Interview James Scully Words Chris Hartman  Photographs Guzman

Originally published in No 12

From her early beginnings on 7th Avenue to her moment of defiance in 1973 at the Battle of Versailles, there has not been a decade since in which Bethann Hardison has not pioneered revolution in the fashion industry.

She is known as mother and mentor to many and, like fellow advocates Iman and Naomi, Bethann is so highly regarded in the fashion world that she is referred to almost exclusively by her first name. It’s a no-brainer. This is a man straddling two opposing camps and making the best of both. He sounds relaxed (or as relaxed as New York lets a person be), yet, location-wise, I can almost guess where his preferences lie. But more of that later.

No one in fashion has worn more professional hats — her entire career path to this point seemingly destined. Even as she’s a driving force behind the advocacy for and empowerment of models of color, Bethann recently admitted to her good friend, noted casting director and whistleblower James Scully, “I don’t have any particular ambitions. That’s the one thing I want people to know. People think I’m so ambitious because I’m doing things. The truth of it really is that things come to me. The only ambition I have is to sometimes figure out how to get to the hammock.”

Bethann loves her retreat north of New York City. After the COVID-19 stay at home order was announced last spring, she discovered, “It was great, because I’ve had the house for a little over thirty years, and I’ve never stayed there more than ten days at a time. I loved every minute. There were days that I never got out of my pajamas. I just looked at one film after another — I was completely content.” That was before the death of George Floyd, which she confessed changed everything, and she was moved to resume the activism that she’s always embraced and inspired in others.

Bethann was born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a respected orthodox Muslim Imam who advised Elijah Muhammad, as well as a mentor to Malcolm X. After graduating from high school, where she was its first Black cheerleader, she attended art school at New York University and the Fashion Institute of Technology — at the latter of which she took a merchandising program that piqued her lifelong interest in the fashion industry. She is now Executive Advisor, Global Equity and Culture Engagement for Gucci, as well as liaison between Gucci’s Fellowship Design program and the design studio in Rome. “My relationship with Gucci is quite special,” she says, adding, “I am not corporate and come from a different approach. I love the direction of Gucci and am happy to support them and keep an eye out for any irregularities.”

In 1973, Bethann, along with ten other models, including Pat Cleveland and China Machado, walked in the fashion show that made history in its use of a groundbreaking number of models of color — the Battle of Versailles, a competition between American and French fashion designers to raise money for the restoration of Palace of Versailles. As she recalled, “Every step I took, I was talking to that audience. It was an intention; it was like acting. When I stopped and decided to throw down the train of my dress, I stared at the audience for so long that they then started to stamp their feet. And the longer they stamped their feet, they started to scream, ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ And then their programs started going up in the air — that’s when I knew I nailed it.”

Bethann says her only goals going forward are to remain alert and healthy, and “to do all that comes in front of me that’s meant for me to achieve.” This includes acting, as in a 2017 short film, Hold On, directed by Christine Turner. She is also appearing as a marriage counselor in season four of the CW Network drama Black Lightning. She’s also looking forward to completing a memoir detailing her life experiences and opinions, as well as a documentary about her time in the modeling world, Invisible Beauty.

Bethann’s fashion career began in Manhattan, when she answered an ad for a job at a button factory on West 40th Street. After hiring her, the manager decided to have her take buttons to the designers, and as a result, she became the first Black saleswoman in the Garment District. Her initial modeling experience came soon after, when she met Bernie Ozer, the head of the junior dress department of Federated, which by that time owned all the big department stores. Bethann was showing him some samples, and she knew instinctively there was going to be a fashion show — his, Bethann says, were “big, incredible, Broadway-type shows.” Bethann had been a tap dancer as a child, and after presenting the dresses to Ozer, leaned in and said, “If you really want to have a great show, you’ll have me in it.” 

Bethann soon caught the attention of the iconic designer Willi Smith. “I modeled a little bit for him, but I was more of a muse.” Through Smith, Bethann met the fashion photographer Bruce Weber. He impressed Bethann with his highly discerning eye. Years later, in 2015, Weber photographed Bethann again, this time among other accomplished models, including Brooke Shields and Pat Cleveland, for Barney’s “Better Than Ever” advertising campaign. 

Another connection Bethann made through Willi Smith was the Henri Bendel designer Stephen Burrows. Burrows later hired Bethann as a showroom girl. “And then, eventually, Stephen asked me to come in to help him in the design studio. So, then I moved from showroom model to becoming an assistant to Stephen Burrows — overseeing the models that I found.” Later, Bethann would model a dress — Burrows’ homage to couture — at The Battle of Versailles. Bethann took Paris by storm, modeling for designers Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Claude Montana, and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, among others. And after she made the decision to leave Burrows, she joined Frances Grill’s Click Models in New York City, where she did, indeed, “click.” The agency, and her career as a model agent, took off.

