Gareth Pugh Fall/Winter 2009

Two years ago today, on October 14, 2024, Elliott Hill took over as Nike’s President and CEO. He was a lifer coming home. Hill joined Nike in 1988 as an intern selling apparel in Texas, then worked his way through 19 different roles over 32 years. That run ended as President of Consumer and Marketplace, overseeing the Nike and Jordan brands, before he retired in 2020.

Nike called him back because the business was slipping. Under his predecessor, John Donahoe, a former eBay and Bain chief, Nike pushed hard into selling directly to customers through its own stores and app and pulled back from retail partners. Rivals like On and Hoka moved in and took that shelf space. Critics also said Nike had stopped producing the groundbreaking sneakers it was known for and leaned too heavily on retro styles. In June 2024, Nike forecast a 10% sales drop for the quarter, and the stock had the worst trading day in its history. When Hill’s appointment was announced, shares jumped about 8% after hours.

The turnaround has been slow. Nike’s annual revenue peaked at $51.4 billion in fiscal 2024, then fell 10% to $46.3 billion in fiscal 2025, as net income dropped 44%. “While our financial results are in line with our expectations, they are not where we want them to be,” Hill said. Fiscal 2026 was flat at $46.4 billion, with Nike saying it was encouraged by progress in its performance products.

In August 1974, Beverly Johnson became the first Black model on the cover of American Vogue, in the magazine’s 80-year history. The cover was shot by Francesco Scavullo: a close-up of her face in a blue turtleneck. Johnson later called it the defining moment of her career and her life. Her first agent, Eileen Ford, had told her it would never happen, so she moved to Wilhelmina Cooper’s agency, which got Scavullo’s photo in front of the right editors. The night the issue came out, Johnson said she kept getting up every hour to look at the cover and make sure it had really happened.

She wasn’t the first Black model on any Vogue cover, though. That was Donyale Luna, a model from Detroit. David Bailey photographed her for the March 1966 cover of British Vogue, eight years before Johnson’s. A year earlier, in April 1965, Luna had also been the first Black person on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, though that was a drawing rather than a photograph. Luna’s British Vogue milestone got little attention in the United States at the time, which is part of why Johnson’s American cover is the one most people remember.

Modeling wasn’t Johnson’s original plan. Born in Buffalo, New York, on October 13, 1952, she was a competitive swimmer who nearly qualified for the 1968 Olympics. She went to Northeastern University on a full scholarship to study criminal justice, planning to become a lawyer. After her freshman year, friends urged her to try modeling. Several agencies turned her down, but Glamour hired her on the spot, and she became a regular on its covers. That’s why Glamour is the decoy here: she was on its covers before Vogue, but that wasn’t the first.

Johnson’s cover changed the industry. Fashion writer Marjon Carlos noted that afterward, “every major fashion publication began to feature black models.” In 1975, Johnson became the first Black model on the cover of French Elle, and she went on to appear on more than 500 magazine covers. She walked runways for Halston and Calvin Klein, and she was still modeling in her 60s, including on Tommy Hilfiger’s 2019 runway with Zendaya.

Gianfranco Ferré, Virgil Abloh and Tom Ford all studied architecture before they turned to fashion.

Ferré earned his architecture degree from the Politecnico di Milano in 1969. He then designed jewelry and accessories before launching his own label in 1978. His clothes were known for their architectural symmetry, above all his crisp white shirts, and Women’s Wear Daily called him the “Frank Lloyd Wright of Italian Fashion.” In 1989, he was named artistic director of Christian Dior.

Abloh earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2002. In 2006, he finished a Master of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, studying under a curriculum designed by Mies van der Rohe. That way of thinking shaped everything he did after: Off-White, which he founded in 2013, and his role as artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, which began in 2018.

Ford dropped out of NYU, where he was studying art history, and enrolled at Parsons School of Design to study architecture, first in New York and then in Paris. He switched to fashion in his final year, reportedly because it moved faster than architecture. He joined Gucci in 1990 and became its creative director in 1994, but his sense of space carried into his runway shows, stores and ad campaigns.