Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Really?


            A little over two years ago, in September 2007, a few of the world’s most prominent supermodels – Naomi Campbell, Liya Kebede, Iman, and Tyson Beckford among them – launched a protest. But it wasn’t about anorexia, money, or any other issues that might immediately spring to mind when thinking about issues within the fashion world. Campbell and her supermodel peers were protesting racism within the fashion industry.

            I didn’t read anything about the protest at the time, so I was surprised to stumble upon this issue when researching discussion points for my blog. I have never really thought about the fashion industry in terms of race before – but once I started to look at it from that angle, I realized that the supermodels have a point.

            Other than the black supermodels that I noted, I cannot think of many big names of minorities within the fashion world. Tyra Banks, of course, has gained a lot of popularity through her modeling career and subsequent television shows, but part of her rise to fame is that she was an exception during the time that she was modeling.

            The instances of discrimination raised by the models in their protest were surprisingly blatant. Campbell, for instance, asserted that she could no longer get on the cover of British Vogue and that she had been featured on the cover of French Vogue only after Yves Saint Laurent had applied pressure on the magazine to use her picture. The group also pointed out that one of the Calvin Klein shows that season had hired exclusively white models.

            Two years later, one would hope that some improvement has been made. And yet, in March Sean “P. Diddy” Combs came under fire for a promotion casting call for Ciroc Vodka, a brand that Combs endorses, that requested “white, Hispanic, or LIGHT SKINNED African Americans,” according to a blog called “The Frisky.” To paraphrase the title of the Frisky’s article: It’s 2009, world. So why is there still racism within the fashion industry?   

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