well-known black or Asian models has shrunk to a handful: Jourdan Dunn, Chanel Iman, Sessilee Lopez, Georgie Badiel. Or even, indeed, on the inside pages, thanks to the current fascination with celebrity that means a famous person (usually a white, fake-tanned one) bags the cover slot. It seems astonishing to think that, in two days' time, America may elect its first black president, but the editor of a glossy magazine might still think twice about putting a beautiful black woman on the front cover. Fashion isn't just about the way a dress moves.' The concern is that a generation of girls, both black and white, will grow up thinking there is only one - white - benchmark for beauty. And my industry is the least modern of them all. I want my industry to be as modern as the next one. According to Hardison: 'Fashion should be a reflection of society. We had achieved all of this' - she sits up straighter, tilting her chin imperiously and I catch a glimpse of how arresting she must have been as a 20-something woman striding down a runway for Oscar de la Renta or Halston - 'and we'd disappeared'.Ĭasual observers might wonder why this issue is important, why anyone cares who's wearing a £2,500 coat in a magazine fashion spread or on a catwalk since most of us will never be able to afford it anyway. It's like once you've seen Paris it's hard to go back to the farm. 'Once you've climbed to the top of the mountain you don't expect to be back at the bottom again. In the late 70s and early 80s, she recalls, on the back of the black civil-rights movement, catwalks and magazines were often more diverse than they are now black models were the stars. What irks her most about the lack of diversity on the catwalks is the fact that 'we'd had it before and it had disappeared'.
Something to do with the fact that yesterday she held another campaign meeting, and that she's fasting because it is the month of Ramadan. Paintings, mostly of black women, line the walls there's a large framed poster from Andy Warhol's American Indian Series. We sit in her small apartment near Bryant Park in New York, a short walk from the Garment District where she started out working for a button company. 'Did you realise that, over the past decade, black models have been reduced to a category? Call me.' She was respected and well liked in a business renowned for being fickle and as ingrained with ego and jealousy as a designer logo on a leather handbag. She'd retired, which meant she had nothing to gain financially. 'Every couple of months she'd ring me and say, "There are no black girls out there. 'Not even my doctor knows that!' she hoots.) It was Naomi Campbell who persuaded her to come out of retirement to organise the events. (She is, it swiftly transpires, not a typical sixtysomething. Hardison had actually sold her agency and stepped out of fashion, preferring, she says, to lie in a hammock in Mexico and dance salsa with pretty skinny Latino boys. As Iman said at one of the early groups: 'In any other industry it would be racism and you'd be taken to court for it.' Black models paid less than their white counterparts. Designers who, out of a total of 30 models, use only two who are black because, 'If it's more than two it becomes a Black Thing'. Caption writers who get the few black models who are successful mixed up. Magazine editors who say black covers don't sell. Casting agents who stipulate 'No ethnics' this season. 'I knew I could make the rest of the industry feel self-conscious about what was going on.' Over the months her audiences revealed a fashion white-out - design houses that hadn't used a black model for a decade issue after issue of American Vogue without a single black model on the fashion pages. 'I knew I could make things happen,' she says. Here, the likes of Naomi Campbell, Liya Kebede, Iman, Tyson Beckford and Veronica Webb squeeze into a room with some of the fashion world's biggest players such as André Leon Talley, editor-at-large of American Vogue and designer Vera Wang, as well as casting agents, stylists and representatives from the modelling agencies.Īt each meeting, Hardison sits at the front and beckons people she knows to stand up and speak. These are protest groups like no other - a cross between a rumbustious church service and the coolest party you have ever been to.
Over the past 14 months she's held campaign meetings in New York to speak out about a subject that has been largely taboo in the fashion industry.
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