Citing the troubled economy, Linda Johnson Rice, chairman and CEO of Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., announced the fall season of the Ebony Fashion Fair has been canceled.

In a statement posted on the Fashion Fair’s Web site, Johnson said the extravaganza, which has raised more than $55 millions in its 50-year history, was witnessing the toll that the nation’s recession has had on many businesses, including the fashion show’s corporate sponsors.

“In the coming months, we will develop a new business model to ensure that the show is a mutually beneficial endeavor,” Johnson said in the statement. “Our primary goal is to build Ebony Fashion Fair and our other brands in ways that will continue delivering meaningful insight and inspiration to the African-American community.”

The traveling fashion event was a staple in the black community and sponsored by sororities, women’s clubs and the Congressional Black Caucus spouses to raise money for local charities and nonprofit organizations, including the United Negro College Fund, the Urban League and the NAACP. The Fashion Fair thrilled audiences throughout the U.S. the Caribbean and England. It even spawned a popular cosmetics line.

While the Fashion Fair showed the work of fashion legends Yves St. Laurent, Bill Blass and Nina Ricci, it also provided a home for black designers, including Kevan Hall and Tracy Reese.

Ebony Fashion Fair, under the guidance of Producer-Director Eunice Johnson, broke barriers in the world of fashion by featuring African Americans as models, opening doors for African American designers and not borrowing but purchasing creations from fashion legends like Pierre Cardin and Bill Blass, to name a few.

“My mom took me to my first Ebony Fashion Fair when I was in junior high school,” said Lynne Adrine, an executive career coach in Bethesda, Maryland. “It was a fantasy world of exotic looking, beautiful people, strutting with more attitude than I ever had seen before - even on Easter Sunday. Beautiful black women of every height, size and skin tone. Of course, in the weeks that followed, there were some junior Fashion Fairs in bedrooms of my friends, styling in our mothers' secretly borrowed clothes."

“Fashion Fair was a vital creation for its time. Maybe its time has passed,” Adrine told BlackAmericaWeb.com, “or maybe this is the opportunity for reinvention, something beyond all our imaginations.”

Patrick Riley, a New York-based independent television producer, pop culture analyst and blogger, said he, too, was mesmerized by the Fashion Fair since childhood.

"Like Ebony and Jet overall, the images of the models in the Ebony Fashion Fair made this little boy from Savannah, Georgia tingle on the inside, much like my icon Diana Ross and her movie 'Mahogany' made me feel," Riley told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "The images were haute couture, European, chic, yet no less African and what we all know our people can be about - from the high-end to the low-end: Dressing sharp and to the nines.”

Riley also said, however, that in addition to the changes in the economy, the audience for the Fashion Fair may be drifting away as well.

“This economy is screwing with more than my bottom line; now it is messing with my Ebony Fashion Fair. And though some may consider the concept 'a dinosaur' in the grand scheme of how people of color are slowly but surely folding into the mainstream, just look to Tyra's 'America's Next Top Model' as modern-day proof of a door that opened on the shoulder-pads of Ebony Fashion Fair," said Riley. "The Ebony Fashion Fair experience is an annual tradition that many of our people look forward to attending. Moreover, it raised lots of money for key charities that impact communities .....

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Wow, how sad to see this show come to an end when it doesn't have to , when we have so many blacks with money that can contribute, and save this icon.Yes, I to remember my first Fashion Fair show at the Ford theater in Detroit and I do hope we as a community can save this icon.

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ACL
September 9, 2009, 7:24 am
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