Here is the gist of a Cathy Horyn article for the NY Times, about the Upcoming Vogue Italia July 08 Issue and why black models continue to find it hard to break more into the fashion industry. Pay attention to the 2nd to last paragraph. When you're done reading you can also check out a slide show from the issue.
"…the July issue of Italian Vogue will have only black models, and all the features are related to black women in the arts and entertainment. …—an entire issue devoted to black models could be seen as making hay of a controversy. I’ll let you be the judge…Steven Meisel did the fashion pictures…and I think they are some of the best he’s done. They are crazily, softly beautiful, plainly the work of someone who knows women and fashion…
When you see how he has photographed Lopez, for instance you are forced to ask yourself why this beautiful woman isn’t working more than she is. Meisel suggests that the reason, and the answer to the problem of diversity on the runway, is simple: “Because nobody gives her a chance.”
Part of the problem…is that the agencies aren’t taking the time and trouble to develop models, white and nonwhite. And, then, the cycle of new models, especially from Eastern Europe, is cycling faster and faster… That automatically makes it difficult for a model to build a career. agencies...are simply not making the effort to find and develop young models.
It’s funny, thinking about it now, that they don’t, as a group, inspire dreams. So much of fashion, as we know, is determined by groups. The tribes of fashion. The supermodels—Naomi, Linda, Christy, Cindy, Stephanie—were, after all, a group. They helped set the tone for the period, as did the waifs and the Goths, and their success was not an accident. They fed peoples’ imaginations.
Now we’re in the age of the wall-eyed blond. What is it that they represent to us? What experience? The point of being racially or ethnically representative on the runways or in pictures is, I suppose, to impart a unique experience or desire—something that goes beyond skin color or ethnic background but is not unrelated to it.
Well, I think that’s what you see in Meisel’s pictures of Campbell, Lopez, Kebede and the other models. They are a way of looking, yes—glamourous, cool, ultra-accessorized—but they are also a way of being."
Comments