Black fashion has never waited for an invitation to New York Fashion Week

From Harlem’s Fashion Row to Ophelia DeVore, we break down how Black creatives continue to make NYFW their own. 

New York Fashion Week officially kicked off on Thursday, but Black talent, somewhat unsurprisingly, is already several steps ahead on the catwalk.

On Tuesday, Sept. 8, Harlem’s Fashion Row held its 19th annual star-studded Fashion Show & Style Awards, getting a head start on the week while celebrating new and emerging Black talent in fashion.

Themed “Peace by Piece,” a play on both “protecting one’s peace” and the way Black talent in fashion has had to build their careers piece by piece, the evening honored some of the biggest names in Black fashion and style, including Erykah Badu, Brandon Blackwood, Wisdom Kaye, Recho Omondi, and industry veteran Audrey Smaltz, before turning the runway over to designers Chuks Collins, Waïna Chancy of Atelier Ndigo, and Lamin “Rey” Jaiteh.

All three debuted their Spring/Summer 2027 collections through HFR’s Runway Ahead Designer Fellowship, with Chancy ultimately taking home the program’s inaugural $100,000 prize to help grow her brand.

During her opening remarks, Harlem’s Fashion Row founder Brandice Daniel said, per Fashionista, “You don’t have to build everything overnight, in chaos, or afraid, you can build in peace.”

Almost 20 years after Daniel founded HFR to help connect designers of color with a fashion industry that has historically shut them out, the organization has become a Fashion Week fixture all its own, complete with its own runway, funding, awards, and opportunities for the next generation coming up behind it. HFR is also far from the only place where Black creatives have decided that if the usual path into Fashion Week isn’t wide enough, well, there are plenty of other ways to get there.

From HFR to RAISEfashion’s two-day independent fashion marketplace with Refinery29, to veteran Black designers returning to the schedule and newer names making their debuts, Black creatives are once again finding ways to make New York Fashion Week work for them. In fact, we’ve been doing that since essentially the very beginning.

Back in 1969, pioneering Black model and entrepreneur Ophelia DeVore launched “Fashions in the Park,” a week of fashion shows in Bryant Park featuring a multicultural slate of models and, by its second year, an entire day dedicated to Black designers.

At the time, New York designers largely showed their collections at various venues scattered across the city. More than two decades later, the industry would famously gather its shows beneath the white tents at Bryant Park, creating the centralized fashion spectacle that came to define modern New York Fashion Week — a whole concept that, as Vogue reports, was inspired, in part, by what DeVore had already done there.

Of course, DeVore had been finding ways around fashion’s closed doors long before Bryant Park. After navigating racism and barriers throughout her own modeling career, she founded the Grace Del Marco Agency in 1946 to train and launch Black models at a time when most major agencies, magazines, and beauty brands had little interest in giving them a chance. Rather than wait around for the fashion industry to suddenly see the light, DeVore found another way in and brought other Black people with her.

You can find plenty of that same energy around New York this week. On Thursday and Friday, RAISEfashion and Refinery29 are taking over The Standard, East Village, for a two-day experience centered on independent designers, featuring Black-founded brands including Diarrablu, K.NGSLEY, Gwen Beloti, and Vontélle. Rather than another traditional runway, shoppers and industry insiders can browse collections while actually getting to meet some of the talent behind the brands.

Then, beginning Friday, ANKA is bringing together independent Black-owned brands from Africa and across the diaspora for a three-day pop-up in Herald Square. Each participating designer gets their own display space, while shoppers get the increasingly rare pleasure of actually seeing, touching, trying on, and buying the clothes right there on the spot.

Meanwhile, designers LaQuan Smith, Sergio Hudson, and Frederick Anderson are back with shows of their own, while Trinidadian knitwear designer Aisling Camps stages her first formal runway show. Rachel Scott is pulling double duty, presenting her own label Diotima while continuing her tenure as creative director of Proenza Schouler.

Maybe one of these designers will eventually become a household name. Maybe a fellowship like HFR’s will help build the next great Black fashion house, or somebody will stumble onto an entirely new way of showcasing clothes that everybody else eventually copies. There’s really no telling what can happen when Black creatives stop waiting for an invitation and start building what they need instead.