TO- DO LIST
Unity, COVID-19 coordination, the economy, social justice — where fashion’s biggest names want the next administration to focus.
Whoever sits in the Oval Office — whether Donald Trump in a second term or Joe Biden — no president in modern memory has faced the myriad challenges that lie ahead, including bringing the coronavirus under control, jump-starting the struggling economy, issues of social justice and systemic racism and healing the nation’s political divide. WWD surveyed designers and industry executives on what the president’s priority should be.
IT’S TIME TO GET back to work — and come together.
The polls are closed and the counting has begun in the most turbulent and — many say consequential — U.S. election in generations.
As millions voted by mail or in person in recent weeks — masked up, socially distanced and at times waiting for rain-soaked hours to make their voices heard — WWD asked more than 75 fashion leaders what the next administration’s first priority should be.
The responses add up to a kind of secular prayer in the midst of overlapping crises, a plaintive cry for something more from Washington.
More unity, more coordination to overcome COVID-19, more progress on social justice, more support for small businesses and the unemployed, more work on climate change. More, more, more.
The question was party-neutral, asked as former vice president Joe Biden surged in the polls and President Trump fought to pull out another ballot-box stunner with the help of swing states or the Electoral College. But some rejected even the possibility of fourmore years of a Trump administration and preferred to focus on what a President Biden could do.
Everyone saw the stakes as high.
Cynthia Rowley neatly summed up the sentiment: “We have never been in a more dramatic intersection of hope and fear, with the fate of the nation hanging in the balance.”
Beyond the omnibus wish for unity and the healing of a fractured people, fashion’s wish for the top of a presidential to-do list includes a more coordinated response to the coronavirus and real social justice reforms.
Chip Bergh, president and chief executive officer of Levi Strauss & Co., said, “I don’t think life will return to normal until the pandemic is clearly in the rearview mirror.”
Designer Tracy Reese of Hope for Flowers signaled out the structural problem of racial equity, “When your foundation is cracked and broken — nothing you do will have real, lasting success.”
There is much to do, all at once and under enormous pressure, be it the coronavirus case count, an angry citizenry in the streets or economic collapse.
And to get any of it done and definitely turn the page, Washington must also examine itself.
As Vera Wang said: “Centuries of culture, business, learning, family structures, friendships have forever been changed.
Politics must change.”
The president has enormous power and resources to initiate the kind of change that sweeps through broader society — or at least try.
Here, fashion leaders tell the next president where to start by answering the question: “What should be the first priority of the next administration?”