Last month in South Los Angeles’ Leimert Park, four mothers walked a runway breastfeeding their infants as part of an event called “Breastfeeding on the Runway.” The mothers were not asked to cover up or step aside, according to the event’s organizer.
The show was organized by Breanna Kuimi, a nurse of more than a decade, a board-certified lactation consultant, and founder of the Los Angeles nonprofit Anew Life, which provides prenatal, postpartum and lactation support to mothers and families, particularly in underserved communities. Kuimi is a mother of four, including twins who recently turned 1, and has breastfed all of her children.
“I know firsthand that breastfeeding is beautiful, exhausting, empowering, inconvenient, emotional and deeply personal,” Kuimi said.
Kuimi said several designers and brands backed the event, which she designed to challenge the idea that breastfeeding should happen out of public view.
The timing carried extra weight for Kuimi. The show took place in August, National Breastfeeding Month, and it fell during Black Breastfeeding Week. Kuimi, who is Black, said staging the event in Leimert Park — a historic center of Black culture and community in Los Angeles — made it a statement about Black motherhood and visibility as well as breastfeeding.
The LA event preceded a separate development on the other side of the Atlantic: on Sept. 21, London designer Di Petsa presented a “Holy Milk” collection during London Fashion Week. Kuimi said the sequence matters to her not as a competition between cities, but as evidence that mothers in Los Angeles had already been pushing on the same boundaries independently, through a nonprofit-led event built around real mothers actually nursing their children on the runway.
Kuimi said her goal was to resist the expectation that breastfeeding mothers stay out of sight, even in a city that she says otherwise celebrates women’s bodies openly.
“Women should never have to choose between being mothers and being seen.”
Kuimi’s nonprofit, Anew Life, continues to work with mothers and families across the Los Angeles area on breastfeeding education, resources and postpartum support.
