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Ebony On the Runway
Despite Showing Signs of Age, Fashion Fair Keeps Rolling
By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 5, 2006; C01
Ebony Fashion Fair is the perfect confluence of popular culture, racial uplift, community pride, tantalizing entertainment and good business. The elaborate roadshow, which is in its 48th year and travels to 179 cities, celebrates style, glamour and the fervent belief that dressing up and dressing well are good for the soul. A fashion show is not church, but there can be something redemptive in a piece of well-chosen finery.
At the production's most recent stop at the Kennedy Center, a moment of earnest prayer interrupts the pre-show, red-punch reception. "Loorrd, we are here today," begins the faithful speaker with a breathless quiver of emotion that lets the room know, yes, Lord, we are going to be here with our heads bowed for quite a long time. There is so much for which to be thankful.
Fashion Fair models spin coats and fur-trimmed capes over their head like disks of flying pizza dough, catching them gracefully and positioning them just so around their slender shoulders. They pirouette center stage like exotic birds with flamboyant plumage. These ready-to-wear pyrotechnics are part of the show's appeal, for the audience knows that when a model canters out clutching a demure shawl around her shoulders, something enticing lies below which will be revealed with the kind of fanfare trademarked by Diana Ross in "Mahogany."
The show's pair of muscular young men are charged with flirting with the ladies of the front row. No matter if those ladies are old enough to be their grandmothers, the lively come-ons are innocent, as raunchiness is not part of the Fashion Fair legacy. Still, the gentlemen take every opportunity to be topless, serving up their pectorals like so much grade-A beef and on occasion, making their chest muscles dance like marionettes.
"This is one smooth show," says John Syphax, a psychologist from Washington dressed in a cocoa-colored suit with metallic buttons, who is an audience regular because his Aunt Ethel always corrals him into buying a ticket.
Fashion Fair highlights the Ebony brand while funneling readers to the magazine. It raises money for local charities, especially those that focus on education. Ebony is an institution that, like W.E.B. Du Bois, believes in uplifting the race. It is committed to showing black women -- and men -- in the most flattering, golden light.
Sometimes, the best light is high-wattage klieg, shining on a Las Vegas-style spectacle.
A Fading Glamour
Fashion Fair was developed by Eunice Johnson, who along with her husband, John, founded Johnson Publishing Co. John Johnson died in 2005 and left behind a legacy that includes not only the fashion extravaganza and Ebony magazine, but also Jet magazine and Fashion Fair Cosmetics.
The couple's daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, 47, is president and CEO of the company, which is headquartered in Chicago. And it falls to her to usher Ebony Fashion Fair into the future. Rice says the show is too potent a branding device to let fall into disrepair.
Over the years, Fashion Fair has matured into a cultural institution that has raised more than $52 million for local and national charities and has helped Ebony magazine reach a circulation of 1.7 million. The Washington chapter of the Continental Societies Inc. has hosted the show for 42 years; the group regularly raises about $30,000 for its outreach work with disadvantaged children.
Fashion Fair is an exemplar of corporate synergy, but it also is showing the effects of age. Its audience no longer is filled with the kind of young men and women who once vamped in their own designer duds, giving the show its heady aura. The show's arrival in a city no longer generates the anticipation it once did. How can it, when cable television now provides a steady loop of runway footage? Celebrities do not flock to the show.
"We had the creme de la creme ," says Audrey Smaltz, who once served as Fashion Fair's onstage commentator. "Sidney Poitier came to the show. Bill Cosby came to the show. Muhammad Ali came to the show. They were coming for the girls. It was an event. Every show, people got dressed up. They had on gowns and suits."
Old-guard designer names -- Givenchy, Bill Blass, Thierry Mugler -- dominate this year's show, titled "Fit to Be Fabulous." Big-buzz, directional labels such as Marc Jacobs, Balenciaga and Prada are scarce.
