Watch our cover girls discuss why the fashion industry needs to be more inclusive:

Director: Maya Margolina // Director of Photography: Anna Stypko // Producers: Taylor Shung, Brett Potter // Editor: Sarah Laties // Production Services: BorschtCorp. & Meadow Street Films // Color: Marika Litz // BCam: Daniel Fernandez // 1st AC: Cesar Chacon // 2nd AC: Debi Jimenez // Gaffer: Nicco Quinones // Grip: Santiago Mendez // Sound Mixer: Joel Hernandez // PA: Kayla Delacerda, William Garcia

Bethann Hardison, founder, Bethann Management Co.

“I arranged a town hall meeting in 2007. The room was packed. There were editors, stylists, model-agency owners — and I sat in front of them and talked about what I thought was inappropriate behavior. [Models of color] were being told, ‘Sorry, no blacks, no ethnics.’ Newspapers started writing articles about ‘Is there racism in fashion?’ And it changed. ‘I’m sorry, no blacks, no ethnics’ has never been said again.”

From left: Padma Lakshmi, Meghan Markle, and Zazie Beetz. All: Getty Images

Padma Lakshmi, author, actress, host, and executive producer, , author, actress, host, and executive producer, Top Chef

“My skin is a map of my life. Before high school, I lived in a white suburb of Los Angeles where there were so few Indians that they didn’t even know the ‘correct’ slurs. They called me the N-word or ‘Blackie.’ For a long time I hated my skin color. Even in India, there’s a complicated history. My grandmother discouraged us from going in the sun; she didn’t want us to be dark. We were only allowed to play outside after 4:30. There was a cosmetics line called Fair & Lovely — that says it all. [And] when I started to work as a model, people would on occasion say things to me like, ‘You’re so pretty for being an Indian.’ I've gotten to a place where I have a much broader feeling that I'm beautiful because I'm accepted in the culture. I scar very badly. You can see every scrape, cut, and burn — mine don't go away... but I'm very thankful for my skin. I'm very tactile. Cooking is as much about touch as it is about taste — I can feel if something is done just by touch. That sense of touch has shaped my sensuality.”

Meghan Markle, actress, , actress, Suits

“I have the most vivid memories of being seven years old and my mom picking me up from my grandmother’s house. There were the three of us, a family tree in an ombré of mocha next to the caramel complexion of my mom and light-skinned, freckled me. I remember the sense of belonging, having nothing to do with the color of my skin. It was only outside the comforts of home that the world began to challenge those ideals. I took an African-American studies class at Northwestern where we explored colorism; it was the first time I could put a name to feeling too light in the black community, too mixed in the white community. For castings, I was labeled ‘ethnically ambiguous.’ Was I Latina? Sephardic? ‘Exotic Caucasian’? Add the freckles to the mix and it created quite the conundrum. To this day, my pet peeve is when my skin tone is changed and my freckles are airbrushed out of a photo shoot. For all my freckle-faced friends out there, I will share with you something my dad told me when I was younger: ‘A face without freckles is a night without stars.’ ”

Zazie Beetz, actress, , actress, Atlanta and Slice

“My father is German; my mother is African-American. Growing up, I visited my grandparents in Berlin a lot. I would not see any other person of color for three weeks. People would stare. They would say things like ‘Oh, you look like chocolate — I want to eat you up!’ I’ve been to gatherings where people would say, ‘She has so much race in her’ or would use the word ‘n*****’ — or the German term ‘neger.’ And I would be like, Who are you talking to? I feel German, I speak German, [but] I don’t look German. In the United States, if you’re African-American, it can be assumed that your family has been here for generations. In Europe, colonialism is much more alive and it’s assumed you’re from Nigeria or Senegal. I would have these conversations like ‘Where is your mother from?’ ‘Brooklyn.’ ‘No, but where is she from?’ I would respond, ‘We don’t know,’ since we can’t trace our roots beyond North Carolina. Slavery has erased our ability to find our origins. We have been here as long as some of the first immigrants.”

“I was born in Pakistan, and when my mother told me we were moving to Canada, I asked her, ‘What do the people there look like?’ And she said, ‘They look like the show you watch, Full House.’ So I assumed that when I would arrive in Canada, I would turn into a white blonde. And I was horrified when I got to the airport and I was still brown. I just couldn’t understand that different colors coexist. I think I’ve come a long way from that nine-year-old girl who wanted to trade in her brown skin for white. I love what my brown skin looks like and what it represents. And there are many times I’m fully unaware of my skin. The perfect example is I’m talking to somebody, and they would look at me and say, ‘So how do they do that in India?’ I say, ‘I’m not sure. I’m from Pakistan. But I can Google it for you and find out.’ That always creates such an awkward moment, but I think awkward moments are not bad; they push us to confront our prejudices. Uncomfortable as it is to hear ‘Oh, you speak English really good for a brown lady,’ it really tells me that people have these ideas but there’s no healthy space to ask these things. We lack basic vocab about understanding our differences. Now I love walking into a room and I don’t look like everyone else. I hope that love for my skin I’ve developed as an adult I can pass on to my kids.”