Ebony On the Runway

But she still approves the garments.

"I call her Mother Superior," Kokin says. "Everything that goes down there doesn't happen until she puts her stamp of approval on it."

Johnson's aesthetic eye searches for clothes to entertain the audience, something that a plain black dress would not do.

"Her thing was coming and going. How does it look coming down the runway and going back up it," recalls Smaltz, who regularly accompanied Johnson to Europe.

The focus has always been on the rarefied designs of haute couture or on ready-to-wear flights of fancy, not what someone might wear to church, to work or to dinner.

"These are not things you can walk into a department store and find or pick up off the rack," Rice says. "We've never had that pressure for this to be a shopping show. You're going to see fashion dreams. There was never a push for us to become more practical. . . . Fantasy is what our audience has come to expect."

Producers, for instance, did not hesitate to send a model down the runway in 1975 in a Rudi Gernreich thong bikini. The audience loved it.

Fashion Fair clothes are always among the most lavish -- and expensive -- in a designer's collection. Johnson Publishing purchases them all, rather than borrowing them, which is the norm. In part, this grew out of a legacy of racial discrimination. Designers "wouldn't let us in," Smaltz recalls. "They wouldn't give us an invitation to the show."

Forty years ago, it went without saying that no designer would lend expensive clothes to Negroes.

"The skepticism, snobbism and racism was still rampant," Rice says. "The only reason we got in was because we were buying the clothes. . . . Some of them would look at my mother askance, 'You can have a seat over there. ' It took years to earn their respect."

Johnson would spend thousands of dollars with a single designer. "I have a check she wrote to Valentino for $50,000," says Smaltz, who is finishing up an autobiography that details her Fashion Fair experiences.

The tradition of paying for the clothes continues because "we don't want to be beholden to anyone," Rice says. Today, the company has a clothing budget of more than $1 million and an archive of garments dating to the 1950s.

"We have a warehouse of clothes," Rice says. "We're going to start to catalogue them. We've tried to keep that sort of quiet. . . . They are really exceptional, one-of-a-kind pieces."

Buying the clothes did not assure entry into fashion's inner circle with its private dinners, obsequious air-kissing and passionate kowtowing. It did not guarantee a seat in the front row. Smaltz, with her extroverted personality and her imposing height, would do her best to myth-make on behalf of her employer. "People would ask me, 'What is Mrs. Johnson's first name?' I'd say, 'Missus.' "

Theater of the Absurd

There was a moment at the Washington show, when a model with a pixie hairdo marched to the edge of the stage and planted herself there with a satisfied foot stomp. She reached up and pulled off her "hair" in one smooth motion, revealing a buzz cut and holding the displaced wig aloft with amusement.

With all of its shenanigans, Ebony Fashion Fair sometimes has more in common with theater of the absurd than the clothing industry. The show defined fashion on its own terms -- in plus-sizes, with church hats, with finger-paint colors when black was all the rage. It was among the first to bring labels such as Fendi, Pucci and Roberto Cavalli to the American public. It showed the industry that black women could command a runway. It introduced generations of black women -- and men -- to fashion at its most extreme, planting the seed for today's desire for "it" bags, designer shoes and king's-ransom jewelry. It fed a hunger to be perceived as glamorous and beautiful. Fashion Fair made an impact.

The ripple effect, however, has been slow and almost imperceptible.

"I'm not so sure we've influenced the general market," Rice says. "But I'm not sure we're trying to do that."

It's still rare that black models are on the cover of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar or Glamour. It's rarer still when they sign endorsement deals with design houses or cosmetics firms. Rice says the industry still doesn't understand the buying power of African American consumers.

But for Smaltz, it was "the best job any young woman could possibly have." And for Andrea Keesee, more than 25 years later, it remains a glamorous place to be.