She bought a dress for an "important client"

Soon after the show, Chicago retailer Ikram Goldman came calling. She bought a dress for an "important client." In 2011 First Lady Michelle Obama wore Smalls's lime and black watercolor-print sheath to a Cinco de Mayo party at the White House. "I can't tell you what it did for me emotionally to know that my dress was hanging in the White House," says Smalls. The First Lady has been a patron of most every standout Black designer. In addition to wearing clothes by Reese and Smalls, she donned a jacket by Nigerian-born, London-based designer Duro Olowu during her visit to South Africa. She wore a Stephen Burrows pantsuit for a White House celebration of the arts and a Kai Milla dress for an evening in honor of Kai Milla-Morris's husband, Stevie Wonder.

Milla-Morris isn't a performer turned designer, but the Washington, D.C., native is a celebrity wife, with access to financing as well as A-list friends. And yet she has to fight the perception that she's a dilettante. "People have expectations and make assumptions," she says. "You have to constantly knock down those ideas." When she launches her new line this fall, it will not bear her name. She wants it to be judged based on the work, not on her husband's fame.

Fashion is a tough business, whether you're famous or unknown, wealthy or just getting by. Recognizing that, New York's garment industry offers more than a few programs aimed at supporting rising talent by providing money, mentoring and publicity, such as the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, the Swarovski Awards and the CFDA Fashion Incubator. Yet few Black designers in their twenties seem to be taking advantage of this uplift. Currently, the CFDA Incubator includes one Black designer, Maxwell Osborne of the edgy sportswear brand Public School NYC.

The problem isn't that hordes of qualified young Black designers are being overlooked. Rather, design schools are graduating few Black students. Although African-Americans make up about 14 percent of the general college population, in 2010 they accounted for less than 5 percent of fashion design students, according to Towers, Parsons' executive dean. To improve those numbers, the school launched the Parsons Scholars program in 1997 to bring in students from New York City public schools to expose them to the field. Of those students, currently 40 percent are African-American. In addition, Sheila Johnson, cofounder of BET, who is chairperson of the school's board of governors, has pushed the institution to improve its Black enrollment through efforts like a recent conference in Black studies.

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