Mrs Johnson, the woman who changed the colour of fashion forever.

‘There aren’t many women who can say they were fitted for a suit by Coco Chanel,’ says Linda Johnson Rice, chairman and chief executive of Johnson Publishing and daughter of the late Mrs Eunice Walker Johnson; who during her 50 years in fashion and publishing was on first name basis with many of the reigning designers of the last century. As fashion editor of Ebony magazine and director of The Ebony Fashion Fair, the famous touring fashion show (which ran from 1958 to 2009), Mrs Johnson was a pioneer of black fashion – the first to bridge the divide between the world of high fashion and the black community. When Ebony published its first issue in 1945, one would have been hard pressed to find a single black designer, model or buyer, let alone an editor, working with- in the mainstream of the fashion industry. By the mid-1960s, Johnson was not only on the front row but became the largest buyer of haute couture in the world, purchasing some 200 garments a year from fashion luminaries such as Dior, Valentino, Saint Laurent, Ungaro, Lacroix, Cardin, and Courrèges. Yet despite being cited as one of the world’s best dressed women, few people within the fashion industry today know of Mrs Johnson, who personally purchased more than an estimated 8,000 garments and spent $1-$1.5 million per year on designer clothes. Through a series of intimate recollections, Linda Johnson Rice, looks back on her mother’s legacy, and industry insiders like Marc Bohan, Iman, André Leon Talley, and Oscar de la Renta speak about the woman who changed the colour of fashion forever.

‘My earliest memory of travelling with my mother would have been to the Paris couture collections in 1965. I was around seven at the time, and I still remember my first show,’ recalls Linda Johnson Rice of accompanying her mother to Europe. ‘It was Pierre Cardin’s, and since I was very young I had to sit in the cabine [fitting room]. I can still picture the beautiful models rushing by like floating swans in a haze of vivid colour and rustling fabric. My mother, of course, sat in the salon on a gilded little chair.’ Curled up on a sofa in her elegant Chicago home, Rice flips through a family album filled with memories representing a virtual history of fashion over six decades. ‘The couture presentations were very different from today. It was a much more gracious, less rushed period. Back then people dressed for the shows, and the audience looked as chic as the models coming down the runway,’ says Rice, who lived through a glamorous chapter in fashion’s history through her mother.

Eunice Walker was born in Selma, Alabama, on April 4th, 1916, one of four children of Nathaniel and Ethel McAlpine Walker. Her father was a doctor, and her mother a high school headmistress. She graduated from Talladega College in Alabama in 1938 with a degree in sociology, and earned a master’s degree in social work from Loyola University in Chicago in 1941. She met John H Johnson in Chicago in 1940, and they married after she graduated.

Together with her husband, who passed away in 2005, Eunice Johnson helped transform Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company into a media and fashion powerhouse. In 1942 with a $500 loan, the Johnsons began publishing Negro Digest, a magazine modelled on Reader’s Digest. Mrs Johnson helped stuff and stamp the 20,000 envelopes that went to subscribers to raise the first $6,000 for the publication. Within a year it had a circulation of 50,000. The success inspired the couple to launch Ebony, a glossy monthly for African-Americans. Today, Ebony has a circulation of 1.25 million.

The Ebony Fashion Fair was born a few years later in 1957, when the wife of Dillard University president Albert Dent suggested the Johnsons put on a charity fashion show in New Orleans. It would evolve into the world’s largest travelling fashion show. Over the years, it would become a powerful fundraising organisation that raised more than $55 million for civil rights groups, hospitals, community centres, and scholarships for African-Americans. Landing annually in some 200 cities, the show brought haute couture and designer ready-to-wear to African-American audiences across the United States, with stops in Canada, London, and the Carib- bean along the way. In doing so, Johnson became one of the first to bridge the divide between a rarefied fashion world and the black community. But as Teri Agins, veteran fashion writ- er for the Wall Street Journal, has pointed out, ‘Mrs Johnson did not just bring couture to black America, she brought it to America. She came before Elsa Klensch – before fashion was accessible.’ In the days before the internet and mass media, the annual Fashion Fair gave the public a rare opportunity to actually see one-of-a-kind frocks.

‘She engaged in racial uplift through personal style,’ observes Robin Givhan, the Pulitzer-winning fashion critic and writer. ‘Mrs Johnson gave her audiences access to a haughty world in an era before webcasts, websites, blogs and Twitter feeds. She had the audacity to believe that a black woman might be interested in Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino even if she could not afford it.’

