Why the fashion industry desperately needs some diversity at mixed media watch

Why the fashion industry desperately needs some diversity

CVK
kimora lee simmons It’s hard to tell from this blog, but believe it or not, I do have interests other than race. ;)

One of those interests happens to be fashion. That’s right, scoff all you want, but I love my Vogue and my Bazaar (sorry, Johnny) and my Lucky and my FashionTribes.com and my Style.com.

Usually the world of fashion is an escape from the race stuff but alas, today the worlds have collided.

I just read this story in The New York Times Magazine titled She’s Like A Rainbow, about the ways in which the cosmetics industry is finally catering to women of color:

In 1900, one in eight Americans was of a race other than Caucasian; in 2000, that ratio is one in four, with significant growth in the Hispanic and Asian populations. The industry is responding with lighter, reflective makeup that is more wearable for everyone — and beauty icons who embody the new mix.

Fair enough. But then it gets bad (bold is mine):

And who better than Kimora Lee Simmons, a flamboyant ex-model with the proud carriage of a Masai warrior and the flirtatious charm of a geisha?

Um… Simmons wasn’t discovered in a remote Kenyan village or an ancient area of Kyoto. She’s from St. Louis, Missouri, for Christ’s sake, that’s about as all-American as you can get. And yet even she has to get the perpetual foreigner/exotic freak of nature treatment.

miu miu It reminds me of an article in Womens Wear Daily on June 23rd about Miu Miu’s new ad campaign. The article is no longer up for free viewing, but this is what it said (again, bold is mine):

Meanwhile, Prada has tapped three Asian celebrities for the Miu Miu fall ad campaign —women the company describes as “strong” and “warrior dolls, who simultaneously represent a futuristic vision mixed with the depth and wisdom of ancient custom and culture.” Chinese actress and singer Zhou Xun, Chinese actress Dong Jie and Japanese model Lina Ohta were photographed by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin at the Lapérouse restaurant in Paris, where Miuccia Prada staged her fall show.

Why can’t women of color just be regular human beings? Why do we have to represent warriors or geishas or ancient wisdom?

more after the jump…

It depresses me to no end that non-white women are constantly exoticized and dehumanized and tokenized in this manner.

Of course, a lot of that has to do with the lack of diversity within the fashion industry. It’s still a white, white, white world. Yes, the last few years have seen a surge of Asian design talent (Derek Lam, doo.ri, Peter Som) and there are a handful of African-Americans who have cemented their positions on the scene (Patrick Robinson, Tracey Reese). But they’re the exception to the rule. And don’t get me started on the lack of diversity within the magazine industry. For more on that, click here.

People often think that hiring a diverse staff is about bowing to the altar of “political correctness.” But there’s a practical side to it — it can help you avoid looking spectacularly stupid.

For example, if the copy editor who reviewed that New York Times Magazine article had been at all attuned to racial issues, he/she might have brought up the fact that some might find it a bit um, racist, to compare Kimora Lee Simmons to a member of an indigenous African tribe that performs female circumcision, simply because she’s of part African-American descent.

Another example. You’ve probably heard by now about the massive boycott led by Jay-Z against Louis Roederer Cristal after a spokesperson from the company was quoted in The Economist as saying, “We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”

If Louis Roederer’s management had been more attuned to the massive influence that hip hop holds over America’s consumers, they might have realized how idiotic a statement like that was. According to this blog from ad agency Fallon:

While it is difficult to assess the hip-hop influence on Louis Roederer’s bottomline, consider that in a 2004 article the makers of Courvoisier were said to have experienced a 30% spike in sales following the first references of the liquor. It was “the largest increase the 300-year-old brand had experienced since Napoleon III named it the “official supplier to the Imperial Court.”

Claire Coates, a spokeswoman for the Cognac National Interprofessional Bureau, says the hip-hop influence helped American sales reach more than 40 million bottles last year, worth $1 billion. Young blacks accounted for 75 percent of those sales.

A final example. If Marie Claire’s editorial staff was a little more conscious, they might realize how asinine it is to talk about multiculturalism by running an article like “What’s In Your Purse?” — asking 5 women who live in different countries around the world to say what’s in their handbag. And of course, the Brazilian woman just happens to carry around an extra thong or two. (I’m paraphrasing, but this is a real article that I read in the magazine sometime last year.)

If the fashion industry were a little more diverse, it might realize that Asian and black and Latina women are actual human beings who also buy clothes. We’re not just jungle savages or coy geishas or sultry nymphomaniacs you can use as props in your ads.

