New York Fashion Week is Zanna Roberts Rassi‘s playground, and we were lucky enough to catch up with the fashion guru in the midst of the runway chaos! With longtime labels like Victoria’s Secret rebranding, innovating and embracing change, HollywoodLife turned to Zanna — an E! News Style Correspondent and Co-Founder, Milk Makeup — to dissect the current state of New York Fashion Week and its evolution.
“The change is a triple-fold, if not, quadruple-fold,” Zanna said during an exclusive interview at Spring Studios in New York. When asked about inclusivity and why it’s taken so long to see models of all shapes, sizes, colors and backgrounds on the runways, Zanna admitted, “I don’t know why it’s taken so long, but it’s great and it is absolutely about time!”
“It’s taken champions like Rihanna and Fenty to spearhead this all and for people to stand up in this almost revolutionary time and be like, ‘This matters. This is important. We all have a [different] shape and size, we all love fashion, we all love beauty,'” Zanna explained, noting that influencers are also helping shift the fashion landscape.
“You can watch any influencer and any YouTube video and you could find someone who you can find similarities, someone you relate too — someone you want to know what they want to wear as opposed to maybe what an editor in a magazine wants to wear,” she continued.
Zanna said that when she first started to notice change in diversity at Fashion Week, it occured within a two-season span. “The change was pretty dramatic. Thankfully, we’re seeing diversity in every shape, every size, every color, every type of body, and it’s so much more relatable to the audience watching it,” she admitted. “We’re now seeing things that others can actually imagine themselves wearing, especially when you put them in more real bodies [on the runway],” she said, declaring that Fashion Week, especially now, “is an excellent platform to look at and be inspired by and to shop.”
Now, it’s crucial for designers to expand their vision.
“I mean, all designers have to pay attention to being inclusive, to being diverse, to editors, to influencers, to all. They have to create content for 360 platforms,” Zanna urged. “I think the best thing a designer can do is know their own DNA. You can’t cater to absolutely everybody. But, if you have a strong vision, then you can move from there and be diverse.”
Zanna also revealed that her vegan Milk Makeup brand officially launched in Europe last year, after kicking off 2019 with a launch in London. Milk Makeup will now be available in Sephora.
“We have a protocol vegan mill, because we have a vegan brand. So, we have a moisturizer which contains four different vegan milks, including oat milk and desert milk — it’s delicious,” she said, noting, “We also launched a nourishing cleanser to go with it.”