It's not secret that the fashion world has long way to go in representing the people we see everyday.
Visible progress, however, has definitely been made. As Fashion Spot points out, Sudanese model Anok Yai became the first black model to open a Prada runway show in more than 20 years. The last was Naomi Campbell in 1997.In further good news, their latest seasonal runway report shows there's been an improvement for diversity and transgender inclusivity.
AW 2018 saw the most racially diverse castings ever, with the total number of nonwhite models across all four cities increasing to 32.5%. This is a 2.3% increase from last season.
New York was the most racially diverse, featuring 37.3% nonwhite models, with the rest following behind: London at 34.6%, Paris at 31.1%, and Milan, which consistently falls behind, at 27.1%.
The top five designers with the most racially diverse shows? Gypsy Sport, Ashish, Chromat, and Matthew Adams Dolan, with Jeremy Scott and Brandon Maxwell tied for fifth.
The other category to see a relatively huge improvement was transgender and non-binary.
A record 64 transgender women and non-binary models (56 transgender, 8 non-binary) walked in 52 shows. When you look at just one year ago - when only 12 trans or non-binary models walked in five shows - it's a massive improvement.
City wise, New York came out top again (33 models, up from 31 last season), while London seriously upped their game with10 models (up from just 1 last season).
Moreover, the number of transgender and non-binary models on the runway increased in all but one of the four cities, the exception being Milan. New York saw 33 trans and non-binary model castings (up from 31 last season), London 10 (up from 1 last season, the biggest jump of any city), Paris 14 (up from 10 last season).
While runway star Teddy Quinlivan, who came out as transgender in September 2017, made up for a big percentage of transgender and nonbinary castings , the number of gender-inclusive castings (that didn't include Quinlivan) increased by 15 from last season.
The bad news? There was actually a decrease in terms of size and age diversity. Only 13 models this season were above the age of 50, which is the lowest number recorded since the same numbers in Spring 2017.
The numbers of plus-size models appearing on the runway also dropped from 38 to 30 across all cities.
Clearly things are improving there's still a long way to go. We need to keep fighting to be represented.
