CFDA CEO and President Steven Kolb will join fashion industry leaders at Poster House this August for a conversation examining the industry’s response to the AIDS crisis, presented in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition ‘Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS.’
The programming comes at a moment when the fashion industry is reassessing its relationship to public health and collective action. Younger designers entering the CFDA’s membership ranks have grown up in a post-crisis landscape, and the institution sees an education mandate in connecting current members to the industry’s history of mobilization.
Kolb’s participation is significant for what it represents about institutional memory. Few industry bodies hold the longitudinal perspective that the CFDA does on the epidemic’s impact on American fashion, having lost members including Perry Ellis, Willi Smith, and Patrick Kelly to AIDS-related complications over a devastating decade.
The conversation will be moderated by an academic specializing in fashion and social justice, with additional panelists drawn from the ranks of designers and activists who lived through the height of the epidemic. The August date places the event at the intersection of New York Fashion Week previews and the exhibition’s final weeks.
The exhibition traces the visual culture of AIDS activism through poster art, public service messaging, and the graphic language of protest that defined New York’s response to the epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. Fashion’s role in that response — through fundraising, awareness campaigns, and the loss of an entire generation of designers — forms the conversation’s anchor.
