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This is the final chapter in a four-part oral history of fashion's response to the AIDS Crisis. Here, industry leaders discuss the advent of Seventh on Sale, a multi-day, multimillion dollar fundraiser for HIV/AIDS.
We were all blindsided by it, not knowing who was the next one that was going to die. I remember when we were at DIFFA [Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS], we went to the CFDA and talked about doing something together to raise money for AIDS. They didn’t want to work with us at the beginning. [We] did an ultimate warehouse sale, which was the forerunner of Seventh on Sale. It was all of the companies, just a booth, and sold everything as wholesale and below prices. People came and bought tons of stuff.
I joined the CFDA, as I say, in ’84. When I first joined, the other designers were talking a lot about AIDS. We’d have these quarterly meetings and we’d hear the same things on how we have to do an AIDS benefit. The people who were the most vocal in those meetings were Donna [Karan] and Isaac Mizrahi. They were very much the loudest voices in the room.
Bill [Blass] and Oscar [de la Renta] came to me and said, “We want you to be the next president of the CFDA.” And I said, “Why? All we do is sit there and yak and never do anything.” It was kind of politics as usual; they wanted one of their protégés to take over because I was very close to Oscar, and I had tremendous respect for both of them.
So I said, “I will do it on one condition—and that is that you, as the big names in this, will support me in finally doing an AIDS benefit.”
When I did become president, I invited Ralph [Lauren], Calvin [Klein], Bill, and Oscar all to lunch at the Four Seasons and did one of my, “You are the leaders in this industry” talks: “Where you go, they will follow, and you are the ones who are going to have to get the whole industry together to make this happen.” And finally, they did. Everybody came together, but it took a lot of talk at the beginning.
I met with Anna [Wintour] and Carolyne [Roehm], and I said, “Guys, we have to do something. This is ridiculous,” and Seventh on Sale was formed. It was the most amazing, amazing event. And I think it would be, I would say in my lifetime, something that was probably the most inspirational from a point of view of truly dressing and addressing and talking to people, which is something that I’ve done ever since.
Donna Karan really was the first one in the industry to rally everybody around it. Seventh on Sale was her baby. It was an extraordinary feat of energy and activity and compassion that she rallied all these people around. You had to see her. She pinned everybody to the wall to get merchandise out of them to raise money. I think what you saw, for all the fear that everybody talks about, there was almost an incredible amount of activity. Donna was the Joan of Arc of this whole thing.
We started working on it and then Anna [Wintour] came to me because I was president and said, “I’ll ask S.I. Newhouse to contribute some money and I’d like to be involved in this.” And I said, “Great. Who doesn’t want the power of Vogue behind them?” And then I said, “I think we need to get someone else because this is such a huge undertaking.” So we asked Ralph and it was Ralph’s group that helped make it physically happen.
It was the early days of the crisis and a group of us designers were in conversation at a CFDA meeting when Donna Karan very passionately suggested we must take a united stand and do something important to support the fight against AIDS. Donna and I served as co-chairs with Anna playing a big role, as well. We all understood that we had to take on a greater responsibility as leaders in an industry that had been devastated by the disease.
In November 1990, we set up the first Seventh on Sale, a huge four-day retail event to benefit the New York City AIDS Fund. My team was particularly in charge of spearheading the entire retail operation of shopping with cash and credit cards. It was like launching a huge new store. We raised over $4 million that first year, and even more when we, led by Anna, staged the second one five years later. Besides the money raised, there was this great feeling of solidarity in bringing our community and industry together for such an important cause. It was powerful and inspiring.
Look, people talk about how mean and bitchy and horrible and terrible and backbiting fashion is and stuff. Maybe so. I didn’t find it that way. Especially during that period. There was such a sense of unity. There was such a desire to fight back, to gather together, to take care of their own.
They took over the Armory on 26th Street, and turned it into this big gala dinner, and then they’re all surrounded by booths that Robert Isabell, who was the crème de la crème party designer, had created with these huge bolts of white muslin dropped from the ceiling, creating booths all around.
Robert Isabell was the party planner. That night, for the opening night party, we all gathered. What Robert had done was put the sales floor in the middle of the Armory. It was a sales floor where all of the designers had their respective booths, and he had shrouded that whole area in a cheese cloth, so it had a scrim over it. We had cocktails outside of that area around it, where people would walk and talk and mingle.
Then what happened is that at a certain moment, the scrim in the theater just came up like a balloon shade all the way around the shops and everyone just gasped. It was a magical moment, I’ll never forget watching that curtain lift and there were all of these shops and people truly just gasped.
When I was setting up my booth, I had a big picture of Christy Turlington photographed by Steven Meisel as my backdrop. I wanted my little space to be very pristine and perfect. The whole thing was red, black, and white. And while we were setting it up, I was climbing up on a ladder and putting this picture of Christy Turlington up, and Patti LaBelle was doing her rehearsal. We all stopped working. The hair on your arms stood up.