In response to the gathering dust, the show's producers updated the stage set and dispensed with the traditional live band, substituting recorded music, much of it hip-hop. The result is a more contemporary mood, but no small number of jarring juxtapositions. It was hard to tell how much pleasure the gray-haired audience derived from Kanye West's "Gold Digger" from which the n-word was conscientiously edited.
"We have to reach out to younger audiences. They need to see how they can see themselves as black women," Rice says. "Here is a show showcasing everything about African American women that is positive."
Rice also is interested in incorporating brands spawned by hip-hop such as Sean John, Rocawear and Baby Phat. "I just have to look to see if it's appropriate for us," Rice says. "We're not trying to push the real provocative edge."
In the meantime, an older generation keeps the theaters almost full -- although where a city may once have hosted an afternoon and an evening performance, it now can support only one. The audiences still are distinguished by church hats, fur wraps and sequins. The models continue to twirl. And the show still preaches the glory of glamour.
Dignity and Humanity
One of Fashion Fair's most faithful patrons has arrived. Organizers call him "Mr. Wonderful" and he has attended the show for 41 years. He is not particularly rich or powerful but he is famous for his attire, which in the past has included Zorro capes and suits the color of a ripe strawberry.
In the crowd of spit-shined men and women in their fancy dresses and business suits, he is easy to spot. Only one man lives up to such a visual drumroll: Mr. Wilbur E. Cook. Native Washingtonian. Currently retired. Former government worker. A man who occasionally -- a long time ago -- modeled. Anyone can see how he could have been on the runway, with his wavy hair -- now gone a little thin -- and smooth skin. He is dressed in a turquoise sharkskin suit. A sea-green cloth daisy is affixed to his jacket lapel. Go ahead and say it: wonderful.
"Young people don't follow fashion the way the older people do," he says. "If they would come to Ebony Fashion Fair, they'd get a better idea of what fashion is. You can see things you'd never think of."
So many of the elders at Fashion Fair talk about how important it is to "know" what fashion really is. They regret that young folks don't seem to "understand" fashion.
Barbara Davis is dressed in green: chartreuse skirt and blouse, olive heels, green tweed jacket with a dyed-to-match fur collar. As a rhythm-and-blues band blows brass and beats drums during the reception, Davis voices her distress about young people's lack of fashion knowledge with as much seriousness as she might discuss a lack of competence in the three R's. She shakes her head and clucks her disapproval.
(Then, although no one asked, she leans in to whisper, "I'm 72." Which is to say: "I have the wisdom of age" and "Don't I look good?" And she does.)
On the surface, when these mature guests speak of fashion, they seem to be talking about shoes and matching handbags, fancy hats, and the kind of suit-and-tie combinations that are so slick a man seems to slide around a room rather than walk. But in fact, they talk about fashion as a proclamation of self-respect, as part of the social contract.
"I think for my generation -- I'm 62 -- [Fashion Fair] was very important," says Shirley Shuggs, a retiree in a royal blue suit. "We get so much negative feedback. This is very inspiring."
They never say it explicitly. They tap dance around it. But Fashion Fair has always been a matter of dignity and humanity and an example of an ethnic community doing for itself.
Fashion Fair was conceived in 1956 when the wife of Dillard University's president asked John Johnson to sponsor a fundraising fashion show for New Orleans's Flint-Goodrich Hospital, which served black patients. The success of that show led to the traveling production that exists today.
Wherever Ebony Fashion Fair stops, it is at the behest of a local charitable organization. "We look for those types of organizations with a track record for fundraising and also with the same philosophy: uplift," Rice says. In truth, though, it is difficult for Rice to even remember precisely how an organization is selected since most of them have been Fashion Fair partners for decades.
Ebony provides the packaged production. The local group pays for the theater, houses the models and gives them a per diem. Volunteers sell the tickets. In a small town, they may be as little as $25. In Washington, they were as much as $75. The local organizers receive a percentage.
