Virgil Abloh found himself at the center of a social media backlash late last week when pictures of Off-White™’s team dinner surfaced online, revealing Off-White™’s staff in attendance to be almost entirely white. While the criticism was initially dismissed by Abloh’s PR rep, the designer later released a statement when the story grew online outside of the usual fashion insider circles.

In an unusual move for Abloh, who typically ignores callouts of his brand, he took to Instagram stories to showcase the black people he works alongside, including Tremaine Emory and Acyde of No Vacancy Inn, and even Serena Williams. Abloh later released a statement, saying “My design team is diverse as the world is big.” The milquetoast response left a lot to be desired; it didn’t take long for people to point out that working with one of the world’s most famous athletes isn’t quite the same as hiring black people on his staff.

It’s also worth pointing out that most of the “outrage” was actually disappointment. It’s become easy to flatten anything that happens inside the walls of social media as a baying mob, desperate for blood. But most of what we saw was black people expressing sadness about a luxury black-led fashion brand actually appearing to just follow the industry’s status quo.

Virgil Abloh Diversity Furor Off-White Extra Burden Samuel Ross Tremaine Emory Acyde No Vacancy Inn
INEZ AND VINOODH

But this pushback has cast a light on a wider problem. Namely, why does it fall on people of color’s shoulders to fix an industry-wide problem? Diversity, and lack thereof, is an issue across the board in the upper echelons of fashion, but we rarely, if ever, see the same level of scrutiny that Abloh is currently under applied to his white peers.

Most recently, we saw Gucci face a similar collective criticism due to the brand’s blackface sweater debacle. While Gucci received backlash for the offending item, relatively little of it landed on Alessandro Michele. In fact, it was the brand’s CEO, Marco Bizzari, who first spoke publicly about it to WWD with Michele releasing a statement soon after, saying “the fact that, contrarily to my intentions, that turtle-neck jumper evoked a racist imagery causes me the greatest grief.”

Abloh’s appointment to Louis Vuitton is still used as a watershed moment in fashion and a sign that the industry was making a concerted change. But, as we noted at the time, his hire wasn’t a sign of systemic change but merely highlighted the issues that have always plagued fashion and other similar creative industries. Photos of Off-White™’s overwhelmingly white Milan team are proof that while it’s relatively easy to use streetwear and a host of young black influencers as a calling card, creating real change behind the scenes takes a lot more effort.

Virgil Abloh Diversity Furor Off-White Extra Burden Samuel Ross Tremaine
Emory Acyde No Vacancy Inn LOUIS VUITTON

The backlash against Abloh is part of a wider trend that affects POC in industries that suffer from underrepresentation; it’s not merely the lack of inclusion, it’s the unspoken expectation that POC will be the ones to do the heavy lifting of fixing the industry’s biases. It’s what Van R. Newkirk II described as “diversity as a second job” for the Columbia Journalism Review, where he examined “the collection of unspoken responsibilities involving diversity, inclusion, and development” that POC are expected to take on in comparison to their white counterparts.

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