“Invisible Beauty” is a documentary that makes one reconsider, yet again, the role fashion plays in society by how it has always narrowed “standards of beauty,” how it presents “what power looks like” and by remembering a woman who was one of the first through the door to “inclusion.”

And when Bethann Hardison got through it, she made damned sure she held that door open to generations that followed.

Hardison co-directed the film and framed it as a way of jump-starting her unstarted memoirs, and as a sort of “looking back to go forward” in a life spent modeling and making the scene, fashion consulting, model agency operating and activism.

“When I look at my life, you’re so busy doing it than you never think there’s a story to tell about it.”

A good way to start, her astrologer assures her, is “Your talking about (and with) other people is your story.”

So here are fashion designers such as Stephen Burrows and fashion photographer Bruce Webber talking about her “presence,” a woman who “seemed taller than she was” thanks to the way she carried herself on the runway — not just a Black woman but a dark-skinned “kind of adrogynous” Black woman and one of the first to turn up in major shows in the ’60s.

Here are Iman and Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb and other Black models she mentored recalling her influence. The serene Somali icon Iman gets choked up describing Hardison as “the Statue of Liberty” for her, the first American in the fashion scene to welcome her and not resent a foreigner joining the growing ranks of Black models in America.

We’re treated to archival interviews and chats with friends, from Whoopi and Tracee Ellis Ross to Zendaya. And the film recalls the famous “Battle of Versailles” charity fashion show at the French palace, in which the American designers showing assembled a dream team of young African American models who swooped in and swirled and put on a show, bowling over stodgy, ancient and ever-so-white Eurofashion as they did.

That show “gave her purpose,” and as a woman who ran her own modeling agency, Hardison turned out a generation of Black fashion icons.

Co-directing the movie and thus controlling what is related and who is spoken to, if not how it is all framed (we hear several phone chats with co-director Frédéric Tcheng), a lot is left out about her early life, first jobs and childhood that saw her raised by her grandmother, her activist Imam father and occasionally by her own mother.

We’re allowed to reflect on how that impacted her “live my life” upbringing of her son, the actor Kadeem Hardison, who got direction from her — she pointed him at acting and got him into classes — but which was mostly carried out by her grandmother, the same woman who mostly raised her. The circle of neglect explains Kadeem’s on-and-off relationship with her to this day, which he touches on in a cheerful “I’m a grown-ass man” and getting over that is partly on him interview.

Through it all, Hardison mère comes off as upbeat and complicated, playful and regal, accomplished and human, joyously open, narcissistic, immodest and “lift everyone else up” generous.

“If you’re gonna go to the circus,” she says, “get on the rides!”

And if the whole world is obsessing over what Zendaya and her generation of great beauties of color are wearing today, she and Hardison both know who has had the most outsized influence on why that is.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Bethann Hardison, Zendaya, Iman, Naomi Campbell, Bruce Webber, Veronica Webb and Kadeem Hardison

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bethann Hardison and Frédéric Tcheng. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:56