Diversity means understanding.
But what does diversity in fashion actually mean? And what still needs to change and be improved. These were some of my first few questions I thought about when I started this project. It’s such an interesting topic for me, as a foreign student from Asia, being in Europe and I want to get it right. Fashion always tells us how to look: what to wear, what make up to put on or what colour of hair you should have to be in trend. This is really sad, but it also tells you what size or height you should be. It dictates “everything” to you. And what is even sadder, is the fact that fashion dictates what one’s own “taste” of age, race and gender should be. Like there is a mould that every individual must fit into. But I think it can’t be like this anymore, because we all live in a diverse world. We all know that the fashion world has really strict rules. For example, there is a standard and requirement, that all modelling agencies wanted to see is only tall, European looking, skinny models. They rarely accept models of different race, age and size. 1During my research I found an interview with a supermodel from the past - Bethann Hardison, she was saying that she still remembers the days when, before every single New York Fashion Week, “Casting directors would send out notices to all the modelling agencies in the whole city, saying 'no blacks, no ethnics' — we don’t want to see them.” Back then, the issue of diversity in the fashion industry had “got lost like a splinter,” says Hardison. She organized a press conference in New York in 2007, where Bethann criticised the industry’s lack of diversity. “From that moment on, no one has ever said that again” – she said in the interview. It’s a big progress, but still, the lack of diversity in Fashion continues to be a problem.(1) Also talking about magazine covers, statistics shows us, that in 2014, only 119 of 611 covers of major fashion magazines featured models of colour. An overwhelming majority (what is 78.69 percent) of models walking in New York Fashion Week last year were white. And of the 260 shows appearing at Lincoln Center, only three featured African-American designers. These already sobering statistics become more troubling when looking at the disparities between Latina, Asian and black models. There were more black models walking the runway in Fall-Winter 2014 than Asian models (9.75 percent of all models, as compared to 7.67 percent, respectively), and even fewer Latina models than either of those two groups. People have tried to sort this problem out and we can see more nationalities on catwalks, modelling , but what about other aspects of the Fashion industry? What about a size and age? Nowadays we can see models of different ages and sizes. Plus size models are also becoming more popular and they are modelling just as much as smaller models of size 6 to 8. This is more realistic as the average women in the uk is a size 16.