In its first two decades alone, the Ebony Fashion Fair registered a number of firsts, filling auditoriums in the segregated South and staging the first fashion show at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Yet the Fair faced many challenges, and in the early days travelling with it was far from glamorous. Carole Preston who was a 19-year-old model with the first Fashion Fair in 1958, says in some Southern towns in the very early years, Mrs Johnson’s husband arranged for food to be delivered to the bus ‘so we didn’t have to go to any back doors’. She was one of two light-skinned models who were sent in to get food at restaurants that declined to serve blacks. In the still-segregated South, they weren’t allowed to stay in hotels, so local groups would put up the models in their homes. And during the Fashion Fair’s 1965-66 season, the Ku Klux Klan rallied outside a hotel where the models were staying. But the Ebony Fashion Fair carried on regardless. ‘[It] was both an aspirational and inspirational experience,’ says American Vogue’s André Leon Talley. ‘Mrs Johnson was one of the first to bring haute couture to small-town America at a time when fashion wasn’t as readily available the way it is today.’

In 1962, while working as Johnson Publishing’s secretary and treasurer, Mrs Johnson became Ebony Fashion Fair’s producer and director. That same year she also became the publication’s fashion editor. Under her direction, Ebony’s fashion pages were transformed into a showcase for black style and beauty, featuring regular articles and fashion stories that informed its readers about the latest international trends. ‘She had a lot of energy and came into fashion at a time when one could wear many hats. In addition to producing and directing the Ebony Fashion Fair, she was an editor, buyer, writer and fashion director. That’s an incredible feat when one considers fashion was a very different business when she first started out,’ says Rice.

From behind a Plexiglas desk in her elegant, ultra-modern office, Eunice Johnson would plan and orchestrate fashion features that often displayed the clothes she purchased for the Ebony Fashion Fair. Conceived by Californian decorator Arthur Elrod, Johnson’s office left quite an impression on visitors with its white etched plaster walls, thick cream-coloured shag rug and a plush cream sofa that cantilevered from the wall. She also had a passion for collecting art (Rice recalls that one of the most memorable events in her mother’s life was on September 28th, 1974 when the painter Marc Chagall paid a visit to her Chicago home for lunch), and a number of important artworks featured in her office walls. ‘I remember her purchasing a tapestry by Picasso when we met the artist on Paris’ Left Bank,’ recalled Audrey Smaltz, former mod- el and Ebony Fashion Fair commentator from 1970 to 1977.

Beginning in the 1960s, Mrs Johnson created some of fashion’s most striking images; recently rediscovered by a new generation of tastemakers. ‘As a fashion editor, she had a very discerning eye, and she loved creating bold and strong imagery. She was also very hands-on and paid attention to the smallest details,’ recalls Rice, who assisted her mother on a number of shoots through the years.

‘She was extremely perceptive and had the kind of fashion sense that could feel the pulse of the moment. You knew that her judgments would always be on target,’ says Smaltz, who travelled first class with Mrs Johnson and Linda to attend the European shows for the better part of the 1970s. ‘We would stay at the Dorchester in London, the Plaza Athénée in Paris, and the Grand Hotel in Rome. I got to meet all the top designers with her, including Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro, Valentino, and Princess Irene Galitzine.’

Today, as the company’s chairman, Rice is focusing her attention on exposing a new generation to her mother’s legacy. ‘There is something timeless and sophisticated about many of these images. She had a keen sense for colour and composition and never cut corners when it came to getting the best models and photographers,’ she says. This unique collection of fashion imagery becomes all the more impressive when one considers that Mrs Johnson, a black fashion editor working for an African-American publication, had to compete with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to make these images a reality.

‘After the collections were presented, there was a mad rush to get pieces photographed for the magazine. In Rome, we would shoot on location throughout the city with the photographer Franco Grillo. While in Paris we shot in the studio with the well-known jazz photographer Herman Leonard,’ says Rice. ‘Herman was my first exposure to a very hip world. Everyone around him was edgy and bohemian, which was very inspiring to me in my early teens.’

Mrs Johnson worked with other noted talents too, including Bill King, Michael Roberts and the Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American photographer, Moneta Sleet Jr. ‘Hours were spent haggling to get the right clothes, as we were vying with other big publications. In some cases we had a mere 15 minutes to photograph a piece before it was whisked off by a courier to the next photo shoot,’ says Rice. Shoots rarely ended before 3am. But Mrs Johnson was a perfectionist, and she would set up each image, styling the models and making sure they posed to her vision.

