The Issue on Black Models

While the much-ballyhooed Italian Vogue's "All Black" issue last July 2008 was an overwhelming disappointment, it apparently succeeded in awakening the fashion industry to the fact that industries of beauty culture produce, circulate, and secure very limited ideas of beauty especially in relation to race and size. Unfortunately, a lot of the response from American Vogue has been of the "some of my best friends are black" variety. Consider, for example, the editorial Vogue ran called, "Is Fashion Racist?" Recounting the hard luck stories of three young (and working) black models, Chanel Iman, Jourdan Dunn, and Arlenis Sosa, the article seems to conclude that the answer to racism is for models to keep a "strenuously positive" attitude. Iman offers this advice: "Nobody likes to work with someone negative." And further, that the real problem in the fashion industry is not racism but the supermodel's fall from power.

The latest issue of Teen Vogue, however, presents a much more honest portrayal of the politics of race and beauty in fashion. And again, Iman and Dunn are featured. Rather than glossing over the institutional structures of fashion's racism, they rightly point out that the lack of opportunities for black models reproduces racial alienation. On this issue, a journalist at Jezebel is also astute when she asserts that "black" can be a homogenizing category of identity that misrecognizes the ethnic and racial diversity of non-white models. "Selina Khan is from the French-speaking Caribbean island of Martinique and swears she's not black, but 'Indian, mixed with Arabic and Creole, and Vietnamese.'"

Actually what Khan really says is: "My mom's Indian, mixed with Arabic and Creole, and my dad is Vietnamese. Yep, Indian and Chinese." When the interviewer asks Khan to clarify--"I thought you said Vietnamese"--Khan explains knowingly, "It's ethnically the same thing. Just a different country."

Now, if only we could get Khan to stop misrecognizing all Asians as being the same.

RIP Naomi Sims

"Naomi Sims, whose appearance as the first black model on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1968 was a consummate moment of the Black is Beautiful movement, and who went on to design successful collections of wigs and cosmetics for black women under her name, died Saturday in Newark. She was 61, her family said, and lived in Newark."

-- Eric Wilson, "Naomi Sims, 61, Pioneering Cover Girl, Is Dead," New York Times



"Appearing on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal—and Life magazine, too—was not some esoteric coup noted only by the fashion-obsessed. It was a cultural revelation. Sims pushed black beauty into the mainstream in a way that was more provocative and resonant than a million 'black issues' of Italian Vogue.

Sims was also a successful businesswoman with a line of wigs aimed at African-American women. She was a model-turned-entrepreneur long before Tyra Banks ever uttered the word 'fierce,' long before Banks was even born.

Those twin cover achievements are far more important and lasting than being able to strut down a runway in 4-inch heels without toppling over or being a designer’s muse. The title 'supermodel' is too limited, too modest for what Sims really managed to do. She initiated a dialogue on how our culture defines beauty—a dialogue that continues to this day. She proved that a pretty face does not mean an empty head—a fact that continues to roil our assumptions. And ultimately, she let the world know that a black face—a black woman—is someone to be reckoned with."

-- Robin Givhan, "Naomi Sims Was No Supermodel," The Root

Black Is The New Black

The July Vogue Italia should be arriving on American shores in the next few weeks, and of course New York Times' Cathy Horyn has a sneak peak of, as well as interviews with, some of the models who appear in the “historic” issue. (For the Thursday Fashion and Style section, she also penned an essay called "Conspicuous By Their Presence.") Her column and the comments posted to it include some interesting, and some troubling, insights. Reading these, I want to post some initial thoughts:

1. A commentator noted: "I’m very excited about the Italian Vogue issue, but I also think we need to remember this isn’t the first time an all black issue has appeared on the news stands. An 'all black issue' is not necessarily an innovation or groundbreaking within the context of fashion publishing, so much as it is a rarity. After all most magazines out there are typically 'all-white' issues, while a magazine like Essence has always been 'all-black,' but we don’t make a fuss about those."

I think that’s critically important here. Vogue is a gatekeeper in the industry, so it’s important that its publication of an all-black issue be located in just this power to arbitrate what counts as fashionable, as beautiful. For all these reasons it’s also important to ask about what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “the traffic in criteria:” By what criteria does Vogue’s publication of this issue count as “historic” or “groundbreaking”? What does it mean that black aesthetic and commercial practices, such as the rise of magazines like Essence or Jet and their critical importance to the cultivation of black models in the 1950s, are corralled under a different set of criteria?

2. In an e-mail from stylist Edward Enniful on the Steven Meisel shoot with Naomi Campbell, he wrote: "We laughed, ribbed each other, and talked about the old days, but most of all we created a story that reflected black dreams and aspirations. There was no hip-hop gangsterism, no ghetto fabulousness, no bling-bling clichés." Without choosing one sort of fabulousness over another, I think it’s fascinating how contemporary black expressive subcultures –which, let’s face it, have also become global commodities and art forms on a massive scale-- are somehow not located as a site for “black dreams and aspirations” in this statement.

This rhetorical maneuver seems to be happening on two levels. The first implies that hip-hop is either a site for only inappropriate black dreams and aspirations, or that the dreams and aspirations so often expressed through hip-hop are dead ends. The second positions "hip-hop gangsterism, ghetto fabulousness, and bling-bling clichés" in opposition to a presumably more universal standard of glamour, which is imagined to be clearly, discernibly, the proper location of black dreams, et cetera. (And also, by the way, reduces hip-hop to a single dimension.) This standard, however, has never been all that universal– as evidenced by the heralding of this issue as historic, not because it’s the first ever all-black issue of a fashion magazine, but because it’s the first ever all-black issue of Vogue.

What interests me about these qualities and values we bandy about –style, fashion, glamour, beauty, sophistication, excellence —is their histories. There’s a reason why ghetto fabulousness names both a particular moment for certain (not all) black aesthetic practices and a particular site for their emergence. I think it’s important to acknowledge that in doing so, ghetto fabulousness can manifest a complex and complicitous critique of the hierarchies of differential value (aesthetic and socioeconomic) attached to certain bodies, clothes, accessories, et cetera. These hierarchies are deeply embedded in political, economic, and geographic conditions (deindustrialization, urban underdevelopment, white flight, zoning laws, redlining) and racist discourses (blackness as particular rather than universal, blackness as criminal rather than aspirational). The negative discourse about ghetto fabulousness as a sort of false consciousness, a delusion of superficial glamour, a distinct lack of rational economic or "educated" aesthetic sensibilities, a pretense of living large by black and poor persons who are living beyond their means (as if most Americans aren’t doing so!), is a direct descendant of the Reagan era’s stereotype of the welfare queen collecting checks and cruising in her Cadillac. As such, it bears recognizing that all the judgments of taste, "rational" or "irrational" decision-making, and beauty invoked in negative uses of the term ghetto fabulous are deeply ideological and contentious.

This is not an argument that all images of black aesthetics have to be located in hip-hop or urban spaces (which would be totally problematic because African diasporic aesthetics vary so widely), but an argument for being thoughtful about the uneven distribution of what counts as beautiful --and what is defined as ugly in counterpoint-- and why.

3. I’m excited to see Toccara from America’s Next Top Model in the issue! She was done wrong by the show.