As CFDA Turns 60, President CaSandra Diggs on Its Journey of Representation
Sixty years ago, when Eleanor Lambert had only just founded the Council of Fashion Designers of America and begun using her prowess to put American designers on the world stage, Sam Walton had just opened the first Walmart, Marilyn Monroe had passed and James Meredith became the first African American student admitted to the formerly racially segregated University of Mississippi, leading to riots.
It was the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, and while there were designers of color represented among CFDA’s founding members, none of them were Black.
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Since then, the organization has been on an ongoing journey to improve its representation — even before those efforts were being called DE&I — and this New York Fashion Week, according to CFDA president CaSandra Diggs, 25 percent of the designers represented on the calendar are Black.
“That’s transformative, that hasn’t happened before. And we’re going to continue to make sure that happens,” she told WWD. “We’re going to continue to make sure Black and Brown women are fully and wholeheartedly represented, but we’re going to make sure we’re not siloed off as these independent groups. We need to be part of the main stage and I think that’s what we’re really focused on going forward, to make sure that everyone is part of the larger picture.
“I mean, 60 years of CFDA and how it launched and the focus on designers, it was all about including people who were unseen from behind the shadows,” continued Diggs, who has been in her role as president for two years. “So it’s always been an organization about the underrepresented and we just continue to expand that over time. And I think it got accelerated in 2020.”
George Floyd’s murder kicked things into high gear for fashion — and the U.S. at large — where diversity and representation were concerned, including for the CFDA, which many in the industry had called on to do more to represent and highlight designers of color.
The organization had already been supporting Bethann Hardison’s Designers Hub through its A Common Thread fund (with additional support from Tom Ford International) to help Black designers and Black-owned fashion businesses grow, from around 2018. And in the time since summer 2020, it made a $1 million donation to Harlem’s Fashion Row’s Icon 360 fund to help designers of color scale their businesses, and it launched its Impact initiative last year to “identify, connect, support and nurture Black and Brown creatives and professionals in fashion.”
“CFDA Impact continues to grow. When we started out, there were 1,000 talents, then there were 2,000, then there were 3,000, then there were 4,000, we’re heading to 5,000,” Diggs said.
The organization has offered mentorship, job opportunities, access and visibility for designers, as well as connected those in the industry to graphic artists, creative directors, models and others who work in the business of fashion. And 70 percent of the recent scholarships CFDA has doled out have gone to Black and Brown students, Diggs said.
“Everything that we’re doing going forward has a DEI lens. We need to incorporate multicultural, multiethnic, multigender orientation. We’re making sure that the representation of those who are on our committees, who help select winners for grants and scholarships, those who receive grants and scholarships, all of that has to come from a diverse and inclusive and equitable lens,” she said. “We’re very mindful of that and I think what happened in 2020 really magnified the need to do that going forward and to be consistent with that and to make sure the work always reflects that.”
Admittedly, that wasn’t always the case at CFDA. Sometimes the organization, Diggs said, “can be a bit reserved or a bit shy to lead on certain things because they want to make sure they’re doing it the right way. But once they understand what needs to be achieved, they certainly lean into it. And the same thing happened with diversity, equity and inclusion, they leaned in.
“Listen, I know it’s the 60th anniversary and everyone’s just looking for a piece that champions the positivity, but I think giving a holistic representation of the organization is much more interesting and real and much more inspiring, much more respectable,” she said. “We definitely see ourselves as an industry leader but we don’t look at ourselves as the only organizational entity that contributes to where the industry needs to be and what it needs to do.”
But it’s playing the parts it can.
Now CFDA is working on the pipeline, and bringing fashion and its opportunities to more people from more backgrounds.
In the first iteration of a partnership with Best Buy and its career pathways program late in 2021, CFDA did a workshop in conjunction with Sustainable Brooklyn, an organization working to broaden the scope of sustainability from the lens of the African diaspora, to teach youth about sustainable fashion and the careers that exist within it. Following the success there, CFDA will host another workshop with Best Buy this fall, this time centered on technology in fashion and the blossoming opportunities there.
“Being able to tap into students and young people and create this new pipeline that hasn’t been looked at has been quite incredible,” Diggs said. “I’m really excited [by] how many of our members and industry have tapped into HBCUs and invested in that and I think that’s awesome, but I also want to tap into places people are not necessarily thinking about, so we’re looking at community centered programs like the one that Best Buy has.”
Though it’s too early for a public display of details, Diggs teased, “there’s something that we’re going to be doing with sports and fashion” which also has a DEI bent.
“We’re looking to take fashion into all of the other industries,” she said. “We’re looking to make sure that it’s clear that fashion is a centering industry, it’s a creative industry that inspires other industries and leans into and pulls from and gives to other industries. So we’re looking to make sure that we are in collaboration and engagement with those other industries as well.”
Like it has for 60 years, the CFDA will continue its efforts to “build programming that amplifies that industry,” and focus on resources to support and provide visibility, not just for designers but for others across the industry.
“Part of what the CFDA is looking to do is to pull more of the community into its network. It’s an organization that was founded to focus on designers and I think we’ve realized that fashion is an ecosystem that really takes the participation of all different types of people and disciplines and expertise,” Diggs said. “With Impact, it was one of the first times where the CFDA really said, ‘we’re going to focus on professionals, it’s not just about designers but we want to make sure that other disciplines in our industry have access and have support and have resources.’ I think we’re going to see more community network building, operating, activations and magnification going on over the next couple of years with what we’re crafting.”
As far as what’s next for CFDA where diversity and representation are concerned, this is just the early stages of an ongoing movement and there’s much more to come, Diggs said.
“This movement for equity and inclusion and belonging, it’s no different than the Civil Rights Movement, the Suffrage Movement — any movement that historically has happened has taken decades to really come to fruition,” she said. And right now we’re at the start of this, we’re planting those seeds and we’re going to see them over the next three, five, seven, 10 years. That’s when we’re really going to start seeing the larger results. Right now, we’re going to see smaller, incremental things happening and then we’re going to know that there’s change when we’re going to look up and say, ‘Wow we’re not even thinking about it anymore, we’re not pushing it, we don’t have to do interviews, we don’t have to check in every six months,’ and that’s when we’re going to know.
“We’re not going to know because of the numbers. We’re going to know because it just becomes normal, it becomes part of our every day and it’s not something that we have to focus on,” Diggs added. “That’s going to be the big change.”
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