In Other Blogs...

Continuing on the theme of brown people as props in ads and editorials  is this truly excellent post on hipster racism in Nylon Magazine published at Threadbared. Below is short excerpt but do yourself a favor and check out the full post. It is extremely well-written and thought provoking. On a side note, does this image reminds anyone else of those old Baby Phat ads that featured Kimora Lee Simmons surround by housekeepers and nannies?

There's much to be said about Beth Ditto, fat and fashion, but the above photograph from Ditto's eight-page editorial in NYLON's recent music issue is about none of these things for me. It's about the woman who may or may not be a real housekeeper at the motel at 

which this editorial was photographed, sitting on the edge of the bed with a handful of cards and gazing at Ditto with a weary but guarded expression. In the story that coalesces for me, studying this photograph, she has just been forced to play cards with a guest -- not because she wants to, but because she could lose her job if she doesn't. Nor does the game even feel like a break from her domestic labor; this sort of affective labor is no less taxing. In her mind (in the story I imagine about this editorial), she calculates how much longer she'll have to stay and clean in order to meet her day's quota.

In other Blogs...

A post called "Darker Skinned Glamour Girls" on Racialicious caught my eye this morning. In it Latoya Peterson wrote about something she noticed while paging through an issue of the UK beauty magazine "Pride." She writes:

Hmm, I thought to myself, they have a lot of dark skinned women in this magazine. Wonder why?

Then I wondered to myself why I thought it would be strange to have dark skinned women in a magazine that caters to black women. That should have been a no-brainer. So why was I surprised?

and later,

It just seems like fashion has a specific look that is acceptable for dark skinned women. It is almost as if the woman is not dark with close cropped hair and a bone-thin physique, she simply does not exist.

I've had that same thought go through my head. Nothing will get me to pause on a page longer than the inclusion of a woman with dark skin. It's like I'm staring at a unicorn or something.

Aside from Naomi, off the top of my head I'm having a little trouble thinking of a "glamour girl" model who has very dark skin and honestly even Naomi is probably somewhere in the middle of our color spectrum.

This is not to imply that they aren't out there but when one does see them, they usually fall into a certain mold.

There seems to be a handful of lovely Africans dividing up some of the crumbs brushed down to non-white models in the industry but in spite of the many different types of beauty represented on that continent, most fashion mucks seem to only want to focus on the girls with keen features like Liya Kebede or the cropped hair darker skinned models like Alek or Ajuma.

The first type can appear in the Estee Lauder and Tiffany and Co. ads while the latter is going to see a lot of leopard skin in the course of her career.

Of course there are exceptions.

Sessilee Lopez is currently appearing in ads for Lanvin but her dark skin is seemingly used as one the stylist's props.

Also, Naomi is still thriving in her career but she is such an icon at this point that it hardly seems fair to compare her success to the plight of a model of color with no real name recognition. Her ads for Pinko (see above photo) has the feel of a celebrity endorsement.

Of course, none of this is new especially in this industry but I always find myself hoping that one of these days I'll be surprised in a good way when paging through a mag.

photo source: TFS/simplylovely

In Other Blogs...

Don't miss this great post at The Hiss This Minute:

I love fashion and I beautiful things but I stopped looking a long time ago at fashion magazines and runways for self-validation. I think it would be brilliant and sensitive and smart for more designers of Miuccia Prada and Dontatella Versace's ilk to open up their cabines to a variety of ethncities, in the way Prada has included Hye Park in the past and Versace had drafted the likes of Naomi and Kiara. But I wouldn't walk away from those shows feeling like...finally...validation...acceptance...proof that black girls are chic and sleek and complex "intellectual beauties" too. I already know this to be true, via the world that lives in my head, via the perceptions sculpted in my mind from seeing my mom and my aunts throughout the years, from my girlfriends in high school, from looking at my club running mates in my 20's dress themselves with individuality and brilliance....

Read more here