The ticket sellers have a relationship with audience members that sometimes extends across two or three generations. There is a kind of loyalty involved that is familial in its pull. Who could say no to Aunt Ethel?
Every aspect of the Fashion Fair machine draws the audience into the Ebony brand and its sister businesses. Each ticket comes with a subscription. The show's cross-country schedule is published in the magazines. A staff photographer is sure to take a group portrait of the sponsoring organization so that months later members can see themselves in glossy print. The current show even includes a pantomime about the merits of using Fashion Fair cosmetics.
The D.C. Continentals filled the bulk of the Concert Hall's 2,442 seats for the October show -- a fact that did not become clear until almost an hour into the production, since tardy guests continued to stream to their seats even as the show moved swiftly toward intermission.
At the halfway mark, all the Continentals were introduced onstage. They stood in a row, all dressed in red, to receive a round of applause. There were thank-yous and God-bless-yous and the kind of Amen, church-basement fellowship hall familiarity that conveyed the message that there are no outsiders here. It's just us.
Eschewing Trends
Compared with the cool detachment of an industry show, Fashion Fair is slickly produced hyperbole and camp. It is a fantasy of how one might imagine a fashion show to be.
"Ebony Fashion Fair is different from regular modeling because we're trying to entertain with high fashion instead of walking for buyers to show the clothes and sell the clothes," says Andrea Keesee, 20, from Clinton, one of the models in the current show and an aspiring actress. "You're putting more of yourself in the show."
Only one Fashion Fair model -- Pat Cleveland -- went on in the 1970s to make a significant splash within the New York and European fashion industries. But others have certainly achieved acclaim, and they include actor Richard Roundtree, journalist Sue Simmons and media consultant Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former defense secretary William Cohen.
Jada Collins, the current onstage commentator, has a flat-ironed curtain of thick hair and Miss America glamour gowns, and she speaks in mellifluous rhymes, with a slippery, sexy way of enunciating her words -- a cross between Henry Higgins and Eartha Kitt.
Collins's role is one made famous by Audrey Smaltz, who purred descriptively from 1970 to 1977. Smaltz now owns the Ground Crew, which provides designers with backstage staff and expertise for fashion shows.
Back in the '70s, Smaltz held the audience's attention with her wardrobe of Halston and Bill Blass finery, her improvisational style, her coyly naughty patois and down-home plain talk:
"This is what to wear on Sunday, when you don't get home till Monday!"
"If you can't get to Milan, if you can't get to Paris, go to Sears!"
Smaltz toured with Fashion Fair -- on its Greyhound bus -- during its glory years. Everyone wanted to come to the show and everyone wanted to be in it. She recalls a trip to Las Vegas in which "Sammy Davis Jr. gave me hell because his valet wanted to be in the show. . . . And I let him do it."
Smaltz laughs at the memory. Davis complained, she said, because without his aide-de-camp, the star was left to fend for himself. But it was all posturing. "The next day, Sammy gave me tickets to come see his show. He sent 12 dozen yellow roses and 12 dozen red roses."
The "top dogs" from Ebony used to come to the show in New York and Washington, Smaltz says. Folks treated the models like celebrities and asked them for their autographs. And the whole cast would always meet everyone who was anyone -- and black -- wherever they went.
The show has never been concerned with fashion trends. Minimalism would never have a place on the Ebony runway. "Fit to Be Fabulous" is divided into a half-dozen or so scenes, one of which celebrates "plaid." It doesn't matter that plaid is no more popular this year than it has been in the last five.
"I don't get that 'Oh, we're doing boho,' or whatever the fashion divas are saying this season," says milliner Kokin, who goes by only one name.
"I'm part of Ebony because of the nature of what I do. Black women and head coverings go back thousands of years. It's a beautiful tradition. I'm not in business because of them but I do a lot of business with them."
