In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, the fashion and beauty industries have struggled to formulate meaningful responses. Brands and influencers alike have come under fire for statements that missed the mark, performative allyship, or saying nothing at all. Critics and consumers have flooded social media demanding change for all the right reasons.

Two of the industry’s most vocal critics and influential voices in the movement are Chrissy Rutherford and Danielle Prescod. The duo has extensive, first-hand experience encountering racism in the industry. Rutherford, who most recently served as Special Projects Director for Harper’s Bazaar, and Prescod, who is currently the Style Director for BET and has worked for titles such as InStyle and Elle, swiftly took to their platforms to speak out on the Black Lives Matter Movement and educate their followers.

The result was astounding. The duo both experienced viral moments – Prescod attracted over 2.5 million views on her post calling out companies for performative allyship and failing to address previous instances of racism. Meanwhile, Rutherford garnered over 5 million views – thanks to the support of celebs like Ariana Grande – for a video imploring her followers to speak up on their platforms in support of Black lives and to learn to be “anti-racist.” Both their follower counts on the platform doubled.

Brands and influencers were quick to take notice, flooding both their inboxes with requests for guidance during this time. While the longtime friends discussed the sheer volume of inquiries from multiple brands and talent, an idea was born.

“After I posted my video, the next morning I had several influencers who all have over 1 million followers blowing up my phone asking, ‘Should I speak out about this? What do I say?’” said Rutherford. “Simultaneously, we had brands hitting up our inboxes shortly after our videos to be like ‘Hey, can we talk?’”

“We got a lot of messages, and we were so overwhelmed,” Prescod added. “People wanted us to weigh in to help educate them, and tell them what to do. I was like, we’ve been doing that for free. Now you’re going to pay us.”

Thus, ‘2BG’ (2 Black Girls) was born. The newly-formed agency will be working within the fashion and beauty space, offering their consulting services to brands looking for crisis-management solutions and to become more diverse and inclusive. The duo will also be working with influencers, offering two-hour seminars that cover the Dos and Don’ts for anti-racism work, examples of influencers and brands who have gotten things both wrong and right, suggestions for how to be an ally with actionable steps to take both on and offline, and the historical context of how racism relates to fashion and beauty. The seminar also allows one hour for questions along with a list of reading materials so participants can continue their education at home.

This is not new territory for Rutherford and Prescod. As seasoned media professionals who have worked across some of fashion’s top titles, they have been using their position to speak up for years.

“Working for a Black brand in particular was really liberating for me because I no longer had to cover Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez,” Prescod said. “It was exhausting because all I did was spend my time exalting the beauty of white women over and over again. When I came to BET I was totally free of all of that, but it also left me in a really weird spot because I brought over all of those relationships and I was forced to have conversations with them as early as 2016, being like, ‘I cannot feature this because this is a brand only for white people. You have done no research & development on skin for people with melanin.’ It put me in a strange place with the industry because I have felt a lot of friction and people annoyed with the way I approach things, but when I send you three nice emails and again you have pitched me this thing only for white people’s hair? Now you’re going to get an angry e-mail, and take me off the list if necessary or take the feedback I’ve generously been giving you for free to your leadership.”

Rutherford recalls a similar experience, crediting her family’s Jamaican culture and upbringing of “brutal honesty” for empowering her to speak up when she witnessed injustice.

“There have been many times when I’ve sent emails to brands and been like, ‘what is going on?’” she recounted. “All of your imagery is white. I’ve been invited to panels about female empowerment but all the speakers are white. I always challenge them directly. This is the year 2020, you should not be inviting people to a panel that features only white panelists. White people in this industry have had this incredible privilege to not even notice these things or care to fix them. We all have the same capabilities to send an email and say ‘Hey, I saw this and it didn’t sit well with me. You should really change the racial makeup of the people in these shows.’”

This unprecedented moment in history has presented the pair with a unique opportunity to formalize relationships with brands and influencers that are more eager than ever to get involved in the racial justice movement.

