On the evening of September 3, 2024, Harlem’s Fashion Row opened New York Fashion Week with its 17th Annual Fashion Show and Style Awards, held at the General Grant National Memorial in Harlem. Themed “Night of Legends,” the event gathered some of the most consequential names in fashion, film, and culture to honor the Black trailblazers who have not simply participated in the industry, but fundamentally redefined it.

For Jordan Baker-Caldwell, the evening was one of deep significance. Baker-Caldwell has designed the HFR award statues for more than a decade, creating the personalized sculptural works that honorees take home as symbols of their cultural impact. This year, those statues went to four women whose careers represent the full breadth of what leadership in fashion can look like.

Naomi Campbell: Icon of the Year

Naomi Campbell was honored with the Fashion Icon of the Year Award — a distinction that, for anyone who has watched her career unfold over four decades, felt both overdue and perfectly timed. The award was initially presented by Vogue editor Anna Wintour before Campbell arrived and took the stage to deliver remarks that were entirely her own: candid, proud, and pointedly clear about who she wanted beside her that night.

Campbell has been a muse to designers including Virgil Abloh, Azzedine Alaïa, and Marc Jacobs, and a devoted advocate for models and designers of color at every stage of her career. On stage at HFR, she reflected on the trailblazers who shaped her path — figures like André Leon Talley, Naomi Sims, Iman, and Bethann Hardison — and turned the honor into a call to action for the next generation. “I don’t see it as a culmination,” she told the audience. “Rather, I see it as a call to action. Yes, our industry has made strides, but we still have a long way to go.”

In joining HFR’s roster of Fashion Icons — which includes Kelly Rowland and Tracee Ellis Ross — Campbell added her name to a lineage of women who have used visibility as a vehicle for real industry change.

Teyana Taylor: The Virgil Abloh Award, Presented by LVMH

Corey Smith, Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at LVMH, introduced Teyana Taylor as the 2024 recipient of the Virgil Abloh Award — the honor presented annually by LVMH to a disruptor, changemaker, and style shifter who embodies the late designer’s spirit of innovation and creative fearlessness.

Taylor, born and raised in Harlem, spoke with characteristic directness about how her neighborhood shaped her. She described forming a crew with her brothers and cousin as a teenager — Team N.E.R.D. (Not Everybody Really Doing It) — and how getting dressed was never just about clothes. It was about imagination, identity, and carving out a space that felt like freedom. “With or without the lenses,” she recalled, “it was clear that we had an eye for the look, the moment, the ‘It’ factor.”

Her career as a singer, actress, creative director, and undeniable fashion force has always been driven by that early Harlem sensibility. She thanked Pharrell Williams and Kanye West for their influence on her career, and her mother, Nikki Taylor, for being the original fly girl. Being celebrated by HFR — an organization rooted in the same community that formed her — made the honor feel, as she put it, like being seen by her own people. “While it is an honor,” she said, “it’s even more of an honor to be celebrated by one’s own.”

Shiona Turini: Stylist of the Year

Perhaps no award of the evening felt more firmly grounded in the current moment than the Stylist of the Year recognition for Shiona Turini, presented by writer and director Lena Waithe. Turini, a Bermudian-born stylist and costume designer based between New York and Los Angeles, has built one of the most extraordinary portfolios in the industry — and in the year leading up to HFR 2024, her work had reached a new cultural altitude entirely.

As lead stylist for Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, Turini oversaw a wardrobe of more than 140 looks for the most commercially successful and culturally resonant concert tour in recent memory. Working alongside Beyoncé and a team of collaborators, she helped dress the global superstar in custom pieces from Loewe, Mugler, Balmain, Gucci, Off-White, Ferragamo, Iris van Herpen, and dozens of others — many of them from Black designers given some of the most visible real estate in the history of live performance. The tour sold over 2.7 million tickets and grossed more than $500 million, and its visual identity was inseparable from Turini’s eye.

Her body of work extends well beyond any single project. She has served as costume designer for three seasons of HBO’s Insecure, designed the looks for Universal Pictures’ Queen & Slim, and most recently completed the period costumes for Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake, starring Natalie Portman. Her styling clients include Letitia Wright, Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Solange. In 2025, she would go on to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Costumes for her work on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Bowl halftime show on Netflix.

On stage at HFR, Turini acknowledged standing on the shoulders of the stylists who came before her — June Ambrose, Misa Hylton, Antoinette Messam, and Ruth Carter — and spoke directly to the industry’s ongoing failure to name and compensate the Black creatives who sustain and revitalize it. “I know what it feels like to do this work in an industry that often sidelines us or fails to name the part that Black creatives play,” she said. The room’s response was immediate and sustained.

Samira Nasr: Editor of the Year

Samira Nasr, Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s Bazaar and the first Black woman to hold that role in the magazine’s 157-year history, received the Editor of the Year Award from her close friend and longtime collaborator Tracee Ellis Ross. In her acceptance speech, Nasr reflected on the evolving role of fashion media and the responsibility that comes with controlling what gets documented, who gets celebrated, and whose presence becomes part of the permanent record. “Who gets to be a part of that record?” she asked. “Who gets to participate in that process to document it for future generations so that they know that we were here?”

A Runway That Honored the Present

Following the awards, three Black designers took the runway: Aaron Potts of A.Potts, whose “Urban Oceania” collection moved through blues and metallics with the fluid confidence of someone who has always known his vision; Jimmy LaTuché, whose sharp tailoring and gender-fluid silhouettes have made him one of HFR’s most consistently celebrated designers; and Nicole Benefield, whose bright, layered palette brought an irreverent joy to close the evening.

The 2024 “Night of Legends” was exactly that — not a nostalgic look backward, but a living demonstration of what Black excellence in fashion has always been, and of the work still ahead. The awards designed by Jordan Baker-Caldwell now sit in the collections of Naomi Campbell, Teyana Taylor, Samira Nasr, and Shiona Turini — four women who have earned every dimension of that recognition.

For full coverage of the evening, see reporting from Fashionista, WWD, and Essence.