‘20 Black Models You Need to Know.’ ‘12 Books on Black Fashion to Buy Right Now.’ ‘7 Black Fashion Editors Making a Name For Themselves.’
From May 2020 through the end of 2021, these headlines were inescapable. For many rising Black talents, it felt like the floodgates had opened in the fashion industry. After decades of quiet knocking, they were finally being let in.
Model Melonee Rembert remembers that moment as a kind of awakening. “I was being booked a lot more often than I had before, and having regular clients, which is what a model wants,” she tells Teen Vogue. “And then looking around, the energy was very vibrant, optimistic, and curious. So I felt like it was a little baby renaissance for the Black creatives as a collective. But on the other hand, it was packaged, inauthentic, and obviously being co-opted.”
After the surge of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 following an onset of police brutality against Black people, industries across the board began auditing their diversity practices. Fashion, in particular, faced a long-overdue reckoning. Brands that historically ignored Black employees were coming to terms with toxic work cultures.
For most Black creatives in fashion the calls for inclusion in 2020 and 2021 felt superficial then — an effort to remedy systemic racism through diversity hires. Now, some five years later, it's clearer that many of them were. “There was this push for diversity across the board — size-inclusivity, sexual orientation, and ableism,” says content creator and model Gess Pugh. “But by the end of 2022, the requests dropped significantly. I went from being booked three or four times a month, to maybe once a quarter. And not much changed on my end, so I was like… what happened?”
In 2022, Teen Vogue asked Kith CIO Sharifa Murdock if that progress had stuck. She said: “I want to know in 2025 which brands will continue their diversity efforts. That's a good time to say, ‘all right, maybe [this brand] didn't get over the bump’ because I see them already starting to fizzle. 2025 can give a real, true story on who is actually continuing the mission.”
Well we’re here and many Black creatives feel we’re back at square two — saved from square one only by the continued, often invisible, heavy-lifting of Black leaders.
“If people are not almost being told that these things are important, then they no longer think that they are,” says Antoine Gregory, founder of Black Fashion Fair. “They think that the issue may be resolved or fixed, but it isn’t. The industry is just talking about it a lot less.”
Gregory launched Black Fashion Fair in 2020 in response to his 2016 Twitter thread. It was a way to create a living archive for Black designers, where talent could be seen, remembered, and elevated. Because, as he puts it, they could “literally exist today and be gone tomorrow.”
Hood by Air is a prime example. The brand by Shayne Oliver and Raul Lopez (Lopez stepped away in 2011), won the LVMH Award and a CFDA award in its early years but has since gone through significant changes. “If a brand could be that successful, that critically acclaimed, that copied, and not make it, what does that say about the industry, but also about other Black designers who didn't have that platform?” Gregory posits.
It’s often those most impacted by exclusion who speak loudest about its harm. Gregory shoulders that role without hesitation. “It’s not exhausting. It’s necessary.” With BFF, his mission isn’t charity, it's culture, and he doesn’t mind being the keeper. He wants non-Black people to value Black designers, not just buy a few pieces to “clear their conscience,” but to buy them because the work is worthy, full stop.
Sandrine Charles says the work is still far from done. As founder of Sandrine Charles Consulting and co-founder of the Black in Fashion Council (alongside Lindsay Peoples, the former Editor-in-Chief of Teen Vogue and current Editor of The Cut), she’s seen the shifts up close — and the slippage.
“Real progress in fashion will always look slow from the outside,” she says. “We can push forth, but only so far. We want to create, we want to build for people of color, but everyone else has to meet us halfway. You have to have a goal of breeding equity for everyone.”
She compares it to a stuttering rhythm: “It’s 10 steps forward, but maybe two steps back and then five steps forward again. I think over the five years we've seen a lot of changes in teams and employees when it comes to Black people in fashion and media. And then now we see a deficit in this retention and unemployment that we could have never expected.” Still, she says she’s not giving up — and will continue to partner with people to “create space” for Black creatives in fashion.
When there’s nowhere safe to hide
Declines in representation aren’t unique to fashion and it’s representative of what’s happening across industries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2025, nearly 300,000 Black women left the U.S. labor force. At the same time, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles — once central to so many promises of change — were among the first eliminated under the current administration.
This rollback isn’t just shifting numbers — it’s shrinking access. For young Black people trying to enter competitive industries like fashion, the pathways are becoming increasingly narrow. Even among those pushing for change, scarcity can twist intention. Black creatives — long forced to fight for limited space — can sometimes become unintentional gatekeepers, guarding what little they’ve earned. When power is hard-won, it can turn protective. Even painful.
