The most fulfilling aspect of fashion is that it touches every aspect of your life. It’s both magical and practical, individualistic and communal, and useful and frivolous all at once. Clothing can help you blend in, stand out, problem-solve, or relax. Every day you are compelled to engage with it—otherwise you’ll go naked—and through that, fashion becomes one of the primary tools to communicate you.
Antoine Gregory’s Black Fashion Fair exemplifies the pleasure and potential of fashion. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to the industry’s long-standing issues of diversity and inclusion. It doesn’t celebrate Black designers only at retail or through editorials—it aims to bring the everything-ness of fashion to a community that has traditionally been excluded from such fashion systems. Through its launch this week, the Black Fashion Fair includes an e-commerce platform where Black designers can curate their product selections, with 15% of sales going to Black Fashion Fair’s student programs; a designer directory of Black talent that corrects fashion’s predominantly white European narratives; and a series of editorials showcasing Black designers and stories. Already, in this earliest iteration, it is essential and revelatory—and Gregory’s plans for the future only get bigger.
For those who know Gregory, that he would create this amalgam of editorial, community, and commerce will come as no surprise. He has had a long career in fashion, from jobs in corporate to his own freelance work, but he is probably most widely known for his Twitter account, @bibbygregory. Long before I knew him, I knew his Twitter handle, a primary source for informative fashion news. If you really want to know what’s up with fashion, follow him.
The idea for Black Fashion Fair has been floating in Gregory’s mind since 2016, when he created a Twitter thread of Black designers. “It was New York Fashion Week, and Black designers have been historically left out of that space. There was no visibility for Black designers…so I made this thread, ‘Black Designers You Should Know.’ Over the years, the thread had just grown, and it was me just listing designers by name, because that’s something that’s also so important to me: that we know Black designers by name,” he says.
As time passed, Gregory “noticed that for some of the designers, their brands didn’t exist anymore. You’d click the link and the website would be gone, the brand would be gone. It’s like, how many times does that have to happen, where Black designers get into the space, but then they can’t sustain their business? It happens way too often. So I was thinking: How can we build something that creates infrastructure, that creates a network, and that creates sustainability? That’s how, brainstorming over the years, I began to see what Black Fashion Fair could look like.”
Since then, Gregory admits that the idea has changed many times. “I have probably created 50 decks!” he says with a laugh, explaining that other Black creatives like Pyer Moss’s Kerby Jean-Raymond and Fe Noel’s Felisha Noel helped him refine his vision. “Kerby has been such a great friend, because he has helped me kind of home in on what Black Fashion Fair could look like and what it could mean,” Gregory continues. “When I tell you Kerby is the real deal—you see him speaking up for Black people, speaking up for Black designers, but he does the work. He does the work, and he’s someone I’m just so appreciative of.”
Together with a web designer and communications manager, Gregory began to set up the site’s framework and reach out to Black designers to take part in its e-commerce aspect. “I think it was the only choice,” Gregory says of the decision to have a retail component. “Because Black designers, typically, do not have other choices, other than to sell directly to consumers. You walk into any department store, you walk into any specialty store, and you walk down any popular fashion street in the country, you do not see Black designers. Black designers are typically selling direct-to-consumer, via online, or pop-up shops. They typically are not doing wholesale, and they are not in retailers, so it was important to me to be able to bring all of these designers to one space.”
The launch group spans the industry, and includes the names Pyer Moss, Hanifa, Telfar, Phlemuns, and Johnny Nelson. Jason Rembert, the founder and designer of Aliétte and stylist to the likes of Issa Rae, Michael B. Jordan, and Ezra Miller, contributed exclusive designs for the fair, inspired by his native Martinique. “It’s beautiful to watch so many designers come together and support this initiative,” Rembert says. “Growing up and not seeing many Black people or not knowing many Black designers who made it in the fashion world, to me, was a huge disservice because Black people have always inspired the fashion world and they have been the forefront of what is cool and hot at the moment. They’ve always been the forefront of that. So now, to be able to come together and support one another and uplift one another, I think it’s amazing to watch and to see. It’s one of the most beautiful things that you can think of because it didn’t exist before, and now we can’t live without it.”
Rembert’s decision to participate was almost instant. “I followed Antoine on Twitter. Seeing this amazing young kid speaking on all things Blackness from the standpoint of being so knowledgeable in the fashion world; the way he’s able to articulate so many references is amazing,” he says. “So when he approached me about this project I was just—I was grateful. I was honored.”
Together, Rembert and Gregory came up with their collaborative T-shirt and hoodie design, making sure the products were available in sizing that extends to 4X. “I told everyone, ‘You can sell whatever you want, just let it be something that’s representative of the brand, and how you will want everyone to see you,’” Gregory says. The Martinique souvenir designs are evolutions of Rembert’s latest resort collection, a marked shift away from the eveningwear and red carpet ensembles with which he started Aliétte, and a translation of that glamour to everyday life. (To say it’s a success is an understatement; everyone from Issa Rae to Zerina Akers are wearing Aliétte’s camp shirts and silk short sets.)
“What I hope for more than anything is that a little Black boy or a little Black girl who is sitting in their parents’ house—and they have dreams, aspirations to become a big designer or someone in the fashion world—can look up and see that some of their favorite fashion designers have all come together. And for the first time ever they can see themselves and be inspired,” Rembert says. “That’s what I hope for: to be able to inspire and to help those kids who don’t see themselves. They can see themselves in us, in that support that we have among one another, in how we are inspired to support their generation.”
“Representation matters,” Gregory echoes. “It really just can make a world of difference. I think my experience going to school and working in fashion, it would have been so much different, and probably so much better, had I seen myself. But I didn’t see myself, so I was always a version of myself that wasn’t really who I was, and you shouldn’t have to exist in that way.”
The Black designer directory—which spans not only runway fashion but also costume designers like Akers, who costumed Black Is King, and Ruth E. Carter, who designed the costumes for Black Panther—is another way to showcase Black representation and influence. “Our designer directory is everyone from Ann Lowe to Nicole Zïzi, who is a new designer from Haiti. She uses recycled materials from Haiti and Honduras to make her clothes, to help the cleanup efforts there, but to also give back. You have so many different things that you could just click, and research, and go to their websites. It’s a directory that is free; I worked very hard on it for a very long time.”
He continues: “I have to continue to create Black history, and document it, and preserve it, because no one is doing that. When I was in school, I could not reference Black designers. There were no references for me to have, and for me, it’s about creating these references for the future.” He adds: “How many young Black kids want to go to school for fashion, and then go visit a campus and they see no one who looks like them? I went to FIT for four years. I had one Black teacher. That doesn’t make sense, when Black people have given so much to fashion, and Black people give away so much, and so much is also stolen from them. The least an industry could do is care enough to represent and record our histories.”
As it continues to evolve and grow, the Black Fashion Fair can be that source for Black creatives and the fashion industry. Through his scholarship and grant programs, Gregory explains that the fair will help support Black talent in all creative areas, from design to retail to fashion-related law. There will also be in-person experiences as the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic lessen, as well as other projects down the line.
“It was a journey, but I wanted to be able to represent people at all levels,” Gregory says. “If you want to see an editorial, or you want to learn something, here you go. You want to learn about a designer? Here you go. You want to buy something from a designer you just learned about? Here you go. Here are all the tools that you need to support Black designers, to discover Black designers, and to sustain Black designers—here are the tools right here. Black Fashion Fair…We got you.”