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WE ASKED 100 PEOPLE—from designers, models, and photographers to activists and CEOs—to answer one simple (but also incredibly complex) question: WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF FASHION? Their answers—the majority of which you can find here; all of them are at Vogue.com—create a revealing portrait of our times while pointing the way to the future.
Ugbad Abdi, Model
Brands should understand the importance of assembling a team that is diverse and inclusive, both in front of and behind the camera. I'd like to see more thought being put into making models of color feel comfortable backstage, whether that's in terms of the hairstyling or in creating safe spaces in which models feel they can speak up and be heard. More and more, I'm considering the brands I work with and whether their values align with my own. This is a moment in which we should all feel more empowered.
Virgil Abloh, Designer, Off-White and Louis Vuitton (men)
I'm 39 years old, and it's taken 39 years to get here, to prove my pedigree. I'm one of the few Black designers on the Parisian fashion calendar. There should be more Black design in the conversation, more of us showing on that schedule. Martine Rose, Samuel Ross, Grace Wales Bonner—these are friends of mine, and I know their pedigree for design is just as impressive as my own, if not more. They should be filling up the Parisian houses.
I'm starting a scholarship under my name to put 100 Black kids into a wide range of historically Black colleges and accredited design schools in America—a wide spectrum. It's not just inroads within the fashion industry that need attention—it's like how I started, as a 17-year-old kid whose parents wanted him to be an engineer, and I said, “No—I want to be a fashion designer.” I mean, I started with a screen-printed T-shirt, and now I do what I do. It's like, how do you even get on that path?
Taslima Akhter, Activist and Photographer
The fashion-media industry needs to move away from looking at garment workers as mere victims or as people to be “empowered” by those above them, and look at them instead as people struggling to live with dignity, claiming rights as citizens and human...