Tennis superstar Serena Williams has been a Nike-sponsored athlete since 2003. But as she developed her latest fashion collection with the activewear giant, she wasn’t content to tap the company’s existing slate of designers. “I have been at Nike for many years and I want to see more people in design that look like me,” she tells Fast Company. “I wanted to cast our net further, to areas where Nike generally wouldn’t go.”
An exclusionary industry
The fashion industry is notoriously exclusionary toward Black designers: Fewer than 10% of fashion designers at New York Fashion Week are Black, and fewer than 5% of members on the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a prestigious trade group, are Black. Over the past three years, the fashion media has documented the racial disparities in the fashion world, but change has been slow to come.
While Williams is best known for her athletic achievements, she has always had a keen interest in fashion design. From 2000 to 2003, while still maintaining her tennis career, she attended the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale to study fashion design. And in 2018, she launched her own fashion line, called S by Serena. Throughout these experiences, she saw firsthand how hard it is for aspiring Black designers to break into the fashion industry.
“This program responds to the opportunity to increase diversity across the design industry,” Williams says. “Can you imagine what it means for a young designer to work within Nike’s world-renowned design organization? For me as a designer, it would be legit the best place to work.” (Williams says she snuck her own design portfolio into the pile of applications. “I didn’t get picked,” she says with a laugh. “We had really high standards.”)
Nike, for its part, has been criticized for its treatment of workers of color. The company has actively supported athletes who have used their platform to elevate the Black Lives Matter movement, such as former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. But it has also faced allegations of racism from within its own ranks. Last year, current and former Nike employees started an Instagram account called Black at Nike for sharing their experiences with racial discrimination within the organization.
A program such as the Serena Williams Design Crew could help Nike bolster its image as a company that hires diverse talent and supports Black employees. And ultimately, Nike hopes that it could help attract new generations of consumers from a wide range of backgrounds. “For a lot of companies, the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, sparked a whole new approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Jarvis Sam, Nike’s VP of global diversity and inclusion, says. “For us, it was really a catalyst or an accelerator. We believe that by having diverse teams, it will have very positive downstream implications not only in how our consumers see our commitment to diversity, but how our employees see it.”
The Design Crew’s Inaugural Class
For the Design Crew, Williams thought that it would be best to conduct a search one city at a time, rather than doing a national search, because it would allow Nike to delve deep into the talent pool there. Sam helped Williams build out the program and says that Nike partnered with organizations like Harlem’s Fashion Row, explored local community colleges in the New York area, and even looked at Nike’s retail stores in the city to solicit applications.
Williams stayed involved throughout the process and helped select the final candidates. “They can bring parts of that city to the design and that’s something you don’t really get to see that often,” Williams says. “We’re talking about doing this program for a very long time and going to different cities, so we really want to build something sustainable that will have a lot of longevity to it.” Williams has already helped pick the next round of 11 candidates, this time from Chicago, who began their apprenticeships at Nike in May 2021.
As a member of the Design Crew, McCoy worked on performance apparel items in Williams’ new collection, which are colorful and covered in patterns. The prints emblazoned on these pieces are designed to tell a story about Williams’ life. The double zero motif refers to ‘love’ in tennis as well as her daughter’s initials. Meanwhile, the geometric prints pay homage to West African Kente cloth, with “S” for Serena embedded in the design. Even the cutouts are strategically placed on the right shoulder, which is Williams’ serving arm. The apprenticeship led to a full-time job as a women’s apparel designer at Nike.
The collection will be available in September.
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
