Is this the Fashion Week when diversity comes back into style?

It's been nearly nine months since CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg urged designers to create "truly multicultural" runway shows. Media reviews of last season's shows, however, suggested that the CFDA's suggestion was not always heeded. When Jezebel counted up last February's New York shows, they found that about black models were used only about 5% of the time.

Still, there was mounting momentum and continuing buzz over diversity after the fall shows, cresting with Italian Vogue's best-selling all-black July issue and an all-black Dsquared2 menswear show in Milan.

Designer Tracy Reese is not casting her runway show differently this season; she's always featured non-white models in her casts, she says. "It's important to me as a person of color to see people of color represented in my show," she said during her fashion week castings. "I hope we've gotten to a point where a range of beauty is accepted, not just acceptable. Accepted. Embraced."

Ms. Reese, who spoke last year at fashion industry veteran Bethann Hardison's town hall meetings on diversity, is optimistic that runways will become more diverse as designers realize that showing their clothes on models of different races can help boost sales. "It's a wake up call to everyone. 'Hey there's more than one type of person out there, even if when you're sketching your collection you only had one vision of one person,' " she says. "There are types of people who might be interested in buying your clothing and looking fantastic in them."