I met Yvette Bobonis Flaxman at a Point Breeze coffee shop. She arrived looking as if she had just come from a modeling appointment even though she left modeling some time ago

She did pose for a cover of the local "Metropolitan" magazine in 2006, coming out of retirement briefly but looking sensational in Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen.

At 52, Flossie, as most of us know her, could still be following that career, one in which, even as a black woman, she was a dominant player in Pittsburgh for many years.

I've been reading with dismay reports that runways have faded to white. Post-Gazette fashion editor LaMont Jones in April lamented after February's Fashion Week about the lack of black models in the fashion industry these days. The New York Times also chimed in.

"It's the worst it has ever been," says Bethann Hardison, who started her own agency in New York City the '80s, promoting racial diversity. She had been a very busy runway model herself prior to that.

As Flossie and I reminisced, she was quick to say she finds it hard to believe the lack of black models -- compared with the way it was in the '70s and '80s -- has racist undertones.

"I see a gray area in there," she said, "and like many things that change could be emotional, political, the artistic edge of the designer, but I don't want to even think it is racial discrimination, not after the gains made years ago."

She was one of a very few models, black or white, who made a living in Pittsburgh. There was lots of print work for at least three department stores, and then television advertising, fashion shows, editorials.

"Staying in Pittsburgh was part of the reason it worked so well for me," she admits. "Very few, black or white, make it big. Being a big fish in a little pond was fine with me." She credits Pittsburgh designer the late Mark Pennywell with starting her career, but I think it was her attitude which made her successful.

In other words, she was a professional. She was upbeat. She hustled and worked hard. And she photographed like a dream. During my years of covering fashion, more than 30 of them until 1991, I saw black models, including Flossie, climb to the top of the heap from an almost all-white roster of mannequins which ruled the runways and magazine covers when I began covering the industry in the early '60s.

But it has never been easy, as Flossie will attest.

We began to think of other local models, even prior to Flossie, who worked often: Lenore Andrews, Brenda Graham, Faye Wallace, Kimberly Hester, Marlene Hunt, Charena Shaffer Swann among them.

I recalled one of our own, Naomi Sims, who attended Westinghouse High School. She never modeled here but eventually had worldwide success.

Her face peered at us from the cover of Ladies Home Journal, a first for the magazine. She was just 21 when she also became the first black model to appear in a TV commercial and to have a Vogue layout.

On a runway she took my breath away. She left the business 25 years ago, claiming "modeling was never my ultimate goal, but it allowed me to earn the money to do what I wanted to do."

Considered "multiculturism," the trend seemed to kick off when American designers used a number of black models in a show at Versailles in 1973.

Black designers emerging (like Pennywell) helped the black models' cause and were used often by Gordon Henderson, Stephen Burrows, Scott Barrie and Willi Smith. Designer Halston's shows only got better when Pat Cleveland or Alva Chinn took over his Olympic Towers showroom.

Calvin Klein's shows were lifted from predictable and safe to exciting when Iman or Tyra Banks appeared.

Naomi Campbell, one of the three original women who were first to be hailed as "supermodels" (Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington being the others) was the first black model on Time's cover, and Beverly Johnson was the first black woman to appear on a Vogue cover.

"She was the model I wanted to be like," says Flossie. "I really admired her."

Oddly enough, singer/actresses such as Queen Latifah and Beyonce are featured in the few lucrative cosmetic contracts out there. Halle Berry has her share as well, and disgraced former Miss America Vanessa Williams has shown us you can't keep a good woman down.

The swing in cover girls, when it isn't an actress or pop star, is now toward young women from Brazil, Russia, the Czech Republic. It's a fickle world, especially when it comes to fashion.

Hopeful? A young black woman was just named "America's Next Top Model" on the television show. Stay tuned.