Throughout the decades Mrs Johnson also nurtured the careers of emerging black editors and writers. In addition to being an associate buyer for the Ebony Fashion Fair, Audrey Smaltz worked as a fashion editor for Ebony based out of the New York office. ‘Working with Mrs Johnson provided me with the best education I could get,’ says Smaltz, who today is the CEO of the Ground Crew, a company she set up in 1977 to produce fashion shows for the likes of Ralph Lauren, Don- na Karan, Oscar de la Renta and Michael Kors.

‘She transformed the culture of fashion into an institution for African-Americans, and through the pages of Ebony she used the beauty of fashion and style to instil a sense of pride in the community,’ says André Leon Talley.

Talley first met Mrs Johnson during the Paris couture collections in the late 1970s, as a young writer at Women’s Wear Daily. In 1980, she hired him as a fashion editor for Ebony, and he often accompanied her on Concord to Paris and Milan. ‘It was one of the most unique experiences of my life to go to the collections with Mrs Johnson and Linda. We worked as a team and had a great time,’ recalls Talley, who during his brief tenure at the publication would produce in-depth stories on emerging black designers and models, while collaborating with artist/photographer Reginald Gray on fashion shoots featuring Mounia in Saint Laurent couture.

When the Johnsons first began going to Paris and Rome, they weren’t welcomed with open arms and experienced resistance from some designers who feared they would lose clients if their clothes appeared on black models. But Mrs Johnson persisted despite these early obstacles. ‘In most cases, she was the only African-American attending the New York and European collections in the late 1950s and early 1960s. People were brusque and rude, and often questioned why she was there,’ says Rice, pointing out that Mrs Johnson’s elegance, along with a deep pocketbook, quickly made her a respected figure within the fashion world. ‘Money is a powerful influencer, and she used it to gain entry into many of the couture houses. She not only managed to walk in, but proceeded to walk out with a designer’s most iconic pieces.’

‘She had to do an awful lot travelling in Europe to these haute couture shows because nobody really knew who Eunice Johnson was, no one had heard of Ebony in Paris, in Rome, and in Florence,’ says Rice. But her mother was tough: ‘She was from Southern Alabama and had a very strong sense of self. She wasn’t going to let anyone knock her down.’ And as she became known in fashion capitals, designers began to look forward to her visits. ‘I can’t remember when I didn’t know Mrs Johnson,’ recalled the late designer Bill Blass in a 1991 Ebony interview for the show’s 33rd anniversary. ‘When I started out in this business, I was aware of the fact that there was this unique woman coming into 7th Avenue, into the market, and she was not borrowing clothes for her show; she was buying them. And the things she would buy would be the most daring, the most avant-garde. And when I finally did see an Ebony Fashion Fair show, I realised why.’

Pierre Cardin, another Mrs Johnson favourite, recalls her good eye. ‘Especially when it came to Ebony, Mrs Johnson had the ability to choose the most important looks from a collection,’ he says. ‘They were always the pieces that I would have selected myself, and she never tried to alter a designer’s original vision.’ Marc Bohan, a designer Mrs Johnson had known since his early days at Dior, described Ebony’s fashion editor as an elegant woman with a very strong point of view: ‘She had a great sense of fashion, and she knew exactly what she wanted after seeing a show.’

Despite her hard-earned success in the fashion world, Mrs Johnson faced barriers in the industry throughout her career. According to Smaltz, discrimination persisted even during Ebony Fashion Fair’s heyday in the 1970s. ‘Some designers wouldn’t want us to come to the shows, and it was very tough to wrangle invitations. I would always bring some copies of the magazine with me to show them what we did because they didn’t know who we were.’

Through Ebony, Mrs Johnson changed the fashion world by showcasing beautiful black models in the latest styles. ‘Mrs Johnson gave us a sense of pride by using fashion and beauty to reflect who we are,’ explains Bethan Hardison, the legendary 1970s model and agent, who has been a long-time advocate of diversity on the runways. Iman landed her first modelling job with Ebony in 1976. ‘Mrs Johnson didn’t have an elitist mentality,’ she says. ‘She believed that beauty can come in all different forms, and that was a pretty revolutionary idea for the time. It’s a legacy that we’re all very proud to claim as our own.’ To convince designers to not only sell their clothes to her, but also use black models in their shows, Johnson would often visit showrooms accompanied by beautiful models of colour, as she did once with Oscar de la Renta. ‘I first met her when she came to my showroom right after my collection with two beautiful, beautiful black women,’ recalls the designer. ‘I learned that she was producing this fashion show and wanted some clothes. I immediately said yes, because they were the most extraordinary creatures I’d ever seen.’

