If you buy clothes this is relevant to you! Check out a BET News spotlight on Black models and designers in the fashion industry. Be sure to set your DVRs or tune in live tonight at 8:30pm because you know BET is slack on replayin the good ish! Shouts out to Cat doing her thing behind the scenes!
From the official release:
According to targetmarketnews.com, Black women in the United States spend more than $20 billion on apparel each year. Unfortunately the runways, magazine spreads and the image/beauty industry at large are increasingly ignoring their buying power by choosing instead to market an Eastern-European form of beauty as the standard. At New York’s September 2007 Fashion Week the runways were dominated by white faces. In fact, Black women were more absent from the runways than some fashion insiders have seen since the ’60s. Of the 101 runway shows, more than 1/3 employed no Black models; most of the others used just one or two. So is the fashion industry racist or are Blacks simply not in season? BET News Producers Betsy Jones and Catherine Rogers went behind the scenes of New York’s Fashion Week to find the answer in a half hour special, FASHION BLACKOUT. Industry insiders, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Naomi Campbell, Bethann Hardison, Tyson Beckford, Tracy Reese, André Leon Talley and many others sound off about the sharp decline in African American images in the fashion industry, the blatant racism and their plans on how to keep the Black model from becoming extinct. FASHION BLACKOUT will explore these issues and how the exclusion of an entire race has a negative effect on Black women and their sense of self-worth.
For more on FASHION BLACKOUT, check out the website here.
update: (ok so they ARE gonna replay it!!) If you missed it last night you can catch a re-air Saturday (5/31) at 7:30p and Sunday (6/1) at 11am!
