This is Coatswitch from NPR. I'm Karen Grigsby-Bates sitting in for Shireen and Jean.

We've had several months of protests for racial justice and not just in the streets.

If you've been looking at the fall fashion and lifestyle magazines that have been

published over the past few weeks, you'll notice that a lot of the covers feature black people.

That says Robin Given, the longtime fashion writer for The Washington Post,

and now a senior critic at large for the paper, is no coincidence.

So in the aftermath of a string of black deaths, George Floyd, Amade Aubrey,

Breonna Taylor, to name just three, many parts of American society and its institutions

are experiencing a reckoning on race. And so is the fashion world.

Conday Nast, the 800-pound gorilla of lifestyle and luxury publishing,

was shaken several months ago when the editor of one of its flagship publications, Bon Appetit,

stepped down after his staff accused him of racist and bullying behavior.

Then it was Anna Winterschern. The editor-in-chief of Vogue is also artistic director of Conday Nast,

and responsible for the look and feel of its many magazines. She was taken to task for not being

racially inclusive on her pages and with her staff. The luxury Italian fashion houses Gucci and

product were criticized for producing designs that looked like hurtful racial stereotypes.

And so on. Recently, Robin Given wrote a long piece in The Washington Post's magazine,

looking at the intersection of fashion and race, and it's some of the initiatives that have

been established to diversify fashion from the runway to the boardroom. I started our conversation

by asking about all those black covers, especially on magazines that don't normally do that.

The September issues of fashion, and I would say a lot of the glossy magazines, even ones that

aren't strictly fashion, have always been a big deal. We've always looked forward to them to see

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