Sometimes Mrs Johnson was even more forthright. ‘We were the ones who convinced Valentino to use black models in his shows back in the 1960s,’ Mrs Johnson told The New York Times in 2001. ‘I was in Paris, and I told him, “If you can’t find any black models, we’ll get some for you. And if you can’t use them, we’re not going to buy from you anymore.” That was before he was famous.’

She scored another first when, in 1963, she found Emilio Pucci two black models that he used in his show. This was the first time black models had ever paraded down the runways of Europe, and the first time they appeared at the Pitti Palace. ‘Until my mother went to Europe and really talked about having black models on runways, there really weren’t any. She set the stage for all the top black models that were to come,’ observes Linda. Mrs Johnson cast some of fashion’s most iconic black faces in Ebony’s pages including Grace Jones, Naomi Sims, Gloria Burgess, Billie Blair, Peggy Dillard, Carol Miles, and Khadija.

The Ebony Fashion Fair also helped launch the careers of several models including June Murphy, Cathy Belmont, and Sonia Cole, who became fixtures on the runways of Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, and Karl Lagerfeld. ‘Givenchy was very receptive to hiring black models to work in his atelier as well as on his runways. Throughout the years we sent many of our former Ebony Fashion Fair models to him, and he hired them immediately,’ recalled Mrs Johnson in the show’s 1995 program.

Pat Cleveland, who was 14 when she launched her career as an Ebony Fashion Fair model in 1966, continued to work with Ebony throughout the 1970s long after becoming internationally success. ‘My mother had sent Mrs Johnson photos of me, and the next thing I knew, I was being chaperoned all over the country by my mother on the Fashion Fair tour,’ remembers Cleveland. ‘She was very ahead of her time and gave me, a relative unknown, the opportunity to wear those beautiful clothes and represent Ebony.’

Beverly Johnson, who posed for Ebony at the beginning of her modelling career in the early 1970s, credits the publication’s fashion editor with opening doors for aspiring black models: ‘If it wasn’t for Mrs Johnson’s efforts to promote black women within the industry, I wouldn’t have had the career I had.’ She went on to became the first black model to appear on the cover of American Vogue in 1975.

According to Smaltz, Mrs Johnson set the stage for the kind of success these models experienced. ‘In the 1970s black models became the rage, and designers such as Issey Miyake began using these girls in their shows. Billie Blair, Barbara Summers, and Pat Cleveland were hot back then and they became the women who ruled the runways and best person- ified glamour.’

African-American designers also felt Mrs Johnson’s support. For New York-based designer Jeffery Banks, the Ebony Fashion Fair in the 1960s provided him with his first exposure to European ready-to-wear and haute couture. ‘It was basically a white world of fashion and there were a handful of black designers making inroads into it, and Mrs Johnson provided us with a platform when few avenues were open to us,’ says Banks.

Stephen Burrows, whose clothes regularly appeared on Ebony Fashion Fair’s runway and in the magazine says that Mrs Johnson’s early support proved to be invaluable. ‘When I started designing, Eunice Johnson would come to my shows in the early 1970s and start buying the clothes. That exposure was very important to me as a young designer,’ says Burrows, known for his distinctive layered jersey dresses sporting lettuce leaf hems.

‘The fashion business is tough, and you see a lot of designers come and go, and when you are a black designer, it’s even harder,’ says Rice. Recalling her mother’s enthusiasm when she first met the late Mississippi-born, Paris-based designer, Patrick Kelly – known for his body-hugging dresses embellished with buttons and bows – Rice says, ‘She loved Patrick’s spirit and talent. He was very warm and full of life, and that was reflected in the whimsical way he approached fashion.’ Kelly created a custom dress for Ebony Fashion Fair’s 1986 show. ‘He was so inspired by the show’s theme that year that he designed a slinky jersey dress with the words “I Love Fashion Scandal”, spelt out in buttons down the back.’

Although Mrs Johnson maintained professional relationships throughout her fashion career, she rarely formed close friendships with many of the designers she worked with. ‘Saint Laurent was her favourite designer, but I wouldn’t say she was close to him. You know, my mother wasn’t really close to many designers. For her it was ultimately about business, and she was very focused and disciplined about doing the best job. She didn’t spend a lot of time taking designers out to dinner, and frankly they didn’t spend that much time doing the same with her,’ says Rice.

