Audrey Smaltz’s “Every Inch a Lady” with Alina Mitchell, and foreword by Michael Kors, out now, reads as more than a memoir. Across 15 chapters, each anchored by wisdom drawn from Smaltz’s 84 years of life lessons, the former model, fashion editor, Ebony Fashion Fair commentator and founder of “The Ground Crew” reflects on her remarkable life. “The Ground Crew,” her trailblazing fashion-dressing business, brought calm to the chaos of backstage at fashion week and opened unimaginable doors for a Black woman from Harlem, taking her around the world and back with fashion.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Smaltz, whose voice is no stranger to the pages of Women’s Wear Daily, via Zoom about her memoir, vividly recollected in her own words. Reading the book, Smaltz comes through as she has long been remembered: direct, warm, exacting and fully aware of what it took to build a life in fashion. Growing up during segregation in America, she understood the barriers to entry in pursuing a career where, as she writes, “the lights were not meant to shine on people like me, but I was determined to redirect those spotlights.”
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What gives the book its shape is not glamour alone, though there is plenty of that in her orbit. It is the passion for the work, legacy built with conviction and the self-determination to never give up, even when rejection was brutal. As Smaltz often says, she was, “born, bred, toasted, buttered, jellied, jammed and honeyed in Harlem,” the place where family and community encouraged her every step of the way. She arrived in fashion in the 1940s, at 15, entering through the Ophelia DeVore School of Charm in Harlem. She would work with DeVore, the first Black model at the Grace Del Marco Model Agency, acquiring lessons that carried her far beyond New York.
Mitchell broadens the frame of the memoir here, placing Smaltz within a larger constellation of Black fashion history. Smaltz emerges among an elite group of Black modeling pioneers including DeVore, Dorothea Towles, Sara Lou Harris and Helen Williams. Women who, like Smaltz, defined their own space in fashion’s complicated landscape. But Smaltz’s journey would move beyond modeling.
In 1970, one of her first major breaks came with Eunice Johnson at Ebony and Ebony Fashion Fair. For nearly a decade, Smaltz traveled as commentator for Johnson’s all-Black model showcase, gaining a front-row seat to high fashion at a time when Black access to that world was fraught. As the book makes clear, the experience was formative, but not without difficulty. Smaltz writes candidly about the sometimes turbulent nature of that working relationship, from a lack of credit for her writing work to painful personal sacrifice. Still, she kept moving forward.
By 1977, after years of travel, industry access and hard-won experience, Smaltz was ready to build something of her own. She left Ebony, had a short stint at Vogue, and at 40, with a savings of $60,000, struck out on her own. Founding “The Ground Crew” — a name tied to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech — became the clearest expression for her vision. As she writes, “through The Ground Crew, I pioneered a business that did not previously exist in the fashion industry.”
It wasn’t easy. Her tenacity never wavered, and “no” was never an answer, only part of the quest. She recalls that “for five years they [fashion designers] told me no,” speaking to the early resistance she faced. She kept going — sending letters, walking into offices, introducing herself and explaining what “The Ground Crew” could do and wouldn’t do. “Nothing, not even a shoe would be missing,” she said, a line that captures the trust, discipline and standards that made her indispensable. The ground crew lasted 40 years with a who’s who of fashion designers on its roster.
The book also makes room for the personal life that shaped her. Smaltz writes honestly about Gail Marquis, “the true love of her life,” and Camello “Frenchie” Casimir, her hairdresser and confidant, writing, “To describe my time with Frenchie as a mere appointment would be an understatement; it was a nourishing experience that resonated deep within my soul.”
When asked in our Zoom call what it was like to go through her memory bank, she stated, “At 84 [she] was trying to remember all the good things that happened to me and some that weren’t so good.” That spirit runs through the book’s “honest vulnerable retelling” and advice: “Do what you love and have a hell of a time doing it” — testament to her life’s work.
