Deddeh Howard's Black Mirror
December 10, 2016 10:07 AM   Subscribe

 
Having worked in this biz a long time ago, it doesn't surprise me that not only is this problem getting worse, but the people making those decisions don't even understand that they're doing anything wrong.
posted by 1adam12 at 10:46 AM on December 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


The pic beside Gisele is a really good illustration of what she's saying. Gisele is such an archetype of Western beauty standards that to see a woman of colour in the same shot looking every single bit as high fashion and gorgeous proves that there is no need for said image to be shot with a white woman as the default. It's not an aesthetic choice, it's based purely on the racist idea that the potential customer would not find the black woman aspirational. What worries me about the current climate in terms of racism, given all the moves towards right-wing governments across Europe, Brexit, and now Trump, is that companies will stop pretending that they don't know they're being racist; they will be emboldened to say "we know and we don't care."
posted by billiebee at 10:57 AM on December 10, 2016 [14 favorites]


The comments make me sad.
posted by Hazelsmrf at 11:48 AM on December 10, 2016


People should be allowed to choose what they want to do for a living and not have that decision made for them based on their race. Would it be a better world if there was no advertising at all? Yes please! But until that halcyon day arrives (and I'm sure we're all helping bring that day about by not buying things we see advertised, yeah?) then anyone who wants to be part of the industry should have an equal shot at it as far as I'm concerned.
posted by billiebee at 11:56 AM on December 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


We can probably update Hattie McDaniel's remarks here from:

"Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one."

To something like "Why should I object to being a high paid model as objectification of women? They are going to objectify me whether I get paid or not."
posted by Michele in California at 12:07 PM on December 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


Identity fashion and identity marketing have risen along with identity politics, sadly. It's as if leaders in every field read the same briefs and glosses in millennial psychology: show me people like me and I will get behind that, buy that, vote for that, and instagram all over it.

It's a shallowness that "works", for a time, in that it sells. But then it becomes normalized and you start to see the long term damage, like this article maps out, until the damage itself seems institutionalized and unfixable. As 1adam12 says, people genuinely lose track of the fact it could even be wrong. And even though it keeps repeating in other industries and spheres of life, it's still disappointing.

Also: when I saw the title I expected something about pig fuckers.

In that sense, at least, I was not disappointed.
posted by rokusan at 12:08 PM on December 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


Identity fashion and identity marketing have risen along with identity politics, sadly.
I'm not sure I understand you. What does this mean?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:34 PM on December 10, 2016 [5 favorites]


I would love to see more of these images before giving an opinion based on the ones offered in the FPP, but one thing that stands out for me in the ones shown is that while she's doing a great job of echoing the posture, lighting, and visual feel of the shots, she's absolutely not giving the same face. Especially in the CK and Gisele shots, there's a vulnerability in the original models' looks that she is (intentionally?) Not taking on. Her shots, particularly in her face, show strength. They're sexy in a very different way. I'm not sure if that diminishes her point or makes it stronger, but the difference I'm seeing says as much about how the male gaze still sells product as it does about race.
posted by Mchelly at 4:46 PM on December 10, 2016 [5 favorites]


High fashion is only one aspect of the fashion industry though and those are mostly couture/high end underwear/ agency represented models she's picked to recreate*. That's always been a notoriously awful part of the business.

Women of color dominate the indie modeling industry on Instagram etc. and while you can make the argument that they are pin up types, not "models" that not really true if you look. Lots of the most successful instagram models are very savvy fashion insiders and/ or end up owning some of what they promote. An instagram model with 10M followers is probably getting paid $100K per post to promote a product. And not only are a lot of them not white, most of them are really short and some of them are men! It's so lucrative high fashion models are joining in.

*And as noted above the current vogue in print modeling is what I've heard described as equal parts carnality and indifference and has been since circe Kate Moss's first ad. This lady I think would have made a killing in the late 80s, early 90s when strength and directness was the vogue for models.
posted by fshgrl at 5:41 PM on December 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


Identity fashion and identity marketing have risen along with identity politics, sadly.

I'm not sure I understand you. What does this mean?


While I don't want to digress into something that belongs in the election recovery thread(s), I'm one of those who finds the recent political focus on identity politics a bit condescending, and probably detrimental to real progressive goals that most of us would like to see... and the fact the same mix of shallow success and deep failure seems to map so neatly to the sad type of identity marketing ("Hey, millennial! See these people who look like idealized versions of you and your friends having fun? Don't you want to join them and be like them? Click here or you might get left behind!") seems to line up very neatly with the sort of "identity fashion" issues discussed in these articles.

I worked in marketing long enough to hate it, and have enough close friends who've gone through the fashion mills and grinds, to see how those mechanics work in practice. In terms of politics, of course, I'm the same sort of under-qualified but worried observer as most of us, so I've less authority.

So to be fair, whether these two or three things are related or coincidental, they all seem to be focused on short term feels and/or sales, without regard to the long game of what this actual does to people, which often seems to be to entrench them ever more firmly into camps of uses and thems. And, yeah, that irks me.
posted by rokusan at 1:44 PM on December 11, 2016


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