There’s a dress on display at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. A pharaonic black velvet scoop-neck evening gown featuring a straight skirt adorned with gold sequins and geometric embroidery topped off by a black chiffon scarf with coordinating paillettes. Vintage couture, of course, from 1961. It was worn by Ophelia DeVore, broadly recognized as America’s first Black model, who formed her breakthrough eponymous charm school and game-changing Grace Del Marco modeling agency to help make household names of Diahann Carroll, Dorothea Church, Gail Fisher, Trudy Haynes, Beah Richards, Richard Roundtree, Sue Simmons, Audrey Smaltz, Susan Taylor, Cicely Tyson, and Helen Williams. For starters.
But that’s not what makes the dress interesting. After all, it’s just one of five frocks the Smithsonian retains from DeVore’s closet—31 pieces in all, mostly accessories.
Buoyed by bigotry, the endurance of cultural amnesia over Bryant Park’s Black fashion shows mirrors similar decades-long minimizing of Central Park’s “Black Woodstock,” a 1969 concert that was largely ignored until Summer of Soul, Questlove’s 2022 Oscar win for best documentary. Though, certainly, forgetting or minimizing Black achievement is not always malicious. “Ophelia DeVore lived a long life—she died at 92—and these shows were maybe a blip to her,” says Gabrielle Dudley, an archivist at Emory who specializes in the Civil Rights Era (at 50 and until she died, DeVore took on a second career as owner and publisher of The Columbus Times, a Black newspaper in Georgia she inherited after her second husband’s death). “In the Black fashion community it was something that was very much looked forward to. It was very significant,” Dudley continues, “but the historical context is that this was an era where Black people were breaking barriers almost every day—and not just being a credit to their race, but also an asset to their race. So many Black people were doing it that of course someone was doing it in the fashion industry.”
Even for DeVore herself, Dudley adds, “in a life that is so long and has done so many things, it’s hard to shine a light on every single thing. And she may have been tired of telling the story and tired of pushing against the grain. This is something that often happens in Black women’s archives.”
Likewise, many DeVore biographies or retrospectives have a habit of glossing over her Olivia Pope-style work as an image consultant for the governments of Haiti and Nigeria. And the Fashion & Beauty Centre she opened in Swaziland in 1985 with Zenami Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s daughter, when he was still imprisoned in apartheid South Africa. And her Oprah-rivaling circle of friends and mentors: Julian Bond, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz. DeVore did a lot of living.
A Vogue investigation into DeVore’s forgotten or half-remembered success reveals that, indeed, as early as 1969—24 years before its formal tents—DeVore was putting on runway shows in Bryant Park hailed as “fashion extravaganzas” by The Amsterdam News, New York’s Black newspaper of record, which also forgot this history in its own obituary for DeVore.
“Featured in the fashions in the park were noted Black, Oriental and Spanish-speaking male and female models, both adults and children,” reads one article from September 1970. “They paraded garments contributed by major manufacturers, fashion houses, accessories firms and designers. Ophelia DeVore commentated.”
Still today, institutional erasure of DeVore’s accomplishments endures. Emory, for example, has a policy of waiting 15 business days to digitize even a single image from its DeVore archive; in Emory’s 13 years of stewardship, an archivist there says it has digitized “one image of DeVore.” Such gatekeeping both suppresses DeVore’s legacy and amplifies systemic biases against the visibility of Black women’s success. After DeVore’s family interceded, Emory digitized some records for this article—withholding top-priority requests, including its solitary DeVore portrait.
Nevertheless, DeVore’s daughter Carol, now 83 and living in Georgia, fondly remembers commenting alongside her mother at that 1970 show. “That was her idea to bring some excitement to fashion—and to lunchtime. It was a lot of fun,” she says. “The fashions we had were very unique. So this was something people wouldn’t see ordinarily, even fashion-wise, and not just because the fashions were on Black models.”
A review of flyers, handwritten logistics, and family photographs from the weeklong shows in 1969 and 1970 included Butterick, Gay Gibson, Pandora Frocks, an international show in partnership with TWA, menswear by Oleg Cassini (a designer favored by Jacqueline Kennedy) and Federico Pio, wigs by Jacqueline Lee, and more, including one day set aside exclusively for Black designers. An exuberant soundtrack came by way of a Chicano garage band from California called The Premiers, as well as radio hits including The Jones Girls’ new single “My Own Special Way.”
Beneath their relaxed vibe, the shows were painstakingly planned; for example, City Hall permits scheduled rain dates for the open-air event, which was capped at 500 attendants.
Fashion Week didn’t simply arrive at Bryant Park one day. DeVore brought it there.
Carol sighs happily: “My mother didn’t just promote things to sell. She saw value in people. She called Black people ‘Black diamonds’ and said it was her job to polish those Black diamonds.”
