Ebony On the Runway

"I think for my generation -- I'm 62 -- [Fashion Fair] was very important," says Shirley Shuggs, a retiree in a royal blue suit. "We get so much negative feedback. This is very inspiring."

They never say it explicitly. They tap dance around it. But Fashion Fair has always been a matter of dignity and humanity and an example of an ethnic community doing for itself.

Fashion Fair was conceived in 1956 when the wife of Dillard University's president asked John Johnson to sponsor a fundraising fashion show for New Orleans's Flint-Goodrich Hospital, which served black patients. The success of that show led to the traveling production that exists today.

Wherever Ebony Fashion Fair stops, it is at the behest of a local charitable organization. "We look for those types of organizations with a track record for fundraising and also with the same philosophy: uplift," Rice says. In truth, though, it is difficult for Rice to even remember precisely how an organization is selected since most of them have been Fashion Fair partners for decades.

Ebony provides the packaged production. The local group pays for the theater, houses the models and gives them a per diem. Volunteers sell the tickets. In a small town, they may be as little as $25. In Washington, they were as much as $75. The local organizers receive a percentage.

The ticket sellers have a relationship with audience members that sometimes extends across two or three generations. There is a kind of loyalty involved that is familial in its pull. Who could say no to Aunt Ethel?

Every aspect of the Fashion Fair machine draws the audience into the Ebony brand and its sister businesses. Each ticket comes with a subscription. The show's cross-country schedule is published in the magazines. A staff photographer is sure to take a group portrait of the sponsoring organization so that months later members can see themselves in glossy print. The current show even includes a pantomime about the merits of using Fashion Fair cosmetics.

The D.C. Continentals filled the bulk of the Concert Hall's 2,442 seats for the October show -- a fact that did not become clear until almost an hour into the production, since tardy guests continued to stream to their seats even as the show moved swiftly toward intermission.

At the halfway mark, all the Continentals were introduced onstage. They stood in a row, all dressed in red, to receive a round of applause. There were thank-yous and God-bless-yous and the kind of Amen, church-basement fellowship hall familiarity that conveyed the message that there are no outsiders here. It's just us.

Eschewing Trends

Compared with the cool detachment of an industry show, Fashion Fair is slickly produced hyperbole and camp. It is a fantasy of how one might imagine a fashion show to be.

"Ebony Fashion Fair is different from regular modeling because we're trying to entertain with high fashion instead of walking for buyers to show the clothes and sell the clothes," says Andrea Keesee, 20, from Clinton, one of the models in the current show and an aspiring actress. "You're putting more of yourself in the show."

Only one Fashion Fair model -- Pat Cleveland -- went on in the 1970s to make a significant splash within the New York and European fashion industries. But others have certainly achieved acclaim, and they include actor Richard Roundtree, journalist Sue Simmons and media consultant Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former defense secretary William Cohen.