Ebony Fashion Fair: The Show That Needed Its Own Makeup

In 1958 a fashion show went on the road. Its models were Black, and for half a century it toured by bus, through the Jim Crow South among other places, until 2009.^[1]

The Ebony Fashion Fair is remembered as a fashion institution and a charity. It belongs in a history of makeup for a simpler reason: its producer had difficulty finding makeup that matched her models’ skin, and in 1973 she started a company to make it.^[2]

Eunice Walker Johnson (1916–2010) was born in Selma, Alabama, and studied at Talladega College and at Loyola University Chicago. She married John H. Johnson in 1940, two years before Johnson Publishing was founded, and she gave its best-known magazine its name, Ebony.^[3]

By the early 1950s she was the company’s secretary-treasurer and wrote for its pages.^[3] The Fair would be the project most closely identified with her.

The Fair began in 1958 as a section of Ebony magazine and grew into a touring production that Johnson created, produced and directed, with an all-Black staff.^[4][5] Its models travelled by bus, with seats removed to make room for their long legs, and the tour went through the Jim Crow South.^[6]

The shows were also fundraisers, and the totals they reached are large enough that the accounts disagree about them: about $55 million for African-American charities such as the United Negro College Fund and sickle-cell research by one, more than $51 million by another.^[6][5]

The Fair went on the road in the years the cosmetics industry was learning to sell through broadcasting. Hazel Bishop had become the country’s largest television cosmetics advertiser by 1953, and in 1955 Revlon bought a whole quiz show to sell its lipsticks.^[7][8]

The Fair reached its audience differently: in person, a city at a time, on a stage and a runway. It was there, rather than in any advertisement, that the shortage of makeup for darker skin became a practical problem for the show’s producer.

Johnson’s was not the only Black-owned beauty enterprise with a public of its own in the 1950s. In Harlem, Rose Morgan’s House of Beauty employed twenty-nine people and served about a thousand customers a week; she sold her own line of cosmetics and staged fashion shows at the Renaissance Casino and the Rockland Plaza. When her new House of Beauty opened in February 1955, ten thousand people came.^[9]

Dressing a touring company of models is one problem. Making up their faces is another. According to one account, Johnson had difficulty finding makeup shades that matched her models’ skin tones, and in 1973 she created Fashion Fair Cosmetics in response.^[10] The exhibition biography written for the Fair’s retrospective puts her role more cautiously — as one of those involved in creating the company — and gives its purpose as cosmetics in shades for deeper skin tones.^[11]

The company became one of the first Black-owned cosmetics lines sold internationally. It reached its commercial peak in 2003 and then declined, as other brands began to carry shades for Black women and the department stores that sold it closed.^[12] In 2019 it was sold to Desiree Rogers and Cheryl Mayberry McKissack.^[13]

That story belongs to the 1970s and after. The gap the company was made to fill belongs to the 1950s, when the show that exposed it first went on the road.

A story often told about the Fair, that its models blended their own foundation to find a match, is not told by any of the sources used here, and this account does not repeat it as fact.

Nor do they describe, product by product, what the models wore on the runway in the 1950s. The Fair’s place in the history of makeup is clearer in the company it led to than in the shows themselves, and an account of the early runway faces would need sources this archive does not yet hold.

The figures differ between accounts: the total raised for charity is given as about $55 million or as more than $51 million.^[14][15] And whether Johnson created Fashion Fair Cosmetics herself, or was one of those who created it, depends on which account is read.^[16][15]