Leading a new effort within the fashion and beauty industries, Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner and Sandrine Charles, fashion publicist and owner of Sandrine Charles Consulting, have co-founded the Black in Fashion Council “to represent and secure the advancement of Black individuals in the fashion and beauty industry,” the two said. The council will officially launch next month, in partnership with the Council of Fashion Designers of America. 

With additional support from the Human Rights Campaign, the council will work to support Black people in the industry by establishing an equality index score that will provide benchmarking around corporate policies and practices pertinent to the inclusivity of Black employees, the CFDA said. This will include a yearly public report to track the work of companies that have made a three-year commitment to foster representation of Black employees at all levels, the report said.Members of the council’s executive board will include costume designer Shiona Turini, Harlem’s Fashion Row founder Brandice Daniel, and GQ deputy fashion director Nikki Ogunnaike, among others. “The Human Rights Campaign already has a Corporate Equality Index for people with disabilities and the LGBTQ community that companies like Kering are already a part of,” Peoples Wagner told Vogue.com.“This would be a way to continue to give companies a report card of accountability without them feeling like they’re being shamed into it, and giving them the actual resources of what people are saying they want to see changed.”“We’d like everybody to participate; we don’t want to segment based on larger brands or smaller brands. We really want this to be a collective of everyone, so we built out an industry standard of what we want diversity and inclusion to look like moving forward.” The announcement of the Black in Fashion Council’s upcoming launch comes after the CFDA revealed a series of new initiatives to combat systemic racism within the fashion industry earlier this month.