Sao Paulo Fashion Week Protestors Call For 20 Percent Quota Of Black Models: Protestors at this season's Sao Paulo Fashion Week called for a 20 percent quota of indigenous and black models to be used on the event's runways, the Guardian reports.
Back in 2008, the BBC wrote that only 28 out of 1,128 models booked for Sao Paulo Fashion Week that year were black. As one modeling agent said, 'The black models can't get jobs and have no access, don't have a good distribution of money or earnings and live in a sub-world, because there are no job opportunities.'
And the New York Times reported on the issue last summer, writing, '70 percent of the country's models come from three southern states that hardly reflect the multiethnic melting pot that is Brazil, where more than half the population is nonwhite.' Erika Palomino, a fashion consultant in Sao Paulo, told the newspaper, 'I was always perplexed that Brazil was never able to export a Naomi Campbell, and it is definitely not because of a lack of pretty women. It is embarrassing.'