Her friends Calvin Klein and Perry Ellis inspired Bethann to go out on her own after she became disillusioned by a business partnership gone bad. In 1984, she founded Bethann Management in TriBeCa, which redefined the ideas of conventional beauty for the first time, representing the most ethnically diverse roster of models. Over its thirteen-year tenure, the agency represented groundbreaking models such as Bonnie Berman, Ariane Koizumi, Josie Borain, Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb, Roshumba Williams, Tyson Beckford, and many others.In 1988, Bethann and Iman founded the Black Girls Coalition to both celebrate and advocate for more runway and print exposure for models of color. “We went up against the advertising industry to help them change,” Bethann says, “because they never would have anyone in the ads that looked like who they were selling to.”

After closing Bethann Management in 1997, Bethann traveled to Mexico for a three-month sabbatical. While there, she received incessant phone calls imploring her to come back. They included several from Naomi Campbell, who was concerned about the precipitous decline in opportunities for black models in fashion. In 2007, Bethann, Iman, Naomi, and the Ethiopian model Liya Kebede participated in a number of town hall-style discussions such as “The Lack of the Black Image in Fashion” at Manhattan’s Bryant Park Hotel. Bethann remarked, “I feel it’s the worst it’s ever been in the USA. This is the one industry that still has the freedom to refer to people by their color and reject them in their work.” 

During New York’s Fashion Week 2013, Bethann, along with Iman and Naomi, published a ‘Call Out List’ designed to educate fashion designers who featured none or only one black model in their shows the previous season. Together with the Diversity Coalition Bethann organized, the objective was to bring more models of color into the fashion industry, and to monitor progress of its diversity efforts.

In appreciation of her efforts, the Council of Fashion Designers of America recognized Bethann with The Founders Award in Honor of Eleanor Lambert, in 2014. “It was a great moment to be acknowledged by the Council.” Because, as Bethann has said, “To not accept diversity hurts everyone. It hurts the fashion industry. It hurts society.”

In 2019, CFDA chairman Tom Ford named Bethann to his Advisory Board — featuring experts in art, entertainment, media, and contemporary culture. In the prior year, Bethann and the CFDA introduced the Designers Hub to mentor black fashion creatives and their businesses. In its first year, it awarded ten companies $150,000 each to help sustain them. “I like what I’m doing with Designers Hub,” she says. “I want it to be an academy. I don’t need people to have graduations or anything. But I want it to be a place where people know that when they go there, they learn.”

 Also, in 2019, Gucci released a controversial black turtleneck jumper, which some considered racist because it resembled blackface. Deeply offended, the Harlem designer Dapper Dan requested a meeting with the Gucci team, including its CEO. He remarked, “I am a Black man before I am a brand.” The meeting featured notable members of the Black community — Bethann among them. She could tell the whole Gucci team was demoralized, and tried to reassure them, saying, “You didn’t do anything wrong. And they said, ‘How can you say that when the whole world says that we have?’” Bethann responded, “If you do something that some people see as one thing, but other people don’t see it — then that means it’s just in the eye of the beholder.”

Within days of the meeting, Gucci invited Bethann to Milan, where they offered her a consulting position. And in late December of 2019, she became one of the faces of Gucci’s Pre-fall 2020 lookbook. She recounted a conversation she had with Gucci’s Global CEO, Marco Bizzarri. “We were texting, and he just called me on the phone. He knew he made the right decision when he asked me to come work with him. That was such a nice thing. Because, he said, ‘You’re my true best discovery besides Alessandro Michele (Creative Director of Gucci).’”

These days, Bethann’s advocacy in fashion shows no signs of slowing down. She says, “So now, there are a lot of people doing something similar to what I’m doing. We need just to come together, and I’m going to call it like … a Mafia meeting — to see who does what, and how it can benefit each other.” And as the world moves forward in growing more inclusive, Bethann believes, “This is the opportunity, this is the moment.” 

Update: Magnolia Pictures has acquired U.S. rights to Invisible Beauty, the Sundance world premiere documentary about the career of pioneering African American model and fashion icon Bethann Hardison.

bethannhardison.com and @bethannhardison

 James Scully is on Instagram as @jamespscully

Chris Hartman is a regular contributor to Upstate Diary @book_builder

Guzman are regular contributors to UD and represented by veronique-peres-domergue.net @lesguzman