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50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair
For fifty years, Ebony Fashion Fair brought the world's most exclusive fashions to black audiences nationwide. A spectacle of glamour and performance, the traveling fashion show grew out of the pages of Ebony, the best-selling magazine of Chicago's Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). Similar to the publication, the fashion event provided eager audiences with transformative images of African Americans as beautiful and successful.
Ebony Fashion Fair reflected changes within black America.
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, African Americans challenged centuries of racial segregation and discrimination. Despite civil rights victories, images of black achievement remained rare. Through its innovative work in Chicago, a city where black businesses and culture thrived, JPC presented a powerful, new vision of what was possible for African Americans. |