Review: 'Invisible Beauty' profiles pioneering model Bethann Hardison, and her headstrong fight to make the fashion world more diverse.

Bethann Hardison has been educating, and sometimes fighting, the fashion world for decades — to get designers, critics and others to recognize that they are setting the standards for beauty around the world, and that those standards long have been limiting and even racist.

Hardison’s latest vehicle for making this point is the documentary “Invisible Beauty,” which she co-directs with French fashion filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng to ell her life story in all its glory and power.

For those who don’t know, Hardison, now 81, was one of the first Black fashion models to work the runways for prominent designers. She was working as a saleswoman in New York’s Garment District when designer Willi Smith discovered her, first as a fitting model and later on the catwalk and in print. Her angular cheekbones were striking, and her dark skin a rarity among the thin white models that dominate (and still dominate) the industry.

Hardison was part of a movement in the 1970s — along with such models of color as Iman and Pat Cleveland (who are interviewed here) — to add some diversity to the modeling world. Not content to just model, Hardison moved into the management side, first as a booking agent for a modeling agency, and later with an agency of her own. In those roles, she created a stable of models who looked interesting in their own right (Naomi Campbell was one of them), rather than interchangeable clothes hangers in human form.

When Hardison stepped away from her agency, the industry didn’t keep up the progress in diversifying itself. Instead, fashion went backward, fueled in part by an influx of Russian and Eastern European models — emaciated white women fleeing the end of the Cold War. Hardison co-founded the Black Girls Coalition, using the collective power of the models’ stardom to call attention to the nonsense excuses designers gave for the industry’s systemic racism.

Though Hardison is co-director on this documentary, she doesn’t shy away from some criticism. Most of this comes in the film’s discussions about her stormy relationship with her son, the actor Kadeem Hardison. There were good times — like when he became famous in the sitcom “A Different World,” and gave Bethann an SUV with his first paycheck — but also some hard ones, because Bethann was a demanding mother who apparently didn’t believe in participation trophies.

Tcheng, whose resume includes documentaries on fashion icons Diana Vreeland, Raf Simons and Halston, marshals all the appropriate interview subjects to talk about Bethann Hardison’s legacy as a pioneer and an advocate. But it’s the personal touch, of Bethann trying to sort out the eight decades of her admittedly messy life for an upcoming memoir, that gives “Invisible Beauty” its quite visible power.

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‘Invisible Beauty’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and sexual content. Running time: 115 minutes.