Before New York Fashion Week became a global institution, Ophelia DeVore was already changing who got to walk the runway.
By Mood Magazine NYC
New York Fashion Week has a way of making the city feel like a runway.
For a few days, sidewalks become front rows. Coffee shops become casting rooms. Every well-dressed person suddenly looks as if they have somewhere very important to be.
Designers present collections. Editors take notes. Photographers chase the perfect street-style moment. Buyers, celebrities, models, stylists, and influencers move through Manhattan with the particular urgency of people who know they are being watched.
But before Fashion Week became the polished global institution we know today, there was a Black woman in New York who was already asking a much bigger question:
Who gets to be seen?
Her name was Ophelia DeVore.
And the fashion industry has a memory problem.
BEFORE THE TENTS, THERE WAS OPHELIA
DeVore was one of America’s pioneering Black models and an extraordinary entrepreneur. In 1946, she helped establish the Grace Del Marco Modeling Agency, creating opportunities for Black and other non-white models who were largely shut out of mainstream American fashion. She later ran the Ophelia DeVore School of Self-Development and Modeling for more than six decades.
Her agency became a launching point for people who would go on to become household names, including Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Richard Roundtree, and Helen Williams.
But DeVore wasn’t satisfied with putting Black models into rooms that had previously excluded them.
She wanted to change the room.
She understood something that remains true today:
Visibility is power.
If you change who gets seen, you begin to change what people believe beauty looks like.
If you change what beauty looks like, you begin to change who believes they belong.
And if you change who believes they belong, you eventually change the industry.
THEN SHE TOOK FASHION TO THE PARK
This is where the story gets particularly interesting for New York.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, DeVore organized multicultural fashion presentations in Bryant Park, years before the modern Fashion Week tents arrived there.
The shows brought together models of different racial backgrounds and presented clothing from major manufacturers, designers, and fashion companies. Her 1970 presentation, Fashions in the Park, was designed to bring fashion directly to the public during the lunch hour.
Think about that for a moment.
Bryant Park.
Fashion.
Models.
Designers.
The public gathering around a centralized fashion presentation.
Years before the fashion industry formally established Bryant Park as the home of its centralized runway calendar.
Fashion history often tells us that New York Fashion Week became centralized in Bryant Park in the 1990s, when the CFDA and 7th on Sixth created a central location for designers’ biannual shows.
But DeVore had already understood the power of that location decades earlier.
She didn’t simply wait for fashion to come to her.
She brought fashion to the people.
SHE WAS BUILDING MORE THAN A RUNWAY
Perhaps the most fascinating part of DeVore’s story is that modeling was never really the whole point.
She was building infrastructure.
Her agency trained and represented models of color.
Her school taught self-development and modeling.
She worked with major corporations to encourage more inclusive advertising.
She eventually launched her own cosmetics company.
And she used television as another avenue for representation.
In the 1950s, DeVore co-hosted “Spotlight on Harlem,” an ABC program featuring Black talent, beauty, and fashion. The Smithsonian describes it as the first television program produced by and for African Americans in New York.
This was not a woman waiting for an industry to invite her into the conversation.
She was building her own conversation.
THE BLACK BEAUTY BUSINESS
DeVore understood something else that modern conversations about representation sometimes forget.
Representation isn’t only about who appears on the runway.
It is also about who owns the agency.
Who trains the model.
Who gets paid.
Who controls the image.
Who makes the advertising.
Who creates the beauty products.
Who decides which faces are commercially valuable.
DeVore recognized the economic power of Black beauty at a time when much of corporate America had not.
The Smithsonian notes that she worked with major companies including Pepsi-Cola, Revlon, Coca-Cola, General Foods, Anheuser-Busch, and major airlines, encouraging them to use African American models in their advertising.
She wasn’t simply asking fashion to become more diverse.
She was helping create the market that would make diversity impossible to ignore.
SO HOW DID WE FORGET HER?
That may be the most uncomfortable question.
Because fashion remembers.
It remembers designers.
It remembers models.
It remembers locations.
It remembers the firsts.
It remembers the photographs.
It remembers the parties.
Yet the institutional story of Fashion Week has not consistently remembered DeVore’s role in bringing multicultural fashion presentations to Bryant Park decades before the modern Fashion Week era.
That omission matters.
Not because every institution needs to be rewritten around one person.
But because history becomes distorted when the people who built the infrastructure disappear from the story.
DeVore’s daughter and historians have argued that the marginalization of Black women’s contributions helped contribute to her erasure from mainstream fashion history. Recent reporting has renewed attention to the gap between DeVore’s documented work and how the industry tells its own origin story.
And perhaps this is the part that should make us pause.
How many people are currently building the future of New York while the city is busy celebrating someone else’s version of its past?
FASHION HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT MORE THAN CLOTHES
A dress can be beautiful.
A runway can be spectacular.
A front row can be glamorous.
But fashion has always been a conversation about identity.
Who gets to be beautiful?
Who gets to be desirable?
Who gets photographed?
Who gets hired?
Who gets represented?
Who gets remembered?
Ophelia DeVore spent much of her life challenging those questions.
She understood that Black models did not need to become less Black to belong in fashion.
The industry needed to become large enough to see them.
That distinction is everything.
THE LEGACY IS STILL WALKING
Look around New York Fashion Week today.
Black designers.
Black models.
Black photographers.
Black stylists.
Black beauty entrepreneurs.
Black editors.
Black creative directors.
Black consumers with enormous cultural and economic influence.
The work is not finished.
But the runway is different.
And perhaps some of the people walking it should know whose footsteps they are following.
Ophelia DeVore died in Manhattan in 2014, but her legacy lives in something larger than a photograph or a fashion credit.
It lives every time a Black girl sees herself reflected in a runway image and doesn’t question whether she belongs there.
It lives every time a designer understands that beauty does not have one complexion.
It lives every time an entrepreneur decides not to wait for an invitation.
And it lives in New York itself.
Because sometimes the people who change a city don’t build a skyscraper.
Sometimes they build a platform.
Sometimes they build an agency.
Sometimes they put a runway in a park.
And sometimes, decades later, the world finally realizes what they were doing.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
Who are the Black women in fashion, beauty, art, or business whose contributions deserve to be remembered before the next generation writes the history?
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