At top magazines, Black representation remains a work in progress

Representational image (Source: Reuters)

On the last Friday morning in August, the website for Harper’s Bazaar magazine led with an image of a Black model smiling widely in an Hermès gown, her hair in dreadlocks. Beneath that was a portrait of Lil Nas X and, just below it, an assemblage of stories about Aaliyah’s personal style.

The magazine’s most recent print cover featured Beyoncé, photographed by a Black photographer, Campbell Addy, and styled in part by Samira Nasr, who in 2020 became the first person of color to lead the publication in its 154-year history. (This was also Beyoncé’s first Harper’s Bazaar cover in a decade; she was last photographed and styled for the magazine by two white men known for selling images that resemble soft-core pornography.)

None of this is lost on Nikki Ogunnaike, who was named digital director at Harper’s Bazaar in November. Nearly 15 years ago, when she began interning at fashion magazines, she grew accustomed to being one of two Black people on staff, she said.

Now she moderates panels during such initiatives as Hearst Magazines’ recent three-day series highlighting Black talent in fashion. (Did she have access to similar programming early in her career? “Absolutely not.”) Now, when looking to fill entry-level positions, she scouts graduates of historically Black colleges and universities far from New York City. (“I don’t think 10 years ago that people were running to HBCUs,” she said. “They weren’t running to U.Va., where I went.”)

But the question remains: When it comes to magazines, will the change Ogunnaike has witnessed, accelerated in 2020 by the murder of George Floyd and the social unrest that followed, be lasting? Will fashion, with its history of bias and exclusion, fall back into old patterns of treating racial progress as a trend, or will it truly embrace systemic reinvention?

The conversation around magazines’ diversity problem is perennial. In September 2018, for example, Black women covered a majority of top titles. But by 2019, the models on those covers were less racially diverse, according to The Fashion Spot’s annual report.

Even now, there are signs that the imperative has waned. Early this year, The New York Times examined whether Black representation had improved in the fashion industry, including magazines, and encountered widespread reluctance from companies to engage with questions about staffing. Still, an analysis of nine major magazines — four international editions of Vogue, the American and British editions of Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle — showed a surge of Black representation at the time.

That surge has gone sluggish. The majority of those nine publications used less Black talent for their covers in the six-month period from March to September of this year when compared with the previous six-month period that came on the heels of the summer of Black Lives Matter protests. (Two exceptions were Vogue Italia and Harper’s Bazaar, which used more Black talent over time.)

Chioma Nnadi, the digital director and highest-ranking Black editor at Vogue, called it a “slow and steady kind of journey.”

“Radical change actually is incremental, and changing the culture of a company or changing the culture of an industry — it takes a long time,” said Nnadi, who stepped into her role last September after six years as the website’s fashion news director. “In order to make lasting change, it can’t be a box that’s ticked and forgotten about until there’s another crisis, or there’s another flashpoint in the news cycle.”

While Ogunnaike and Nnadi work for different publishing companies — each with its own diversity baggage — they feel a similar pressure at times, operating within traditionally white institutions.

Lindsay Peoples Wagner, who was named editor of The Cut in January, described in an essay published Monday “the specific kind of pressure to get it right at all times, at all costs, that comes from being one of the very few Black leaders of a publication, and the high wire can feel like it’s suspended above a pool of piranhas.”

And that’s the problem, as companies continue to grapple with their internal cultures more than a year after being called out for their shortcomings: There is an expectation that Black leaders alone will drive change. “I don’t think it should be up to people of color to shoulder the responsibility of coming up with the answers and the solutions,” Nnadi said.

The top echelons of magazine mastheads — the titles with “chief,” “executive” or “director” attached — have remained predominantly white, with a few powerful exceptions. For example, under Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, more than half of the last 17 cover models were Black; under his predecessor, Alexandra Shulman, only two Black women were given solo covers in 25 years.

But there have been major appointments of Black editors outside these mainstream fashion titles. The influential British indie magazine Dazed hired Ib Kamara as editor-in-chief in January. The beauty magazine Allure named Jessica Cruel to its top position in August.

Black models have also ascended this year. Over the past 12 months of covers, one of the most in-demand models of any racial background was Precious Lee, who appeared on the all-important September issue of American Vogue.

This year also had “the first cover I had with my actual name on it,” Lee said, referring to the May issue of Harper’s Bazaar, a magazine that, growing up, she associated with “all of those old pictures of skinny white women.”

Lee has also fought for more Black talent during photo shoots: people who understand how to light, apply makeup and style the hair of Black women. On the occasions she’s arrived to a set without any “POC people on the glam team,” she said, “I’ve had to put my foot down and say, ‘I’m not shooting with these people.’

“I never want to be involved in something that does not have an expansive crew,” Lee continued. “It just doesn’t make sense. I actually think that’s the reason I’ve been modeling for years and people may think I’m a new face. Maybe if I had been a little bit more concerned about ‘making it’ back then, without ‘making it’ in a way that I felt was true to myself — if I didn’t hold on to what I felt was right — maybe it could have happened earlier.”

(Author: Jessica Testa)/(c.2021 The New York Times Company)