And that night when we opened, there was a party, and I brought Christy Turlington. There’s fabulous pictures from that night of Christy sitting on Linda Evangelista’s lap and dancing with Naomi. Naomi had an Afro wig on.
But that night, we all felt so excited to see everyone come together—small, big, medium, every category. That night, I bought a portrait of Madonna wearing a Michael Kors dress that I still have in my hall. And we would never think that everyone could be in the room, from designers who were teeny to designers who were huge. Everyone was rolling up their sleeves and getting it done. Of course, the moral is, the next day when the public came, it looked like locusts had picked over the entire place. I had nothing left by 10 in the morning.
It taught us that the community together had more strength, more power, more strength. Unity really gave us that power.
People waited around the block for hours, went in for a two-hour shopping session, waited in lines to check out, and the cashiers were just unbelievable. They were on microphones. “You’ve got to get on line now, get on line now! Booths are closing!” And then the booths would be restocked with merchandise that was held in trailers on the streets.
I grew up loving all of these designers, so for me to be able to see this thing, it was like football fields of clothes. These are luxury brands, and you could see them doing something that felt attainable, that felt accessible. I think that’s what I loved about it. It really felt like everyone was coming together.
Every single person in fashion came, had their booths, and raised tons of money. It was so well PR’ed that people came from all over to shop. There was also no such thing then as discounters, you know, so people weren’t selling their merchandise off yet to secondary stores. It was basically throwing the first big mass sample sale to the public, and that’s what it turned into.
It was the ticket, and you wanted to be there. You wanted to be there because one, it was for a great cause, but also you wanted to be there because every single designer at that point had started being a part of the cause. So for a young woman like myself who wasn’t making a lot of money, you went to Seventh on Sale, honey, and you were able to get your designer garments for a very low price.
I remember buying an Oscar de la Renta dress at that event. You think the Met Gala was something? I’m sorry, this event was by far anything more than you could ever imagine. First people would shop, but nobody wanted to stop shopping. You really didn’t need the dinner. You could’ve just done the shopping, which is what happened for the next three days when it was open to the public. And I sat there and sold.
Everybody volunteered, hundreds and hundreds of volunteers for four days, selling, working, restocking. And then, when that event was over, Carolyne resigned from being president. She said that she’d had it. She couldn’t do it anymore.
The CFDA then started to search for a new director. It also had to figure out what to do with this money, because nobody knew how to distribute it. That’s when I threw my hat in the ring. Long story short, after hundreds of interviews, I was hired to be the executive director in ’91. I inherited an office that was a tiny little back office on 1412 Broadway.
We created a second Seventh on Sale in San Francisco a year or so later. And then a third one, we came back to New York. The one in San Francisco was funded by the Gap, and Doris Fisher and her husband, all the big businesses that were out in San Francisco. It also raised several million dollars.
That was sort of my first big understanding of, collectively, the American fashion industry doing something to advance this cause because I would watch television and there would be no mention of it. If there was a mention of it, it was in disgust or judgment, that it was a gay disease. In 1990, it was starting to shift because Bill Clinton came into office.
After Seventh on Sale, fundraising became more of a national thing and that’s a good thing. They were raising more money.
I had said to Anna [Wintour], I said, “I’d love to do another.” So after Seventh on Sale, then we did Kids for Kids. So now it was no longer just a gay male issue, and Anna pulled everybody together. We closed off a whole street downtown, and it was during the daytime because it was children. We had all the celebrities and they were playing games with the kids.
[CFDA] was involved in a lot of smaller AIDS benefits and initiatives for quite a few years. And then honestly, the organization shifted gears a little bit and started to address breast cancer, and created Fashion Targets Breast Cancer, with a similar group of leaders from the industry: Donna, Oscar, and Ralph.
A lot of the biggest fundraisers then became all the morning parties in the Pines, which became these huge fundraisers. Then amfAR came, APLA came, all of those things came eventually. I worked on a couple of those in the early ’90s because Todd Oldham did one and Tom Ford did one. That’s when Hollywood got involved.
Your social life became one fundraiser after the other. I remember in 1991, we threw a party on Fire Island called the Pink Party, and we did it for 600 people. We did it simply because we wanted to throw a party without making people pay for anything.
Fashion’s Leaders Reflect on the Lessons Learned
The fashion industry was slow to respond at the beginning. The only person who really wrote about this stuff [from the beginning] was Bill Cunningham. In his party pages, he would go to every AIDS event and benefit, everybody that was doing something, all these grassroots groups, and he would write about it because nobody else was. I even interviewed him at the Y. He would cry when he would start to talk about it.
We needed fashion to be activists in a more direct way, much earlier on. Many years after protease inhibitors existed, when AIDS was no longer a death sentence, what does it mean to put your ass on the line then—as opposed to putting your ass on the line when no one knew who was at risk and how many people were going to die?
