Erykah Badu stars in the Givenchy spring/summer campaign.
Givenchy is to designers what Bethann Hardison is to models: one of fashion’s leading champions of diversity. When we heard that Riccardo Tisci had chosen Erykah Badu as his leading lady in the spring/summer 2014 campaign there were imaginary fist pumps all round. But now that we’ve seen the full series of ads, photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, it just gets better. Tisci is a real example to his peers of how to take the race issue and run with it: he’s thrown every creative tool he has at fashion’s most red hot topic in a way that isn’t forced. The girls in the campaign (including Asia Chow, Maria Borges and Eboni Riley) — and that one white man (Dominik) – make sense with his clothes and we hope it’s a success other designers will endeavour to imitate.
