For some companies, “making a difference” is a generic slogan, a clever bit of brand positioning. For Fashion Nova, it’s an ethos, and they’re putting up $1 million in grants and donations to prove it through their “Women on Top” initiative.
The initiative is a partnership between hip-hop queen Megan Thee Stallion and Fashion Nova Cares, contributing $25,000 donations to charities, organizations, women-owned businesses and education with a focus on empowering women.
The world is full of talented, brilliant, inventive women who could make a huge difference in their industries, in their communities and in society at large… if only they had the financial backing to do it. And that’s what the initiative aims to address.
Throughout March, Fashion Nova will be announcing a new recipient every day until the 31st. Recipients of these donations have included Girls Inc. of New York City, an organization devoted to helping young women push past social barriers, Mika Osmanovic, a future dentist whose family came to the US when she was just 11 months old, the Breonna Taylor Foundation, and the Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles, to name a few.
The recipients include everyone from small businesses to charities and students, with the common theme being that these donations are intended to amplify women’s voices and elevate more women to positions of power and influence.
Fashion Nova: Who They Are
If you’re at all familiar with Fashion Nova, then this initiative should come as no surprise. The empowerment of women is fundamental to what Fashion Nova represents as a fashion brand.
The simplest way to describe Fashion Nova: you shouldn’t have to be rich and famous to dress like you’re rich and famous.
CEO Richard Saghian founded the company back in 2006 in order to take the world’s hottest, sexiest, most cutting-edge styles, and make them affordable. Simply put, it shouldn’t cost a fortune to be well-dressed, and we should all have the option of being stylish and fashionable, whether or not we can afford a team of stylists.
For Fashion Nova, it’s essentially a matter of taste. If you have an eye for style and an ear for trends, you don’t need to spend a fortune to stay on top of the latest designs. Luckily, Richard Saghian has an eye for style and an ear for trends.
As Saghian puts it, the brand is able to stay ahead of the curve in large part by making the community a part of the conversation. This flips the top-down approach of many fashion brands. They’re not just heading to runway shows and then telling you what’s hot, they’re bringing you into the process so that you can tell them what you’re after, and they can make it so.
In short: It’s a conversation, not a monologue.
Fashion Nova have been at the forefront of inclusivity in fashion, meeting your needs no matter your size and shape with their FashionNovaCURVE, FashionNovaMEN’s, and FashionNovaKIDS labels. Fashion Nova’s mission is simple: if you want to stay fashionable, you should be able to stay fashionable. Whether you’re a man or a woman, thick or thin, young or old, there’s no reason fashion needs to belong exclusively to a small group of influencers in New York and Paris. We all need to dress, so we might as well dress well.
All of this is simply to say that Fashion Nova Cares is very on-brand for the fashion company. Fashion Nova Cares aims to level the playing field for the underrepresented, the overlooked and the underserved, and that’s something that is baked right into the company’s business model.
This may also help to explain why Fashion Nova has become a cornerstone brand in the new wave of women-led hip hop. A favorite of performers like City Girls and Cardi B, plus 25 million social media followers, Fashion Nova was the most-searched fashion brand on Google in 2018. By making high fashion more accessible, Fashion Nova have embodied one of the core principles of hip hop culture, so one could say that their Megan Thee Stallion collaboration was inevitable.
Today, Fashion Nova provides the hottest collections on the market through their five retail stores in Southern California, and through their online shop, launched in 2013 to bring these SoCal trends to the rest of the world.
A Position of Influence
The world would be a very different place if those who hoped to make a difference were in positions of influence, and if those who were in positions of influence sought to make a difference. Unfortunately, these two things don’t always intersect.
This is what Fashion Nova Cares aims to address. In their ongoing fight against racial and gender inequality and injustice, they seek not just to make token donations to high-profile causes, but to put the money where it counts, where it can make a meaningful impact and lead to real change.
The Women on Top initiative lays its goals out right in the name: put women on top of the game. Whether that’s the business world, academics or the arts, too many opportunities are afforded only to the very privileged, which means that the only voices being amplified are those that were already loud enough to begin with.
With the Women on Top initiative, Fashion Nova Cares aims to amplify those voices that we don’t always hear. The passionate, devoted women who have everything they need to go the distance except for a level playing field.
This means direct donations to promising young students and businesswomen, and it also means addressing racial and gender-based injustices through organizations like the Breonna Taylor Foundation.
Put simply: Women on Top is proof that Fashion Nova aren’t just talking the talk, they’re walking the walk, using their own position of influence to elevate and boost the voices that need to be heard.
Shweta Pandey 
Layla Tovey