MODA celebrates Ebony Fashion Fair

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.

Color also played a critical role. Putting the brightest colors on the darkest models was an Ebony Fashion Fair signature. Careers were definitely created through the show as well. Iconic model Pat Cleveland, known widely for her work with Halston and Valentino, got her start with Ebony Fashion Fair. Rice says Ebony Fashion Fair was “a showcase to show an African-American audience that its members were beautiful.”

Johnson also incorporated and encouraged black designers, often critiquing and playing a critical role in developing their work. When some, including Stephen Burrows, who has also participated in MODA’s programming for the exhibition, made the cut, Johnson placed their work amid that of such recognized greats as Christian Lacroix. Mainstream black designers such as Patrick Kelly, the Mississippi native who spent time in Atlanta before his time in New York and later in Paris, also supported Johnson and Ebony Fashion Fair. One of Rice’s favorite pieces in the exhibition is Kelly’s chic black gown that has “I love represented by a heart emblem Fashion Scandal” emblazoned on the back.

In her youth, designer and SCAD professor Stephanie Taylor drew strength from attending the shows. “It was just inspirational,” Taylor says during Bivins’ talk. “If you were a black design student like myself in an all-white environment, it was like, ‘Yes, this is possible.’”

And it was possible because Eunice Walker Johnson helped make it so. It is Rice’s hope that the exhibition continues in that storied tradition. “Being an African-American woman, she was at the forefront of fashion but, that doesn’t mean she was at the forefront in the minds of fashion’s general populace,” she says. “Now that we have this exhibition traveling to different cities, it will give prominence and recognition to all of the hard work, the dedication and love and passion that my mother put into this show.”