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.
From a hundred cultures, [there is] one culture which does what no culture has ever done before-gives a place to every human gift.
I wear the national dress because it is the most natural and the most becoming for an Indian.
One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.
San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus of the world - one of the really urbane communities in the United States - one of the truly cosmopolitan places and for many, many years, it always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world
In many tribal cultures, it was said that if the boys were not initiated into manhood, if they were not shaped by the skills and love of elders, then they would destroy the culture. If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth.
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
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