Nonetheless, over the years she attended several parties with her mother given by Emilio Pucci, Valentino, Pino Lancetti, Fendi and Rocco Barocco in Rome. ‘Laura Biagiotti and the Missonis were particularly nice to my mother. I also remember wonderful cocktail parties at Dior, but she wasn’t usually included in the smaller more intimate parties. I think she wasn’t on those lists because she really didn’t care about ingratiating herself with a certain crowd. For her it was about getting her work done.’

Yet there was one particular party hosted by Pierre Cardin in 1977 during the couture presentations, when he had chartered a plane to fly the fashion press to Lyon for a tour of the famous textile factories, followed by a dinner prepared by the chef Paul Bocuse. ‘Cardin was very ahead of his time. He wasn’t simply a designer but a businessman and promoter, and he put on one of the most spectacular events I ever attended,’ says Rice. ‘I remember him coming to our table to speak to my mother, and I was so impressed by him.’

As one of a select group of women who dressed in couture, Mrs Johnson became part of an elite club. ‘We would go to the couture salons after the shows, and in the cabines on either side of us would be Nan Kempner, Ann Bass, or Princess Firyal of Jordan,’ says Rice, whose mother would always select a few pieces for herself at the shows. ‘Somehow she would find a way to squeeze in two or three fittings between shows and photo shoots. I can’t remember there being any other regular black clients at the time.’

As a child, Rice would sit quietly observing her mother being fitted in luxuriously appointed changing rooms at Paris’ couture establishments. ‘She would take a garment and turn it inside out to see how it was made. She knew what good craftsmanship was and would explain to the fitters precisely where a hemline or sleeve should fall… My mother was very astute. She was very much interested in the catwalk as a laboratory of ideas and showcasing a designer’s original vision instead of watering it down; and that is what she presented through the pages of Ebony.’

Buying samples that appeared on the runway was a common (and economical) practice amongst couture clients thin enough to fit into the originals. ‘As soon as we entered the salon, the directrice would come up to my mother and say, “Madame Johnson, I know exactly what to show you,” and would steer her towards the one-off pieces for the show that would never be reproduced, knowing full well that my mother would buy them. That’s why there are so many iconic pieces in her collection,’ adds Rice. Her unique collection holds rare examples of French and Italian haute couture. For his 30-year retrospective at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 1982, Hubert de Givenchy turned to Ebony’s fashion editor for one particular piece, described by Mrs Johnson as ‘the prettiest dress in Paris’. A standout of the designer’s spring 1974 couture collection, the violet-blue halter gown with matching cape dripping in hand-knotted fringe, was so difficult to make that it had never been reproduced. Johnson had the dress photographed for Ebony’s November 1974 issue.

Mrs Johnson was, however, a tough negotiator. ‘She was very smart and savvy in the way she conducted business, and her negotiation skills were genteel and ladylike but tough. I will never forget watching her negotiate with a directrice who had quoted an incredibly expensive price on a dress. After going back and forth for a while, my mother pulled out her chequebook and began writing out the amount,’ recalls Rice, who then watched her mother fold up the check and place it back in her purse. ‘She looked at the directrice and said, “You know what, I don’t think that’s the fair price. So I’m going to put my cheque away, and why don’t you think about it and get back to me.” By the time we got back to our hotel there were flowers, perfumes and phone calls… and even then she would continue to negotiate over the phone.’ Over the decades Johnson became fashion’s unofficial historian, collecting pieces by designers she had known since the beginning of their careers, at a time before the term archive was used within the industry.

Mrs Johnson even found time to devise Fashion Fair Cosmetics in 1973, a cosmetics line that African-American women could buy, for the first time, in top department stores. Stars like Diahann Carroll and Aretha Franklin appeared in the ads, and within three years the growing popularity of Mrs Johnson’s cosmetics inspired the cosmetics giants to join in: Revlon intro- duced the Polished Ambers line for black skins, Avon launched Shades of Beauty, and Max Factor produced Beautiful Bronzes. Another example of Mrs Johnson’s lasting influence.

During her 50 years in fashion, Mrs Johnson would witness the evolution of the industry from one based on creativity and personal relationships, to a corporate model increasing- ly focused on the bottom line. By the mid-1990s many of the great designers she had nurtured relationships with early on in their careers were retiring or selling their labels to large luxury corporations. Despite this, her contributions continue to be felt throughout the fashion world.

When she passed away at 93 on January 10th, 2010, Eunice Johnson had accumulated a warehouse worth of priceless couture and fashion imagery representing a virtual history of black style. Yet as a pioneer who broke down walls for people of colour within the industry, her most valuable legacy was her ability to harness the power of fashion and beauty to cre- ate hope and change perceptions.