That duality became clear to Megan* back in 2020, during internships at two major fashion labels: one led by a white designer, the other Black. Despite their differences in identity and intent, both environments were fraught — filled with power imbalances, absence of care, and a surface-level understanding of what inclusion really requires.
She recalls the white-led brand’s founder casually using the n-word in a meeting. At the Black-led one, she cried through workdays.
“I think that was when the veil of fashion lifted for me,” Megan says.
Both brands were rising stars in 2020, publicly aligned with fashion’s diversity push. But inside, the experience was fractured. It’s why concrete change in the industry has struggled. Surface level activism cannot lead to systemic changes necessary to develop young Black talent. Years later, Megan says she’s still seeing the same dynamics repeat.
This scarcity mindset, conditioned by an industry that has only regressed in diversity since 2020, not only forces Black creatives to compete for limited seats at the table but also teaches younger generations to normalize struggle as the price of entry.
“My old boss said something along the lines of, ‘I need to go through what she went through.’ It was this idea that ‘because I got hazed, you have to get hazed,’” she says.
Fashion’s diversity problem isn’t just external. It seeps into structures, into relationships, into the next generation. And it makes holding on even harder. Megan says that if not for her current technical design job — one where she feels valued — and a CFDA scholarship worth tens off thousands of dollars, she might have left the industry entirely.
“Before, fashion felt like everything to me. It still is everything to me, but now I'm reframing it so I can protect it,” she says.
Before leaving that internship, she confronted the boss who’d caused her harm. She was left on read — and worried about blacklisting — but she doesn’t regret speaking up. Her voice mattered more.
For many young Black creatives, though, the choice between staying booked and speaking out is a constant negotiation. Fashion demands a kind of curated silence — a quiet compliance that keeps doors open, but change locked out. You want to care. You do care. But rent is due. And in a space already shaped by scarcity, exclusion, and fragility, speaking up can feel like choosing survival over purpose — or vice versa.
“As I got more integrated into the industry, I realized that people don't like it when you say the quiet part out loud,” Gess Pugh tells Teen Vogue. “There are repercussions. But it doesn't matter to me. If it means that I am looked at as a dissenter or an agitator in the industry, I'd actually prefer to be that.”
“I want people to be like, ‘No, Gess is going to say the thing that people are afraid to say,’” she continues. “I think for a lot of women, especially plus-size Black women, we are taught to be silent and just accept whatever it is that we get. We are the ones who are pushing the trends forward. We are the ones that are always inventing new things, and we're not the ones that get the financial or any sort of benefit on the back end.”
Shrinking space for diversity
The weight of being both Black and plus-size in fashion in 2025 has only grown heavier. As castings slow and campaigns shrink, hard-earned visibility slips further out of reach.
In 2020, model Melonee Rembert was working with brands like Skims, Yitty, Fabletics, and Calvin Klein. She even walked for Theophilio. But now, she says, runway work has dried up — and the casting calls that do come aren’t anywhere near the amount her thin white colleagues receive.
“There has been a definite evolution,” Rembert says. “As far as high fashion, I've noticed that there's a big difference. After last year, I was like, ‘I'm over this. I'm sick of going to these castings.’ A lot of times you go and then they don't even have a model that's your size. It makes you wonder, ‘Did you just invite me here for optics?’”
She was grateful to have an agent who didn’t sugarcoat this current moment in time. “My agent said: ‘It's going to look different. They're not really booking that many curve girls. And a lot of the curve girls are skinny now.’”
The shrinking space for size diversity is no accident — it’s echoing the same slow erasure happening with Black and brown representation overall. As the spotlight dims, the industry’s appetite for inclusion dims with it. But not everywhere.
There are still some brands that hold the line — many of them Black-owned.
“You either want to be at the forefront of it or it's not really a priority to you,” Rembert says. “I really like working with brands like Telfar, Theophilio because it's second nature to them. It's not something scary to talk about or to think about for them. Their whole thing is, it's fashion for everyone and they stand on that.”
And when the models step onto the runway, someone must be there to put a designer’s art into words. In 2020, Shelton Boyd-Griffith says it was a golden moment for Black freelance fashion writers.
“There aren’t enough Black fashion critics,” he says. “At that time, we were writing show reviews. We were the voices talking about Theophilio and all these emerging Black brands. But if we fast-forward, the calls are not as frequent. There's not a focus on getting a Black voice to write about a Black brand or topic. The freelance space is harder for Black writers right now if you're not on staff at a magazine. They already have their quota of people to write about these specific things. It's almost like having to find a new niche is the new thing.”