“People are more willing to listen than they have been in the past,” Prescod said. “They are realizing that they have been complicit all along, and they are more willing than ever to hear about how they can change their behavior going forward. We are very candid and very honest. If we see someone has messed up, we tell them. We tell them they cannot run and hide from criticism, they can’t block people, they can’t try to avoid it because that is a function and abuse of their privilege. You might have an uncomfortable few weeks. Live with that.”

While their seminars cover a vast range of topics, the workshop is just a starting point for participants to continue to actively educate themselves and practice anti-racism every day. The task, they concede, is not for the faint of heart.

“Sometimes it feels like people will use this as a cheat sheet,” said Prescod. “But this isn’t a quick fix. You can’t throw money at this problem, and you can’t learn everything you need to know in two hours. You’ll get some good tips, but a lot of this is self-reflection and difficult work some people aren’t interested in doing.”

“White people, especially of the liberal variety, really cling to the idea that they are not racist. They might interact with Black people on a daily basis and they are not actively having thoughts about harming Black people, but they don’t realize that racism exists on a spectrum,” added Rutherford. “It’s not about just saying you’re not racist. It’s looking at the ways you have been complicit in upholding the standards of white supremacy by actually just doing nothing. To fight racism, you have to be active. It’s not about being passive. That’s such a big part of what we are trying to drive home to these people. This requires work. This requires effort.”

Tackling systemic racism across the industry is an important task, but where do you start? The pair are focused on making sure no one deflects blame, and instead takes it upon themselves to find ways within their line of work to be agents of change.

“One thing we try to encourage people to remember is not everyone’s role in this fight is the same. If you are not an organizer, a marcher, or a lawyer, no one is going to expect you to change our legal system overnight,” said Prescod. “The framework we work inside is creating imagery, and making sure that imagery has a sense of anti-racism and pushes a narrative of equality forward. When we talk to brands, we tell them things like, it’s problematic when you say ‘oh this girl is off brand,’ because that becomes codified language for saying she doesn’t look as expensive or elegant. You as a brand – or any of the teams involved with creating an image, have the power to transform someone into someone elegant, and we can shift the public perception of whatever that person looks like. That is completely within your power.”

Rutherford added, “The fashion industry has repeatedly fumbled this very important responsibility and this power. Fashion dictates what is cool, what is desirable, what is worthy, and what is expensive. Cultural appropriation has been a huge conversation in the industry for a while now for this reason. You exclude Black women from this narrative but you are constantly co-opting this narrative from Black women, but it’s not cool until it’s on a white person. When you are aware of this stuff and you see it happening over and over again, it just feels really sh*tty.”

With their new agency, Prescod and Rutherford are committed to change – and are optimistic for the future.

“I like to think there is room for growth within everyone. I’ve seen examples in my own life of people who have changed their minds, got a new perspective, and decided to accept new information. But, the real crucial piece of that is that you have to care and be actively engaging with it. There are a few people that I don’t think are ready, or it’s not in their capacity to do it…some people that have limitations. I’m not going to waste my breath and energy educating those people. You have to want to come to the table and humble yourself, and there are a lot of people in this industry that don’t want to do that. Those are not the people who this seminar is for,” said Prescod.

“It really does feel challenging to love the industry at times because of all the stuff that goes on. I left my job at Harper’s Bazaar in February and I was feeling very disheartened,” Rutherford noted. “This isn’t the industry I fell in love with once you get into the underbelly of the beast. I wasn’t really sure of how I was going to move forward with my career or what I really wanted to do, but I know that helping people and being able to change things was a real focal point for me. It feels very serendipitous that all of this came together…it feels like a great privilege to keep my foot in this industry, which, at the end of the day, I do love. I want to be able to help shape these brands and conversations to be more inclusive, and be proud to wear these clothes or co-sign these brands because they are doing the right thing.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.