A Quote by Beverly Johnson

When I went to Fashion Week, I was very disappointed by how few women of color were in those shows. I do speak to the younger girls, and I hear them when they say they're not getting the big contracts or into the big shows.
When I went to Fashion Week, I was very disappointed by how few women of color were in those shows. I do speak to the younger girls, and I hear them when they say they're not getting the big contracts or into the big shows. So, to sum it up, it seems that whenever we take a couple of steps forward, we take a few more backwards.
When I was growing up, there was no one. There were very few black women in tech; there were very few black women in the fashion game. We didn't have our Grace Jones - Grace Jones was before my time. We didn't really have a lot of black women in electronic and punk who were celebrated in the same levels as, say, your big mega-superstars.
Fashion Week was at Bryant Park and there were a few shows like Marc Jacobs, or when Alexander McQueen came to town, that were offsite, Helmut [Lung] was offsite, but it was very intimate. It wasn't the way it is today where you have a thousand people at the show. You may have had 200 to 250 and it was really the trade and you know fashion greats.
I've found that when I was young, all the pretty girls at school got all the dates and went to all the big parties and everything because they were pretty. They never bothered to develop anything. And as they aged, their prettiness faded and they were left as middle-aged women who were very, very unhappy and disappointed. But I can't feel sorry for them because that was their own doing.
I was never a big networker, but I was a spin doctor, all those shock shows, that's how I got my first backers. But fashion's a scary industry to be in, especially if you've not grown up with it.
When I first started to do fashion shows I didn't have the budget to hire top models so I would cast women who inspired me, and ask them to walk how they walked. I was doing a mise en scène, which for me was normal. I love for people to see my clothes, but it was more about the attitude of the girls. The revues of the late 19th century/early 20th century were very much a reflection of what was happening in society and politics, and for me that is also the role of the fashion designer.
My memories of London Fashion Week are of starting out and not getting many tickets for fashion shows, but wanting to see them so much that I'd sneak in with my friends, people like Pat McGrath and Craig McDean.
I used to go to a lot of Pam Hogg shows. The thing about London Fashion Week is that, generally, we're on tour and traveling around, so it's very rare that I actually catch it. I like to go to Burberry because I know a few girls who work there. I kind of follow friends.
In drama school, they do these big shows and period dramas, and I felt that none of those shows were representing me as a person, and I knew I wouldn't be cast in any of those when I left school. I decided to write my own one-woman show, and that was called 'Chewing Gum Dreams.'
In Sweden, they broadcast the American shows in English with Swedish subtitles, whereas in many European countries they dub them. Watching those shows in English was big for me.
I'm very interested in fashion shows. For me they're at the center of everything. What happens on the side, that's the energy - it's fashion week - but fashion shows are at the heart of it. I function more like a stylist. I'm inspired, and then I try to find it on the street. What's great about a blog is that you can do completely crazy things like take the moustache shoes Marc Jacobs did for Louis Vuitton for spring and talk about what that has to do with moustaches. In fashion, what people are looking for is inspiration and new ideas all the time.
I think musicians should stay off television generally. I get asked all the time. Those shows are just promoting insipid comedies. Who watches those shows? And whoever does I don't think my music would speak to those people. I don't even want those people to hear what I'm doing.
It's going to take baby steps to see a complete turnaround. But there's been such a positive outcome from seeing it at Fashion Week. Plus-size fashion shows are being more welcomed into Fashion Week, and having more plus-size women in major magazines.
There are a lot of bands who would get really big in Fort Worth and play shows on a Friday night that everybody would come out to. But I've never been really big in my hometown. My shows would have 10 or 15 people at them.
The reality television shows are a big hit with the masses with their Bollywood songs. Even if these TV shows are scripted, people are watching them.
It's weird because we live in this age of reboots. Everything is getting rebooted: 'The X-Files,' 'Twin Peaks.' We have shows like 'Gravity Falls' that were inspired by these shows, that are now ending and being followed up by reboots of the shows that inspired them.
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