Fashion has spent the last decade loudly celebrating diversity. The campaigns have gotten more colourful, the runways more varied, the press releases more earnest. But here is the uncomfortable question no one in the industry wants to sit with for too long: what if all of it, even the efforts done well, is still fundamentally superficial? What if the fashion industry has simply learned to perform inclusion rather than practise it, and what if the difference is nearly impossible to detect from the outside?
An Industry Built on Exclusion
To understand why inclusivity sits so awkwardly in fashion, you have to understand what fashion is actually for. Tom Ford, one of the industry’s most candid and commercially successful designers, put it plainly when he noted that fashion is ruthless, requiring a complete reinvention of ideas every three months, and that it functions as a manifestation of broader sociological and political climates. What he and others in the industry have long understood is that fashion’s core engine runs on aspiration, and aspiration, by definition, requires most people to feel excluded. The luxury market does not sell clothes. It sells the idea that you could belong to a world that would otherwise reject you. Inclusivity, in that context, is not just a new direction. It is a contradiction of the business model.
This tension is not new. For decades, the fashion industry was openly hostile to bodies, skin tones, ages, and gender identities that fell outside a narrow template. Runways featured almost exclusively white, thin, able-bodied women. Glossy magazines operated as gatekeepers of a very specific beauty ideal. Then came social media, the body positivity movement, the racial justice reckoning of 2020, and suddenly the industry needed to have a different conversation. What followed was a wave of diversity campaigns, inclusive casting calls, DEI hires, and carefully worded commitments to change. The question is how much of that wave actually shifted anything underneath.
The Numbers Behind the Glossy Surface
The data tells a story that the campaigns do not. A UK census on diversity in fashion found that while 47% of models on catwalks and in advertising were people of colour, only 9% of executive and decision-making roles were held by people of colour. The British Fashion Council reported that just 14% of executive roles in UK fashion are held by people of colour. In the United States, a McKinsey study found Black employees occupy less than 8% of C-suite positions in the industry. According to a 2024 Mintel report on fashion inclusivity, nearly half of adult consumers still feel left out of fashion representation, despite brands’ increasingly visible diversity efforts.
These numbers reveal the central flaw in how fashion has approached diversity: it has focused almost entirely on what is visible to consumers, the faces in campaigns, the bodies on runways, and almost not at all on the structural changes that would make those visible choices feel genuinely motivated. When 47% of runway models are people of colour but 91% of the people deciding who gets cast are white, the diversity is real in one sense and completely hollow in another.
The Business of Fashion highlighted this plainly when examining luxury’s designer diversity problem: across the biggest luxury conglomerates, Kering, LVMH, and Richemont, the scarcity of Black creative directors remains stark even as those same houses celebrate Black models and Black cultural references in their campaigns. The success of Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton and Olivier Rousteing at Balmain are held up as proof of progress, but their very visibility underscores how rare they are. They are the exception the industry points to precisely because the rule has not changed.
Victoria’s Secret: The Textbook Case in Reactive Inclusion
No brand illustrates the limits of reactive diversity better than Victoria’s Secret. The brand built its identity over decades on a single, aggressively narrow beauty ideal: white, tall, very thin, conventionally feminine. Its annual fashion show was not merely aspirational; it was, by design, unattainable. In 2018, then-CMO Ed Razek told Vogue that including plus-size and transgender models would ruin the show’s fantasy. The backlash was swift and severe. Rihanna launched Savage X Fenty the same year, staging an explicitly inclusive show that made Victoria’s Secret look not just dated but ethically indefensible.
Victoria’s Secret spent the next several years attempting a rebrand. The 2023 ‘Tour’ featured models of diverse body types, transgender artists, and designers from multiple cultural backgrounds. The 2024 show returned to New York with models of various ages, races, sexualities and sizes walking alongside original Angels like Adriana Lima and Tyra Banks. PR experts at the time described the result as ‘tokenistic,’ ‘performative,’ and ‘muddled.’ Yonder Consulting’s US managing director Katie Hankinson captured it precisely: ‘Victoria’s Secret is still living in a narrow lane of what beauty is. It’s hard for the show and marketing to not appear performative when the brand hasn’t done the deep work of knowing themselves and what they stand for.’
