Vogue Italia All-Black Issue - Was it and is it wishful thinking?
Posted by v on July 3, 2008
Okay, the haute couture shows are on in Paris and that is seriously huge fashion business. Other than that, it is pretty slow here on earth. There are only so many bankruptcies and management changes one wishes to read about.
Obama is the democratic nominee already and talking about that again or how he got there would be whipping a dead horse, which the TV stations are already doing.
Michelle Obama has also been talked to death and Lord knows, Cindy McCain does not do or say ANYTHING!
So, what to talk about? The Wall Street Journal is NOW! talking about the Vogue Italia All-Black issue.Come on guys, this is fashion, you are arriving at the party sooooo late. That was LIKE so 5 minutes ago! According to WSJ ”the spotlighting of black models in a grouping of their own — not integrated with any other races — could have unintended implications. The issue also fails to recognize any other ethnicity’s that are underrepresented in fashion.
Jourdan Dunn - Givenchy Haute Couture Fall 09
Can a single edition of one magazine cause an historic breakthrough?
Apparently not! Dior, which uses the most models by showing 45 looks on 45 girls, used only one Asian model,Hye Park, and a single black model, Chanel Iman , who has been the industry’s designated “black girl” for a few seasons now. Remember when it was Naomi.
“It’s a slippery slope towards reversing the kinds of problems that the magazine was trying to overcome by making this gesture,” says John L. Jackson, Jr., a professor of media analysis at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “The danger is that all [the editors] have done is find a different way to single out the difference of European beauty, by marking off these racialized bodies in their own special issue.”
You know what, no-one is going to be happy, ever! but not to worry, Professor Johnson, the Vogue Italia is just a thought, a great gesture. That the agencies, designers and magazines will change anything and evrything all of a sudden. You gotta be kidding! Just check out the couture shows. They already picked up their token black model - Chanel Iman.
On June 11, BET ran a segment called “Fashion Blackout” which we are sure not so many people watched.
“After keeping its silence on the issue, the Black Fashion World is moving to action after last fall’s shows at New York’s fashion week. Their mission is to keep Black models from becoming extinct in a business they, at one time, were near dominating. So why have images of Black models been in sharp decline in high fashion for more than a decade? - Bethan Hardison
What does this mean for society at large? At the helm of the issue is Bethann Hardison who has modeled, run her own modeling agency and handled casting over the years.
At her recent town hall meeting, “Out of Fashion: The Absence of Color,” she said, “In the United States of America, this is the one industry that still has the freedom to refer to people by their color and reject them in their work.”
Yep, once again, check out the current runways. Nothing has changed. Aside from DSquared2 who used black male models exclusively, it was pretty much the same issue.
Designers such as Givenchy who uses black models as much as Yves St. Laurent did is still the only designer who featured a rainbow coalition of models. Armani used not a single black model, and only one Asian, Ai Tominaga. Chanel followed the same template using only Liu Wen.
According to Targetmarket News.com, Black women in the United States spend more than $20 billion on apparel each year. However, the runways, magazine spreads and the image/beauty industry at large is increasingly ignoring their buying power and their existence, choosing instead to market an eastern-European form of beauty as the standard.
Liu Wen - Chanel Haute Couture 2009 (Photo: courtesy Style.com)
Maybe, just maybe the $20 billion is not spent on designer wear and couture. Having said that, the biggest buyer of couture is the Middle East and we cannot recall any moment when there was a representation of Arab looking models.
At the spring 2008 collections at Fashion Week in September 2007 in New York, the runways were dominated by white faces. In fact, Black faces were more absent from the runways than some fashion insiders have seen since the ‘60s.
Lacroix chose to use a completely Caucasian cast. It took Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci to 
acknowledge the issue at all, choosing to open his show with (gasp!) a South Asian model, Bangalore model Lakshmi Menon, immediately followed by black models and Vogue Italia cover girls Jourdan Dunn and Sessilee Lopez.
With the exception of the Middle East, there seems to be a direct correlation between the world billionaires list and the representation of the nationality on the catwalks.
After saying that, we don’t completely get the Eastern European model thing. We don’t understand the over representation on the catwalk.
Lakshmi Menon- Givenchy Haute Couture Fall 09
