The Black Beauty Model Agency

The remarkable true story of the pioneering New York modelling agency that helped change the face of fashion and became an unexpected crossroads of Black cultural history. When a faded photograph discovered among her late father’s archive leads Desta Haile to the Black Beauty Model Agency, she begins a decade-long search to uncover the forgotten history of a pioneering agency that put a generation of Black models in front of the camera at a time when the mainstream fashion industry rarely made space for them. But Black Beauty’s story reaches far beyond fashion. Founded in the late 1960s, its extraordinary network included models who would go on to make their mark across film, television, music and popular culture, among them Richard Roundtree, Grace Jones, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Sheila Frazier and Debbi Morgan. Haile’s own father auditioned for the role of Shaft, losing out to Roundtree before returning to Ethiopia, one deeply personal connection in a story that stretches from New York across the Caribbean, Britain and the African continent. Drawing on archival research, interviews and family memory, Haile follows the models, actors, musicians, artists and cultural figures who passed through Black Beauty’s orbit. Against a backdrop of Black Power, African independence, FESTAC ’77 and changing ideas about race, beauty and self-representation, she reveals how the story of one small modelling agency became entwined with a much larger history of Black culture and the African diaspora. Blending memoir, biography and cultural history, The Black Beauty Model Agency is both a daughter’s search for her father’s unfinished story and an exploration of beauty itself: who defines it, who is excluded from it, and what becomes possible when Black people create institutions, images and aesthetics on their own terms. More than a history of modelling, it restores a remarkable agency and the people who passed through it to their place in cultural history.