Academic analysis of the rebrand, published in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, found that consumers consistently described the campaign using words like ‘trying,’ ‘marketing,’ and ‘fake.’ The study concluded that adopting progressive imagery without operational change appears inauthentic, and that crisis-induced diversity efforts require deep reform, not visual adjustment, to be believed. Victoria’s Secret’s net sales fell from 7.8 billion dollars in 2016 to 6.2 billion in 2023. The brand tried to please everyone and, in doing so, satisfied almost no one.
Gucci, Prada, and the Crisis-Activated Playbook
Gucci’s diversity journey follows a similar pattern. In early 2019, the brand released a black balaclava-style sweater that covered the lower half of the face with red-rimmed lips, widely condemned as evoking blackface. The backlash was immediate. Within months, Gucci appointed its first Global Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, launched a multicultural design scholarship program, and established a 5 million dollar Changemakers Fund. These were not nothing. The scholarship program was real, the investment was real, and the cultural awareness training rolled out to 18,000 employees was at least an attempt at structural change.
But the sequence matters. Gucci did not create a diversity leadership position because it believed in equity. It created one after releasing a product that evoked one of the most painful images in American racial history. Prada followed an almost identical path: a Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council co-chaired by artist Theaster Gates and filmmaker Ava DuVernay was announced in early 2019, in direct response to Prada releasing a small figurine in its shop windows that was condemned as resembling blackface. These are not stories of brands proactively building inclusive cultures. They are stories of brands managing reputational emergencies with institutional-looking responses.
Fast Fashion’s Cheaper Version of the Same Problem
The conversation in luxury fashion at least happens at a price point that acknowledges some level of seriousness. In fast fashion, the contradictions are starker. Zara, owned by Inditex, the world’s largest fashion retailer, runs its sizing up to XL in most lines, a range that excludes the average American woman, who wears a size 16 to 18. Plus-size influencer Kellie Brown described the experience of shopping at Zara as being made immediately unwelcome: the clothes are small, the mannequins are small, and there is nothing there for you. Zara has faced no meaningful pressure to change this because it has not framed itself around inclusivity. It simply does not pretend.
H&M, by contrast, does extend its size range up to 4XL in some lines, and positions itself as more accessible and inclusive. But H&M has faced repeated accusations of greenwashing in its sustainability marketing, and the same logic applies to its body positivity messaging. A brand can feature plus-size models in its campaigns while simultaneously failing to pay garment workers living wages, as H&M was found to have done in 2018, affecting an estimated 850,000 workers. Inclusivity, in this framing, becomes a front-of-house story that obscures what is happening in the supply chain.
What Authentic Inclusion Would Actually Look Like
If we are going to distinguish between performative and genuine inclusivity, we need clearer markers than good intentions and nice campaign images. Authentic inclusion, based on what the research and the structural failures show, would look like several specific things happening at the same time.
Diverse representation would exist behind the camera, not just in front of it. Photographers, stylists, casting directors, and creative leads would reflect the communities being celebrated. Size ranges would be expanded permanently, not seasonally, and designed with actual fit testing on diverse bodies rather than a standard sample size scaled up. Diversity commitments would appear year-round rather than clustering around Pride Month, Black History Month, or International Women’s Day. And brands would be willing to talk about the demographic makeup of their boardrooms, not just their campaigns.
Savage X Fenty comes closest to this model among major brands. Rihanna’s brand was built from inception with an inclusive casting philosophy, not retrofitted after public pressure. Its pricing, while not accessible to all budgets, is significantly more democratic than luxury lingerie competitors. Its runway shows have consistently featured models across a genuine range of body sizes, ages, disabilities, and gender identities, not as a contrast to a ‘normal’ category but as the full definition of the brand’s aesthetic. The Mintel 2024 report noted that brands which demonstrate inclusive leadership both externally in campaigns and internally in hiring and product development are best positioned to build genuine consumer loyalty.