Even as the need for Black writers to tell Black stories lessens, Boyd-Griffith wishes editors would expand the lens — not just in who gets to tell Black stories, but in who gets to tell all stories.
“I’m a Black writer. I don’t shy away from that,” he says. “But it does get sometimes limiting when all of the signups that you’re getting are specifically only Black stories. Even now I’ll pitch something outside of the scope of Black fashion and it’s silent. We should be able to tell the same stories as our white counterparts.”
Living the dream, but at what cost?
Veteran stylist Solange Franklin recalls 2020 as a moment when it felt like the industry was finally greasing the wheels for change. However, by 2025, that momentum appears to have stalled. What Black fashion creatives need now, she says plainly, is funding.
“That to me has been my biggest friction as I move onward in my career because [publications and brands] know that we're going to need more than $100 to make this cover shoot happen,” she says. “So now you're putting it on me, a Black creative. I also feel like what’s missing for me is structural protection.”
Full-time staff roles in media, fashion, and entertainment are harder to come by after an onset of layoffs; the industry runs on freelancers, yet offers them none of the security.
“It feels like you're outside of the purview of some of these protections that have been put in place because you're an afterthought,” Franklin adds.
When it comes to brands truly supporting Black people in fashion, Franklin suggests adding a cultural competency officer on the production side because more often than not Black creatives are tasked with this.
“So that when I'm styling and I happen to peep — while I'm dressing 10 talents and ensuring that we're on time with the schedule — that the team is putting cornrows on a blonde girl, I have to be the person that has to now delicately say something that doesn't hurt my reputation with the client,” she notes.
To be Black in a predominantly white space is to carry cultural responsibility far beyond your paycheck. So when asked what she’d tell young Black creatives entering fashion, she pauses.
“I'm in a place where I don't feel confident inviting young Black creators into this space,” Franklin says. “What feels scary to me is, I'm talking to people on the sales side at publications, stylists, makeup artists, who are saying, ‘I would not wish this on anybody else. I'm there and I'm barely surviving or thriving, and I wouldn't wish it on any other Black girl.’”
She wants more Black talent to break in — but with eyes open. Study those ahead of you not just as inspiration, but as a cautionary tale.
“Find security without surrendering joy,” Franklin says. “Listen closely to those 10 or 15 steps further. Watch their moves and how they're breaking in. Because I do also see that there's a lot of support for entry level. But what do you do once you're past entry?”
Too often, she says, Black creatives are sprinting toward a shimmering finish line powered by excitement and the promise of it all. But the sheen has worn thin. “I think that's also why it feels like you're grinding to grind rather than you're grinding towards a dream.”
What comes next?
Five years have passed since fashion’s so-called reckoning. What once looked like a movement now feels more like a moment. Looking back, Antoine Gregory has a few things he wishes he could’ve told himself then.
“I would've told myself to make sure, whatever deals we were making, that we were making the companies more accountable for what happened next,” he says. “Black photographers were shooting their first major publication covers, but that's all it was. They got one cover.”
“The industry wasn't actually investing in the growth of Black photographers, stylists, and designers,” he continues. Their white counterparts, he says, were repeatedly commissioned, with clear support behind their development. What was missing wasn’t just one-off opportunities — it was long-term investment in Black creatives, in their talent, and in their careers.
Boyd-Griffith echoes the sentiment. Fashion, he says, reflects the current social-political climate — and like the world around it, it resists true transformation.
“We have addendums and things that give us hope. But I think, structurally, fashion is a white industry,” he says. “It's set up that way, so it's never going to be fully made for complete progress and diversity.”
For many Black creatives who were elevated five years ago, the shift has been undeniable — the headlines have faded, the promises have quieted. But the work? It never stopped. Sometimes it's defiantly loud. Other times, it hums quietly in group chats, moves through independent runways, and breathes in self-funded photo shoots. The movement endures. Not for clout, not for trend, but because being Black in fashion means knowing the fight for visibility and equity isn’t seasonal. It’s lifelong. That unwavering commitment lives in the quiet echoes of those still pushing forward, even as the world around them slips back into old habits.
“When I look back at that time, it was very beautiful,” Boyd-Griffith says. “I loved seeing so many of us in spaces that I never thought were possible. We were the voices that championed Brandon Blackwood and Black Fashion Fair. I think it was very beautiful. I would just tell little Shelton to enjoy that moment because it's not forever.”
*Some names have been changed to protect the identity of the source.
