Black Model Exits Fashion Show After She Was Asked to Wear Monkey Ears and Lips

Photo credits: Helayne Seidman

By Victor Trammell

      A Black model who participated in New York’s fashion week earlier this month sat down with a national newspaper to share her infuriating story of racism on the runway.

Amy Lefevre (pictured) is a professional model who showcased her radiance at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s (FIT) runway show on Feb. 7. FIT’s live catwalk event was part of New York’s fashion week and occurred at Manhattan’s Pier59 Studios in New York City. However, Lefevre, 25, said she was “pressured” to wear accessories with terribly racist overtones.

Lefevre was asked to wear large monkey ears and monkey lips as accessories during her strides down the catwalk. She refused but various non-Black models went ahead with the disrespectful program and wore the accessories. The FIT event was directed by Jonathan Kyle Farmer, a FIT professor and chair of the new MFA Fashion Design.

The show was produced by Richard Thornn, creative director of a British fashion production company called NAMES LDN. The designs were created by Junkai Huang, a recent FIT graduate who is from China. In her interview with the New York Post, Lefevre talked about the emotional trauma and humiliation she endured during the FIT runway event in NYC earlier this month.

“I stood there almost ready to break down telling the staff that I felt incredibly uncomfortable with having to wear these pieces and that they were clearly racist. I was told that it was fine to feel uncomfortable for only 45 seconds. I was literally shaking. I could not control my emotions. My whole body was shaking. I have never felt like that in my life,” she said.

“People of color are struggling too much in 2020 for the promoters not to have vetted and cleared accessories for the shows. [I called my modeling agency] and they just don’t want their name to be anywhere near this,” Lefevre also said.

Whites often throw the race-baiting rock and hide their hands. Creative directors of functions like these always use the open-ended world of art and cultural expression as a guise to be racist prognosticators of foolishness. Hopefully, beautiful Black models like Lefevre will no longer supply their talents to serve the gatekeepers of bigotry in the fashion industry.