As early as 1949, DeVore herself elevated the staid practicality of showroom exhibits by modeling a gray Persian lamb fur coat by John T. Vidal (America’s premier Black furrier at the time) as part of a “fashion cruise and dance.” By 1955, she was host of ABC’s Spotlight on Harlem, New York’s first TV show produced by and for Black Americans. Being multiracial herself, DeVore also launched a pioneering cosmetics line tailored to non-white skin. In 1959, one of her models, Cecelia Cooper, became the first American and first Black woman to win the Miss Festival beauty contest at the Cannes Film Festival (another one of her models scored the title the following year). The victories made Del Marco the first choice for Christian Dior’s push into international sales; from Del Marco’s roster, Dior chose Helen Williams.
Amid all this momentum, DeVore’s life came literally crashing to a halt in 1952. A car accident in a Detroit snowstorm. Friends pulled her broken body from the flaming wreckage before her new Buick Special exploded. She awoke from a coma two weeks later in a body cast from the neck down. Her legs were crushed and shoulders broken with one arm dislocated. Even her teeth were shattered. “The only thing holding me together was the brand-new girdle I had worn,” she told her family. She spent nine months bedridden, including five in hospitalized traction. Her doctor swore off ever again taking a case as difficult as hers.
“She had one good hand and she used it to sign contracts from her hospital room,” says Alina Mitchell, author of The Color of Beauty. “She was so determined. It’s so inspiring to me. Imagine being stuck in a hospital for months and using that time to think up ways to improve the fashion industry.”
Of course, Fashion Week—like fashion itself—is a collaborative, ever-evolving enterprise. Its earliest modern iteration began in 1903, when a New York specialty clothing shop called Erlich Brothers held in its store what is regarded as America’s first fashion show. The new gimmick became formalized into a tradition citywide as “press week” at the Plaza Hotel in 1943 by Eleanor Lambert, a renowned fashion publicist. But it lacked the Black community’s sense of iconoclastic rebellion and sartorial agency (in 1984, for example, at Michael Kors’s first fashion show, Iman restyled a shawl to her own liking before hitting the catwalk).
“You could do things back then. You could just do things—could be the first of things. You don’t think of it at that time. You’re so busy integrating,” says Bethann Hardison. “The struggle was a wonderful fight because we knew what we had on our side. We were gangsters, revolutionaries, Buffalo soldiers. But it wasn’t one note. Del Marco knew how to change over decades, over generations.” And on the heels of New York’s fresh “Black is beautiful” energy, Paris developed its own fashion week in 1973, Milan in 1975, and London in 1984.
As a pioneer of mainstream Black beauty, DeVore wasn’t changing the fashion industry only through different models with different skin, different hair, and different names; she was adding Black culture as well. Suddenly models walked differently, engaged audiences differently, spoke up differently, and even negotiated their work differently. New Black presence brought new Black possibilities.
Many ordinary people, too, passed through DeVore’s charm school and modeling agency. One was MaryLouise Patterson, who attended the charm school in the 1950s when she was 15.
“It was like I was going from being a little girl to being a young woman—lady is probably the correct term, a young lady rather than young woman,” she says, “the distinction being that you had these manners and this refinement that was special. Not everybody had that.”
She says DeVore’s charm school stint was the first time she felt beautiful. Instead of a model, Patterson became one of America’s most-graceful pediatricians. “I always wanted to present myself in the best light and Ophelia DeVore gave me that, that sense, that awareness,” she says. “She helped me meet my best self and understand the importance of that. It has carried me through.”
Today fashion often debates the fickle exclusivity of “it” models and the hyperbole of elite superlatives. DeVore was kinder: “They did not have to be the most beautiful, the best dancer, or the most talented. All they had to be was the best representation of themselves. My philosophy was there was no such thing as an ugly person, only a lazy one.”
Del Marco and the charm school shuttered in 2006. The frenetic glamour of Bryant Park’s tents ended in 2010. DeVore died in 2014. Fashion has a knack for revivals and her legacy was not wanting—her charm school and agency served 40,000 hopefuls across seven decades—but it was not complete either.
In just one example of DeVore’s ongoing impact, Emory’s possession of her archives has inspired classes taught on “Black Beauty,” “The Power of Black Self-Love,” and “Resisting Racism.” Student discussions turn those classes into essays and dissertations and other academic pursuits, which get turned into books and broader knowledge. With a life like DeVore’s, says Dudley, “the amazement never leaves.”
“She knew she was elevating Blackness in the fashion industry and in our world, and she probably thought she was doing that in an incremental way,” Dudley continues, “but we get the privilege of looking back and knowing, wow, she really did so much.”
When most artists create their masterpiece—a novel, a symphony, a painting, a film, a play, a skyscraper, a shoe—we encourage the pride of creative provenance: the artist emblazoning their craft with their name added for all to see in paint, in ink, in lights, in chiseled wood or stone, in stitchwork. Ironically, we are less generous when a creator’s magnum opus is baked into the concept of beauty itself. Knowing this, DeVore ached for remembrance. Explaining why she named her charm school after herself, she spoke plainly: “I had a gut feeling I was on the brink of something huge and I wanted the world to know I was behind it.”