But even Savage X Fenty is not a clean story. The brand has faced its own questions about pricing accessibility and labour practices. The point is not that any brand has solved this. The point is that building inclusion into the founding logic of a brand produces a fundamentally different result than adding it as a corrective layer.
Should We Just Be Grateful It Is Happening At All?
This is the question that makes the conversation genuinely difficult. If a plus-size teenager sees a body that looks like hers in a Zara campaign for the first time, does it matter that Zara ran that campaign primarily to attract a growing market segment? If a young Black woman sees a Black creative director at a major fashion house, does the structural rarity of that moment diminish its real-world impact?
The honest answer is: probably not entirely. Representation has psychological and cultural effects regardless of its motivation. Seeing yourself reflected in the world is meaningful even if the person doing the reflecting is thinking mainly about market share. A 2024 study by the Unstereotype Alliance, sponsored by Cannes Lions, found that brands creating content with genuinely diverse representation consistently outperform on both consumer connection and business metrics. Seventy percent of younger millennials cited diverse casting as a key driver of brand preference. These numbers suggest that the market is already demanding something that at least resembles authentic inclusion, even if it cannot always identify the genuine article.
But accepting performative inclusion as good enough carries its own costs. It allows brands to capture the social goodwill of diversity without undertaking the harder, more expensive, and more genuinely disruptive work of structural change. It lets fashion houses tick a box and move on. It keeps people from underrepresented communities feeling included in the marketing while remaining excluded from the rooms where decisions are made. And it sets a ceiling: if good optics are rewarded as though they were genuine transformation, there is no incentive to go further.
How Can You Even Tell the Difference?
This is where the conversation becomes genuinely humbling. There is no reliable way, from the outside, to determine whether a brand’s inclusive campaign reflects a sincere internal culture or an extremely well-executed marketing strategy. Brands have become adept at producing the language, the imagery, and the institutional structures of inclusion. A DEI director hire looks the same whether it was motivated by conviction or crisis management. A diverse runway looks the same whether the creative director fought for it or the PR team requested it.
There are rough indicators, none of them definitive. Does the brand’s diversity show up consistently across the year, or does it cluster around specific cultural moments? Does it extend behind the camera as well as in front of it? When the brand makes a mistake, as most eventually do, does the response look like genuine accountability or crisis communication dressed up as accountability? Does the size range, the adaptive clothing line, the gender-neutral collection appear in the permanent catalogue or only in a limited campaign? And perhaps most tellingly: did the initiative precede public pressure or follow it?
The Fashion Minority Alliance’s 2024 Road to Inclusivity report found that the industry’s three most persistent failures were the attrition of underrepresented staff at mid-career level, a disconnect between company policies and actual workplace culture, and a lack of preparation that leads to performative responses to diversity crises rather than embedded, ongoing commitment. These are internal failures, invisible to the consumer, and they are exactly the kind of thing a well-executed campaign can obscure entirely.
Tom Ford once said that real fashion change comes from real changes in real life, and that everything else is just decoration. That applies here more directly than he probably intended it. The diversity that fashion has embraced over the last decade is, in most cases, decoration applied over a structure that has not fundamentally changed. The creative directors are still overwhelmingly white and male. The executive tables are still not representative of the consumers they serve. The plus-size woman still cannot reliably find her size at Zara. The garment worker in the supply chain is still largely invisible.
None of that means the visible changes are worthless. The teenager who saw herself in a campaign for the first time matters. The model who got a runway job that would not have existed ten years ago matters. Progress, even when it is incomplete and partly commercially motivated, is still movement. But it is movement that stops the moment consumers stop demanding it, and that is the clearest sign that it has not yet become part of what the industry believes in rather than what it is selling.
The question of whether to be satisfied with imperfect progress or to keep demanding something more genuine is not really a choice between two options. It is a decision about what standard you hold the industry to. Fashion has proven it can produce beautiful images of inclusion. What it has not yet proven is that it can build systems that make those images true.
