Eunice W. Johnson and Fashion Fair

Eunice Walker Johnson spent her working life at Johnson Publishing in Chicago, the company of her husband John H. Johnson, founder of Jet and Ebony.^[1] By the early 1950s she was its secretary-treasurer, and she is credited with naming its flagship magazine.^[2]

In the history of cosmetics she is remembered for a product line that grew out of a fashion show.

The Ebony Fashion Fair was a travelling fashion show that Johnson created, produced and directed. It ran for fifty years, showed high fashion with an all-Black staff, and raised more than fifty-one million dollars for local and national charities.^[3]

A show of that kind puts faces under stage lights in front of paying audiences, city after city, and it needs make-up that works on every one of them. That was not something the counters of the time could be relied on to supply.

In 1973 Johnson launched Fashion Fair Cosmetics, created to provide cosmetics in shades for deeper skin tones.^[4] The line was designed for women who were often unable to find products to match their complexions, and it became one of the first Black-owned cosmetics lines sold internationally.^[5]

It was sold where the mainstream brands were sold, at department-store counters, and that was the point.^[5] A product in a department store claimed the same standing as the brands beside it, and a customer who had been told for decades that the counter was not for her could buy there.

Fashion Fair was not the first company to make shades for Black customers, and it never needed to be. Anthony Overton's company, founded in Kansas in 1898, sold face powders in tints named nut-brown, olive-tone and brunette, and became one of the largest producers of cosmetics for African American customers.^[6] In the 1960s Flori Roberts and her husband Craig, a doctor who had studied the science of Black skin, founded a line that metropolitan New York department stores turned away before Bamberger's took it on.^[7]

What Johnson brought was scale and standing: a line backed by a publishing house whose magazines already spoke to its customers, launched into the department stores rather than around them.

The brand's commercial peak came in 2003. Its decline is attributed to competition from brands that began carrying shades for Black women and to the closing of the department stores that sold it, an outcome that is at once a loss for the company and a measure of the argument it had won.^[8]

When Johnson Publishing sold Fashion Fair in 2019, to Desiree Rogers and Cheryl Mayberry McKissack, the announcement recalled that it had at one time been the largest Black-owned cosmetics company in the world.^[9] Eunice Johnson did not see the sale. She died in 2010.^[10]

The origin story, in its popular form. Retellings often trace the line to models blending their own foundation backstage. The documentary coverage cited here does not contain that account, and neither does the museum biography, so it is left out of this entry rather than repeated.^[11]