Fashion Institute of Technology President Dr. Joyce Brown has spent the past couple of decades patterning her school after the fashion industry itself. As part of that makeover, the Chelsea institution’s ranks of students of color have spiked from what’s presumed to be around 20% of the population when she arrived in 1998 to more than 60% today, she says.
So it’s frustrating to experience the current turn against diversity initiatives among some academics, corporate chiefs and political leaders, a vibe shift that could threaten what Brown, who will step down this year after a 27-year run, so assiduously built.
“It’s difficult to watch such shameless frontal attacks on things that have been legislated and proven to be true,” she said. “It’s like yanking the legs out of our society and being pejorative about what it all meant.”
Although some college administrators may be buckling under pressure, Brown remains cool amid the diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, backlash. And so far some of the corporate sponsors she has cultivated for the school, a list that includes high-profile fashion companies Prada, Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, appear to be holding their ground too.
The support should enable Brown-created FIT offerings such as the Social Justice Center, a scholarship program directed at minority high school students that arose after George Floyd’s 2021 murder, to endure. “Of course, I worry,” she says. “But it doesn’t seem like what we’re doing should even be considered controversial.”
Fashion was never far away when Brown was growing up in Hamilton Heights. In fact, her mother was a knitter, and her grandmother was a professional seamstress whose multi-employee business counted department stores among its clients.
Not one to sew herself, Brown instead followed an academic path, eventually becoming a professor of psychology at City College and smashing through a few glass ceilings along the way. Indeed, when Brown assumed the top job at FIT, she became both the first woman and first African American to helm the school, which was founded in 1944.
Much has changed since that era, when the surrounding neighborhood clacked with sewing machines and FIT served as a training ground for textile workers. Today students are more likely to focus on improving some of the less savory aspects of the garment industry, like its often toxic dyes. Less-harmful alternatives are now processed from marigolds and other flowers grown in an FIT rooftop garden.
But tech-fueled initiatives have a greater place at the school too. Through the eight-year-old DTech Lab, for instance, students produced slick videos that use virtual models and a thumping club soundtrack to extol the virtues of cotton.
FIT today enrolls more than 8,000 full-time and part-time students, who can choose among 50 majors, and employs 1,700 teachers and staff members.
That size had tested the capacity of the school’s block-size Seventh Avenue campus. But under Brown’s watch, FIT commissioned its first new building in decades, a 10-story tower on West 28th Street that features classrooms, studios and a knitting lab. It will open this spring.
“Everyone told me I was crazy to build a building in New York,” Brown said of the project, which as part of a State University of New York system was the beneficiary of nearly $150 million in city and state funds. “But our faculty deserves an appropriate environment to work in.”
As Brown puts the finishing touches on her legacy, she’s also leaving behind a self-named fund aimed to underwrite a future science lab. A star-studded April gala raised $2.4 million for the fund, which now counts nearly $3 million in its coffers.
“I could have stayed here forever,” Brown said, “but there just comes a time.”