This generation that had so many who passed away, they were the bridge between the hippy attitude of the 1960s and the sexy glamour of the 1970s. I have a feeling that American fashion probably would have stayed a little bit more less of center, more outrageous. We think about talent like Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, Angel Estrada, the list goes on and on and on. We lost, maybe in America, a sense of experimentation, because that was a generation that definitely changed the rules of not just fashion, but of how you lived your life.
The [HIV rates] for young people are still, quite frankly, pretty scary, and particularly for people of color. I think that we’ve forgotten that we still have to make noise. We have to remind people that yes, in the best of circumstances, this is manageable, but there are many people who don’t have access, and we still have to get them access to medical attention. In general, fashion people sometimes have a short attention span. But you know what? It’s not over. This is our history, and we have to think about the power that we lassoed to make the noise, and keep making the noise. It can’t go away.
I think people like Halston and Perry Ellis lasted long enough to give a sense of what they were contributing, but there were so many others like Angel Estrada who were cut off so early that you don’t really know where they could have gone and who they could have influenced. You have to look at it in terms of it being almost a whole generation being lost—like a World War I of art and fashion people.
How people respond to that kind of crisis, and could it have been quicker? Probably, but it’s all hypothetical. All of these gay people had truly wacky, idiosyncratic points of view. I wonder what the landscape would be like if all these daredevils, these idiosyncratic, eccentric, creative people had been allowed to exist? Had been allowed to continue? Whether we’d be mired in this world that we’re in now where everyone wants to be a brand? You never heard any of these people talk like that. They were too busy being creative.
But I try to take away how quickly charity organizations formed, how incredible they were, how the Pride parade became such a solid demonstration of solidarity around AIDS very quickly. New drugs came along and I have friends who were hanging on by a thread, and then the drug cocktails came along and those people are still alive today. So I prefer looking back to think about how protean and incredible people are.
I think the main lesson for the fashion world was understanding what can come out of our solidarity—the strength of coming together for a common cause. We started with AIDS, then breast cancer and there have been many other challenges we have met along the way.
There was more laughter in a half hour during that time than in this decade so far. A lot of that creative spirit, quite frankly, never got replaced. It isn’t the same, just looking at names. It’s about the little things, those little moments that really impact everything in a person’s life. There was a freedom and a joy in how people presented themselves with fashion. When this happened, when this really horrific veil came over everything, it stopped anything that had to do with that spirit.
I was writing for so many publications. I was on mastheads. And I have never hidden my status. I never believed I was going to die. That’s not to say I wasn’t scared. That’s not to say I didn’t have moments that freaked me out or the numbers didn't worry me or any of that. I just didn’t believe it was going to get me.
I think the problem with pandemics is that it’s easier to be the victim and let it roll over you, but the reality is—and I’m not saying that you’re to succeed because we don’t play the victim—but I think it does something to your mindset and something to your body when you take an active part in sustaining your own health.
The conversation surrounding care and self-care, and activating community spaces around COVID seem so similar to the conversations [from the ’80s]. The dilemmas faced by communities of color were mounting an activist response to healthcare issues. They’re inextricably bound to questions of access. The fact that the modeling for drug research protocols is largely based on white bodies and male bodies, it’s less exclusive now than it was at the time, but still is true. The lie of America’s mind is race.
It wasn’t a list of names who were sick. It was people you knew, people you worked with, hairdressers, makeup artists, art directors, photographers, designers, assistant designers. Everyone within your world, everyone you collaborated with. I thought there was more sensitivity and more kindness and more caring because people could relate and people had personal relationships with people who were sick and dying.
I think the fact that people don’t stop creating and don’t stop expressing themselves means they didn’t die in vain. People were active. People kept on making fashion even though these young fashion designers were dying. People kept expressing themselves and dressing up. And that means they did not die in vain. So what would have been if they lived? Well, I don't know. But they didn’t die in vain.
I have a long list of the fashion designers that I knew and worked with who all died. It’s a terribly sad list, like Willi Smith, Patrick Kelly, Perry Ellis, Angel Estrada, Isaia, Adrian Cartmell, Clovis Ruffin, Halston, Stephen Sprouse, Franco Moschino. And then I knew all these people and all the photographers, like David Seidner, Barry McKinley, Tony Viramontes, Herb Ritts, Bill King, Stephen Arnold. Stevie Hughes.
If you look at the ’80s from a cultural point of view, there was music, art, fashion, hip-hop, graffiti, Basquiat, Warhol. It was this unbelievable creative, exuberant, flamboyant, interesting time, with this backdrop of this terrible scourge that was wiping people out. So it’s interesting to speculate how the two are connected. I think misery can produce extraordinary creativity and originality, and it moves the culture forward.