Invisible Beauty

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Lawn at The Elms
367 Bellevue Ave, Newport, RI

ABOUT THE FILM: Naomi Campbell called her “Ma” but to many she’s simply Bethann. A pioneering model, agent and activist, Bethann Hardison is a pivotal figure in the fight for racial diversity in fashion. In her lifetime, she has seen the pendulum swing toward and away from the Black model. At every setback, she spoke up and rallied her colleagues and clients in the industry to advance change. Now in her 70s, the Brooklyn native is in the midst of writing her memoir, taking stock of her own legacy at a moment when the fashion industry is shaken — once again — by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Directing in tandem with Frédéric Tcheng (Halston, Dior and I), Hardison is a force at the helm of her own story. Together, they trace Hardison’s impact on fashion from runway shows in the 1970s to roundtables about the lack of racial diversity in the early 2000s. Candid and audacious, Invisible Beauty is an absorbing record of the racial evolution of fashion and an original contemplation on the life of a radical thinker.

Hardison embodied the ethos “Black is beautiful” long before the fashion industry acknowledged this truth. As a model, she walked the runway alongside Iman. As an agent, she discovered people such as Tyson Beckford and mentored supermodels like Naomi Campbell. Featuring intimate interviews with collaborators including Campbell, Beckford, Iman, Tracee Ellis Ross, Fran Lebowitz, Pat Cleveland, Stephen Burrows, Whoopi Goldberg, Ralph Lauren, Bruce Weber, as well as her son Kadeem Hardison, Invisible Beauty chronicles the life of a maverick at the epicenter of major representational shifts in fashion. The film also gazes toward the future with insights from a new generation Hardison has inspired, including Zendaya, designer-activist Aurora James and designer Kerby Jean-Raymond.

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