Standing six feet two inches, Audrey Smaltz spent her career clearing a path through a fashion world that locked Black women out. At 89 years old, she still speaks with the exact certainty that carried her from 1930s Harlem to the absolute control of her own fashion enterprise through the 2010s. “Believe in the best version of who you can be, and never stop reaching to become it,” Smaltz writes in her new memoir, Every Inch a Lady: My Amazing Journey From Dear Harlem to Haute Couture & Beyond.
“I knew that I could do it. I had that confidence in myself. I always have it,” she told EBONY.
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That confidence was first tested in 1960, when Ophelia DeVore, the founder of the Harlem charm school who trained Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson, recruited Smaltz for the Miss New York City contest.
“Audrey, I believe you are the right girl for the occasion. What do you think?”
Smaltz replied, “I know I am the right girl,” and became the first Black woman to compete in the pageant. By 1962, she had made it to Wall Street, selling mutual funds and landing on the cover of JET.
But the financial district could not hold her. That same unyielding confidence soon placed her behind the microphone of the EBONY Fashion Fair and at the desk as EBONY Fashion Editor.
Mrs. Eunice Johnson, co-founder of EBONY, created the Ebony Fashion Fair to bring European haute couture to Black America and turn ticket sales into college scholarships for Black students. Smaltz helped expand its reach, traveling with Johnson to Paris and Italy at least twice a year, meeting Hubert de Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent and purchasing couture directly from the ateliers.
“Karl Lagerfeld called me ‘Miss EBONY’ every time we saw each other,” Smaltz said. “I think he just forgot my name!” But Smaltz never allowed anyone to play with Mrs. Johnson’s name. “We encountered white women at shows who would always inquire what Mrs. Johnson’s first name was,” Smaltz writes. “And I would always reply, ‘Mrs. Johnson.’ I would not let them call her anything else.”
Back in New York, Western designers took notice. Oscar de la Renta loved the presentation. Bill Blass became a supporter after learning that EBONY Fashion Fair audiences cheered his name during Smaltz’s call-and-response commentaries. Having previously worked for Lena Horne Cosmetics, Smaltz urged Mrs. Johnson to turn the homemade makeup mixtures used on runway models into a standalone brand. Fashion Fair Cosmetics followed.
Smaltz eventually left the magazine and the show, wrote a column for Vogue, and moved from employee to entrepreneur. To tame the backstage chaos of runway shows for Oscar de la Renta, Donna Karan and Vera Wang, she launched The Ground Crew in 1977, taking on a disorganized space and building a business to run it.
She took the company’s name from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which honored the unseen ground crew behind every successful flight. Smaltz knew King personally. She met him in Miami and watched him deliver his dream at the 1963 March on Washington from a near front-row seat.
For 40 years, The Ground Crew managed the demands of some of fashion’s biggest names. “Donna Karan was one of my top clients,” Smaltz recalled. “She was not easy to get along with. She had her way. I just stayed out of her way. I sent those models out, and they got out on time. And nobody stole clothes. Models could take a pair of shoes in a minute.”
Dating jazz musician Lionel Hampton brought her into the White House to meet former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Years before Nancy Reagan became First Lady, she was startled when Smaltz walked into a room wearing the same Halston dress.
“My essence mingled with theirs, my presence as significant, my voice as resonant,” Smaltz writes in her memoir. “I belonged.”
Smaltz’s memoir, Every Inch a Lady: My Amazing Journey From Dear Harlem to Haute Couture & Beyond, is available now.