‘Inspiring Beauty’ celebrates 50 years of Ebony's style influence
Today African-American stylistas may make pilgrimages to the
Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York to spy the latest fashion trends,
but there was a time when that was hardly possible. Diversity wasn't a
concept the emerging American fashion industry even imagined a half
century ago. It was this reality that led Eunice Walker Johnson to carve
out her own path. "My mother was ahead of the curve on everything,"
says Johnson Publishing Company Chairman Linda Johnson Rice.
Barely known outside the black community, Ebony Fashion Fair, which officially hit the road in earnest in a Greyhound bus
in 1958, grew into a traveling fashion institution that, at its height,
hit as many as 170 cities per year, some as small as Itta Bena, Miss.
Models strutted and shimmied in high couture for almost exclusively
black audiences for a two-hour fashion experience that also served as a
fundraiser. Since its inception Ebony Fashion Fair has raised more than $55 million for various black charities before leaving the runway in 2009.
Thanks to the Museum of Design Atlanta, residents can either relive or discover this magic through Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair,
an acclaimed exhibition that originated at the Chicago History Museum
in 2013. For Rice, Atlanta is a perfect first showcase outside her
native Chicago mainly because it is "a mecca for African-American
success." In addition she says the show has been coming to Atlanta for
probably 40 years, with Rice herself even attending some of them.
Inspiring Beauty was sparked by Timothy Long, a costume
curator at the Chicago History Museum who explored the possibility with
Johnson before her death in 2010 at age 93.
Rice, Eunice and John H. Johnson's only child, picked up the baton and
worked with the museum, even when Long went on leave, to mount the
exhibition. "He thought that [it] would be a perfect showcase to really
highlight not only the fashions, which are really exceptional and very
theatrical and fantastic," Rice explains, "but really what my mother did
as a person and as a pioneer and as a visionary, going to Europe to buy
for the Ebony Fashion Fair when there were no African Americans buying
couture clothes at that time."
And even though Johnson, thanks to the runaway success of Ebony and JET
magazines, which she founded with her husband, had cash — as the videos
and other materials accompanying the exhibition make clear — the money
didn't matter. Some European and emerging American designers weren't
thrilled with the prospect of black models wearing their clothes, paid
for or not. Others, however, were more sensible, as Johnson reportedly
bought as many as 200 pieces per season. Emilio Pucci, Pierre Cardin,
and Yves Saint Laurent were early supporters.
More than a mere consumer, Johnson, a Talladega College-educated
native of Selma, Ala., was an astute art lover and understood that she
was exposing much more than clothes. These designers, as she was well
aware, were modern-day masters, and she respected them as such, without
losing sight of what pieces translated best to her core audience of
black women. "My mother had a sense of style and a thirst for culture
and education and I think beauty, for the depth of beauty," Rice says.
In her October lecture at MODA, one of many programs created in
support of the exhibition, Chicago History Museum curator Joy Bivins
noted Johnson's importance as a premier collector. According to Bivins,
Johnson "was able to broker or acquire some of the most significant
pieces of late-20th-century fashion in any collection anywhere"
To properly spotlight the fashion and pay homage to the women who
wore them, the exhibition, which has been whittled down from 67 pieces
to 40, has mannequins in dark tones that recall the complexions of
models that donned the garments in years past. Their creation, Bivins
revealed, ate away at much of the exhibition's budget because it was
very important to the team to capture that essence. Source: clatl.com
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