Eunice Johnson used to travel to Europe to select the clothes for the show. She now leaves the traveling to staff, declines interviews -- leaving that to her daughter -- and does not discuss her age.
But she still approves the garments.
"I call her Mother Superior," Kokin says. "Everything that goes down there doesn't happen until she puts her stamp of approval on it."
Johnson's aesthetic eye searches for clothes to entertain the audience, something that a plain black dress would not do.
"Her thing was coming and going. How does it look coming down the runway and going back up it," recalls Smaltz, who regularly accompanied Johnson to Europe.
The focus has always been on the rarefied designs of haute couture or on ready-to-wear flights of fancy, not what someone might wear to church, to work or to dinner.
"These are not things you can walk into a department store and find or pick up off the rack," Rice says. "We've never had that pressure for this to be a shopping show. You're going to see fashion dreams. There was never a push for us to become more practical. . . . Fantasy is what our audience has come to expect."
Producers, for instance, did not hesitate to send a model down the runway in 1975 in a Rudi Gernreich thong bikini. The audience loved it.
Fashion Fair clothes are always among the most lavish -- and expensive -- in a designer's collection. Johnson Publishing purchases them all, rather than borrowing them, which is the norm. In part, this grew out of a legacy of racial discrimination. Designers "wouldn't let us in," Smaltz recalls. "They wouldn't give us an invitation to the show."
Forty years ago, it went without saying that no designer would lend expensive clothes to Negroes.
"The skepticism, snobbism and racism was still rampant," Rice says. "The only reason we got in was because we were buying the clothes. . . . Some of them would look at my mother askance, 'You can have a seat over there. ' It took years to earn their respect."
Johnson would spend thousands of dollars with a single designer. "I have a check she wrote to Valentino for $50,000," says Smaltz, who is finishing up an autobiography that details her Fashion Fair experiences.
The tradition of paying for the clothes continues because "we don't want to be beholden to anyone," Rice says. Today, the company has a clothing budget of more than $1 million and an archive of garments dating to the 1950s.
"We have a warehouse of clothes," Rice says. "We're going to start to catalogue them. We've tried to keep that sort of quiet. . . . They are really exceptional, one-of-a-kind pieces."
Buying the clothes did not assure entry into fashion's inner circle with its private dinners, obsequious air-kissing and passionate kowtowing. It did not guarantee a seat in the front row. Smaltz, with her extroverted personality and her imposing height, would do her best to myth-make on behalf of her employer. "People would ask me, 'What is Mrs. Johnson's first name?' I'd say, 'Missus.' "
Theater of the Absurd
There was a moment at the Washington show, when a model with a pixie hairdo marched to the edge of the stage and planted herself there with a satisfied foot stomp. She reached up and pulled off her "hair" in one smooth motion, revealing a buzz cut and holding the displaced wig aloft with amusement.
With all of its shenanigans, Ebony Fashion Fair sometimes has more in common with theater of the absurd than the clothing industry. The show defined fashion on its own terms -- in plus-sizes, with church hats, with finger-paint colors when black was all the rage. It was among the first to bring labels such as Fendi, Pucci and Roberto Cavalli to the American public. It showed the industry that black women could command a runway. It introduced generations of black women -- and men -- to fashion at its most extreme, planting the seed for today's desire for "it" bags, designer shoes and king's-ransom jewelry. It fed a hunger to be perceived as glamorous and beautiful. Fashion Fair made an impact.
The ripple effect, however, has been slow and almost imperceptible.
"I'm not so sure we've influenced the general market," Rice says. "But I'm not sure we're trying to do that."
It's still rare that black models are on the cover of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar or Glamour. It's rarer still when they sign endorsement deals with design houses or cosmetics firms. Rice says the industry still doesn't understand the buying power of African American consumers.
But for Smaltz, it was "the best job any young woman could possibly have." And for Andrea Keesee, more than 25 years later, it remains a glamorous place to be.
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