Why Stella Jean and WAMI are boycotting Milan Fashion Week

To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here. Stella Jean and other members of a high-profile collective founded in 2020 to support Italian designers of colour have said that they will not be participating in Milan Fashion Week. It’s a stark reminder of the tensions bubbling below the surface of the Italian industry, where diversity and inclusion efforts have often lagged behind other countries. Jean, who co-founded We Are Made in Italy (WAMI), interrupted the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana’s (CNMI) fashion week press conference on 8 February, taking to the stage to claim the CNMI has “abandoned” its initiative and has not sufficiently supported diversity and inclusion across Italy’s fashion industry. The CNMI denied the claims of lack of support, saying that Stella Jean’s brand and WAMI were invited to be on the schedule and that WAMI was also offered the chance to use the Fashion Hub space location and communications for free. “Stella Jean and WAMI collective decided to pull out from the calendar, claiming that no economic support has been offered by CNMI,” Carlo Capasa, president of the CNMI, tells Vogue Business. “I want to reiterate that we have always supported WAMI and the Afro Fashion Association projects in different ways according to the possibilities available at the moment.” Jean co-founded WAMI in 2020 with Edward Buchanan, who is founder of knitwear label Sansovino 6, and talent scout and Afro Fashion Association founder Michelle Ngonmo. At the time, Jean was boycotting Milan Fashion Week because she was the only Black Italian designer on the show schedule. The WAMI collective participated in Milan Fashion Week in September 2020 with a fashion film; presented collections digitally in February 2021, September 2021 and February 2022; and hosted their first physical show in September 2022. CNMI supported WAMI’s participation in the schedule, and Capasa joined the collective’s board. But Capasa left the board soon after the September show, and WAMI claims the CNMI’s support dried up. “WAMI has been an independent initiative collaborating with the Italian fashion council for three seasons. When we were informed in September that they would no longer support this initiative with visibility, financing for production, and presentations for the designers, we had to prepare the talents and start to resolve and propose solutions,” Buchanan tells Vogue Business. “We were essentially uninvited.” “When president Capasa realised there were Italian designers who were not white, he supported us for two years, but now we’ve been abandoned since September,” Jean said during the press conference. She said she had received death threats — an ongoing issue since she first spoke out against racism in Italy during a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020, she tells Vogue Business — and that she was beginning a hunger strike until Capasa could “guarantee that nobody [in the WAMI and BIPOC community] will be subjected to any future abuse [...] and that the entire community will be safeguarded”. In the press conference, Jean also claimed Capasa had backtracked on a commitment to establish a working group focused on designers of colour within the CNMI. Two days later, on 10 February, WAMI took to Instagram, posting a letter to Jean from Capasa, sent in August 2020, in which he asked her to lead a “working group at the Camera focused on the Black Lives Matter movement and the calls for action coming out of it”. CNMI said the letter was “shared without authorisation” and “is only a partial part of a communication that was shared in August 2020 between Stella Jean and Carlo Capasa”. It says several memorandum of understanding agreements were drafted and exchanged but were never signed by the Afro Fashion Association. CNMI says it subsequently established a working group on D&I. Jean alleges that the CNMI stopped its support following two incidents: the first, an Instagram post by Buchanan in early September 2022, criticising the CNMI for mislabelling WAMI as the “Black Lives Matter in Italian Fashion Collective”, a name it used briefly in its early days. And the second, a speech Jean made to attendees of WAMI’s show last September. “During this historical event, we dared to speak out about the abuses we’ve suffered as women and girls, about the conservative political shift in Italy and of the accompanying fear it sparked in many minorities in the country,” Jean tells Vogue Business. This was not well received, she adds. “In Italy, there’s this culture of retaliation if you speak out against certain things,” says Louis Pisano, a Black fashion commentator who says he left the country in 2018 because of his discomfort at the political and racial environment. CNMI says the wording on the official calendar is provided by those showing. “CNMI received written approval by a representative of the Afro Fashion Association on the wording ‘Black Lives Matter in Italian Fashion Collective — We Are Made in Italy (WAMI collective)’,” the organisation tells Vogue Business, adding that it agreed to change the name when asked. CNMI says Capasa left WAMI’s board on 28 September 2022 because “at board level, nothing has ever been shared with CNMI”. But it refutes Jean’s claims that its support for WAMI — or D&I more broadly — has reduced. Capasa highlights that two WAMI graduates are presenting this season for free — Zineb Hazim and Karim Daoudi — and that the CNMI has offered free inclusion on the official calendar for the Afro Fashion Association’s presentation of 12 designers’ collections and the inaugural Black Carpet Awards, which are a celebration of the Black and brown global community in the Italian fashion industry. CNMI says it agreed to include Black designers Tokyo James’s show and Maxivive’s presentation for free, following a request from Jean. The CNMI is also hosting a diversity initiative for the second time this season that spotlights emerging under-represented designers, titled “A Global Movement to Uplift Underrepresented Brands”, led by Teneshia Carr, owner and editor of US-based Blanc Magazine. In the past year, designers of colour have been appointed to the creative director role at two of Italy’s heritage brands: Maximilian Davis joined Ferragamo in March 2022, while Rhuigi Villaseñor joined Bally in January 2022. For WAMI’s first digital presentation in 2020, CNMI sponsored the show and production of the collections, while WAMI co-founders invested an additional €7,000 of their own money. For the second presentation in 2021, CNMI sponsored the digital show while the co-founders invested €15,000. The physical show in September 2022 was financed by the co-founders, while Vogue Italia, GQ, Vanity Fair and Italian media company NSS sponsored the production of the young designers’ capsule collections, with the funds covering a portion of the costs for materials and tailors. CNMI offered free showroom and presentation space to support the show. It says economic support is not part of its core activities, although it “may be exceptionally, one-off, made available to new brands at the beginning of their journey”. WAMI’s co-founders say this is not enough. “BIPOC designers in this country deal with struggles much more complex than their counterparts [elsewhere]. They find themselves now in the position where they do not have the possibility to complete and show the work that has been started,” says Buchanan. Multiple challenges, he says, include obtaining internships, finding work, connecting with factories and staying financially viable. “The Italian fashion industry has made some small steps forward, but there is still a long road ahead.” This story has been updated to reflect that Vogue Italia, GQ, Vanity Fair and NSS sponsored the production of the designers’ capsule collections for the September 2022 WAMI edition rather than the show itself, and to clarify that CNMI has offered to include the Afro Fashion Association’s presentation of 12 designers’ collections and the inaugural Black Carpet Awards on the calendar for free rather than subsidising the events themselves. (13/2) Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com. More from this author: Tapestry raises outlook as DTC sales offset wholesale losses Capri cuts forecast, shares drop as wholesale demand declines China’s luxury market shrinks for the first time in five years

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