^^Hanaa Ben Abdesslem maybe?
Very beautiful model but as I said again, it’s very marginal. It’s a question Farida Khelfa touched on and also discussions that have been raised in the industry.
To be fair, Binx became a muse conveniently after the industry-wide callout from Iman/Naomi/Bethann's diversity initiative. If you go back before Spring 2014, there were literally zero black models in Phoebe's first several shows for Celine.
It bears repeating that Phoebe was far from the only designer guilty of this; Karl Lagerfeld, Raf Simons, Miuccia Prada, and Marc Jacobs had all gone several consecutive shows and campaigns without using any black models during that time too. She was nevertheless complicit in this pretty shameful yet widespread aspect of fashion during that time.
‘And it’s exactly why the name Russell Marsh was raised in the conversation. Because his power and the influence of the name Prada was really the cause of that. Let’s be honest, designers where complicit to it through their passivity.
What happened was that when people started to have more middle people in the process, they gave their responsability away.
When you have a stylist and a casting director involved, it can happen.
The example of Karl is interesting for example. Eric Wright (a black man) was his right hand man at Fendi and his own brand, he had an influence on the casting. You look at Fendi and Karl Lagerfeld runways up until he left Karl, you see black girls. At Chanel, it was different people and so the castings were different.
When Russell Marsh started the baby doll trend, everybody followed, they started to have casting directors because they wanted to have the girls that walked Prada and that appeared on Vogue. When there was a black girl, it was either at one point Liya or Yasmin, or Chanel Iman and then it was Jourdan.
The perverse effect is that it happened smoothly. I think Gaultier is the one who never fell into that trap because he was always very involved with the casting.
I was working for a brand that always had black girls on the runway and then one season, nobody. Not even a filler. When you aren’t a decision making person, you can only whisper it through the people. The season after 2 were back but that was the industry back then because there was nobody to make people accountable. The same, I’ll always remember the day there wasn’t any black girl in a Lanvin by Alber runway. I was shocked because he is quite hands-on too.
It’s like in Milan, the day Eric Wright wasn’t part of Karl’s team, there weren’t any black girls in Fendi shows lol.
Iman, Naomi And Bethann made casting directors and stylists accountable. Nobody wants to be labeled or appear as racist. So now they put in work. And designers too have regain an interest in models.
