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Milan Fashion Week is finally stepping up to the plate when it comes diversity and inclusion. Milan Fashion Week will open with five black designers from the Black Lives Matter Italian Fashion Collective opening Milan Fashion Week. This is not the first time the collective has shown at Milan Fashion Week. The collective showed in September 2020, but at the end of Milan Fashion Week.
“It’s extraordinary, it’s a very strong signal the Italian Fashion Chamber is broadcasting. It will be us setting the tone,” said to AFP [to] Michelle Ngonmo, co-founder of the collective alongside designers Stella Jean and Edward Buchanan, as reported in fashionnetwork.com. However, “it took quite a fight” before the collective was able to “overcome the CNMI’s hesitation in facilitating our access to the [Milan] Fashion Week. Now, Italian Fashion Chamber (CNMI) is willing to listen to us,” added Ngonmo.
The same five black designers will show at Milan Fashion Week in February as showed in September 2020, Joy Ijeoma Meribe from Cameroon, with her Modaf Designs label; Karim Daoudi from Morocco; Nigeria-born Claudia Gisèle Ntsama, with her Gisfab label; Fabiola Manirakiza from Burundi, founder of the Frida-Kiza label; and from Senegal, Pape Mocodou Fall, a.k.a. Mokodu, as his label is known.
Nogonmo explained that there are over 450 designers of African descent in Italy, many of whom show their collections in London, Paris, and Beijing because the discrimination they experience in Italy. “For five years, we crashed against a wall of silence when we knocked on the CNMI’s door, but now we are an integral part of [the Chamber], without losing our identity,” Ngonmo explained. “Ours are made-in-Italy labels, we manufacture in Italy, not in Africa.”
Image courtesy of vogue.com
Gigi returns
Supermodel Gigi Hadid is back!! After a child with her partner Zayn Malik six months ago, Gigi is back gracing the March issue of Vogue US.
“I know that I’m not as small as I was before, but I also am a very realistic thinker,” said Gigi Hadid in an interview Chloe Malle for the March issue of Vogue. “ I straight up was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll shoot a Vogue cover, but I’m obviously not going to be a size 0,’ nor do I, at this point, feel like I need to be back to that. I also think it’s a blessing of this time in fashion that anyone who says that I have to be that, can suck it.”
Gigi was styled by Gabriella Karefa-Johnson and photographed by Ethan James Green for her recent Vogue cover. For the cover, Gigi is attired in a white and red floral Prada coat. Gigi dons the likes of Proenza Schouler, Alexander McQueen, Versace, and more for her spread in the March issue.
Image courtesy of popsugar.com
A name change can make all the difference
The New York Fashion Week (NYFW) calendar, under the auspices of Tom Ford, has a new name. For those who don’t know, NYFW was founded in 1944 by the great fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert. (NYFW was called Press Week in 1944.) Later, Press Week acquired the name New York Fashion Week and the calendar that announced all the fashion brands/designer that were officially showing at NYFW had the same name, the New York Fashion Week calendar.
All that has now changed. To adapt to changes in the market and some changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the CFDA has changed the name of the calendar to the American Collections Calendar. Instead of covering only New York events, it will encompass all American designers, regardless of location or collection release date.
The Fashion Calendar was invented by Ruth Finley in the 1940s. Finley owned it for 80 years until she sold the calendar to the CFDA right before she died in 2014. In September 1993, Finley published the first official fashion calendar grid which included most New York fashion events, as well as fashion events around the world.
In recent years fashion industry professionals have complained the calendar is too crowded and outdated with many key American designers taking their names off the NYFW calendar, choosing to show in Europe and Asia instead. Ford and the CFDA hopes that the new name of the NYFW calendar will lure some top American designers back to NYFW and new changes to the calendar will provide more access to other American designers and brands.
—William S. Gooch
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