Think about how much fashion profits from black culture and how underrepresented we are in the industry. If you insist on using black celebrities to peddle your merchandise and add a cool factor to your front row, it is indecent to not care about the plights of that person's community.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and supporting black culture within the fashion industry.
Kerby Jean-Raymond highlights the paradox of the fashion industry profiting from black culture while failing to adequately represent and support black individuals and communities. He argues that using black celebrities for marketing without considering their communities' struggles is not only hypocritical but also morally questionable.
In practice
In a panel discussion on diversity in fashion, this quote can highlight the need for greater representation.
The work of black creatives seems to always get undermined in one way or another, and that's what this new generation is actively changing by speaking up. We aren't accepting group categorization and group classifications to describe our work anymore - it just leads to group dismissal.
Is the 'black designer' label there to warn everyone not to have the same level of expectations for me, or is it some type of prize? I just want to work in an even playing field where I can get press for my work and not just my race and my personal views on it.
...people will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand...That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.
I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'
The priest has just baptized you a Christian with water; and I baptize you a Frenchman, daring child, with a dewdrop of champagne on your lips.
Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.
A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.
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