Trackbacks & Pings

Almost Girl » Blog Archive » Race, Class and Fashion: Or I Am Going To Get In So Much Trouble on 11 Jul 2006 at 4:42 pm

[…] Sigh………………I recently got an email from fellow blogger and fan of Almost Girl Carmen Van Kerckhove who blogs at Mixed Media Watch about race issues and diversity about a piece in the NYTS called She’s Like a Rainbow on racism in fashion called Why Fashion Desperately Needs Some Diversity […]
Mixed Media Watch - tracking media representations of mixed people on 12 Jul 2006 at 5:46 am

[…] I blogged on Friday about the ridiculous ways in which the fashion industry exoticizes and thereby dehumanizes women of color (see original post here), citing as examples a New York Times fashion writer who compared Kimora Lee Simmons to Masai warrior and geisha, and the way a Prada spokesperson described the all-Asian cast in the new Miu Miu campaign as “warrior dolls.” […]
real men are not » Blog Archive » 1-and-2-and-1-and-2 and heel-toe, heel-toe: i’m a vitriol spewin’ angry race junkie! on 12 Jul 2006 at 7:37 am

[…] I was disheartened to read a post on Almost Girl who responded to a post over at Mixed Media Watch written by Carmen. Carmen’s post is about racism in the fashion business and it’s a great read that gathers and comments on a lot of different aspects/bits/news-pieces of the fashion biz as of late. When Kimora Lee-Simmons is referred to as a “Masai warrior,” I don’t know how you can sit there and tell me that that’s not fucked up. It’s also important to note that despite Carmen’s in-depth post that talks about an array of race/skin color issues in fashion that are not all one-and-the-same, Almost Girl’s over-arching umbrella response is basically this: […]
Boas Blog » Blog Archive » Kimora Lee Simmons, Maasai Warrior on 14 Jul 2006 at 2:00 pm

[…] “Um… Simmons wasn’t discovered in a remote Kenyan village or an ancient area of Kyoto”, writes Van Kerkhove, “She’s from St. Louis, Missouri, for Christ’s sake”. Van Kerkhove ends by writing “If the fashion industry were a little more diverse, it might realize that Asian and black and Latina women are actual human beings who also buy clothes. We’re not just jungle savages or coy geishas or sultry nymphomaniacs you can use as props in your ads.” […]
Mixed Media Watch - tracking media representations of mixed people on 17 Jul 2006 at 10:30 am

[…] RANT The coded ways people talk about race without appearing to talk about race is the subject of Carmen’s rant today. For more on this topic, check out Ally Work’s post with excerpts from Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel. To see the correspondence that sparked this rant, see here, here, here and here. […]
ATR 32 - July 17, 2006 - Voicemail 206-203-3983 - addictedtorace@gmail.com at Addicted to Race on 05 Aug 2006 at 11:08 am

[…] RANT The coded ways people talk about race without appearing to talk about race is the subject of Carmen’s rant today. For more on this topic, check out Ally Work’s post with excerpts from Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel. To see the correspondence that sparked this rant, see here, here, here and here. […]
August 2006 New Demographic Newsletter at New Demographic - an anti-racism training company on 24 Sep 2006 at 5:32 pm

[…] Carmen comments on an article about the cosmetic industry and it spins into an interesting debate about the cross-section of race and fashion. […]

Comments

brad wrote:

Carmen,

Are you seriously expecting people to use their brains? Isn’t thinking that because someone has more melanin or different shaped eyes or nose, etc. that person should be treated with as much respect as anyone else just a bit too radical in thinking? Really, isn’t not thinking in racial/racist cliches just more work than we should expect from the Times? I thought all Asian-American women love being compared on a daily basis to geishas (high class prostitutes!) or China dolls (cute, truly passive and unthinking objects). Just because someone was born and raised in the U.S. and is a multimillionare fashion executive, should someone like Kimora Lee Simmons expect an ounce of respect? Silly little Asian-Negress that she is, the answer must be NO!

GRRRRRRR!!!!

And speaking of stupid and misogynistic: Busta Rhyme has a new song called “I Love My Bitch.” What???? http://xxlmag.com/online/?p=790 scroll down and you can find the song.

Posted 07 Jul 2006 at 6:10 pm ¶
Ann wrote:

It all revolves around the concept of “The Other”.

The other is some freakish, abnormal, fiendish, subhuman, “other than white” monstrosity.

When spoken of in a figurative text, it is always, “I don’t see color. People are all the same, be they black, white, brown, green or purple.”

Duh?

The last time I looked, there were no such things as “green” or “purple” people. Anyone uttering such a comment, is already saying that since you are not “white’ you already exists outside the norm of what is “right”, what is acceptable; what is “real”: white people.

In order to have the norm/normal of whiteness to be the standard of all that is right with the world, there must always be the Other, especially if the Other is a non-white female.

Ms. White Lady on her pedestal has been shoved down people’s throats as the “epitome of beauty”, as long as the white man has been raping, impregnating and abandoning black women (and other women of color) for more that 350 years; Ms. White Lady (and do you ever notice that white women are always “ladies” and black women are not?) is always considered “pure as the driven snow” (ever hear anyone say “Pure black”? NO! With Massa raping black women and girls during slavery and raping black women and girls during Jim Crow/segregation all the way up to the 1970s, there is no such thing as a pure black person in America.); with white people fetishizing every black, brown, red and yellow race on the planet as less than human because they don’t happen to be white women, any one not measuring up to Massa’s idea of beauty can just forget it and be considered as less than beautiful, less than desirable, less than human.

Or so the white world thinks.

White people have never really had much respect for the differences that many POC in this world come in. White people have never accepted, and from the looks of things, will never accept the fact that beauty does not reside in only one race. Beauty is in all races.

And the real beauty of a person is in how they look at, treat and perceive a person. A “real human”, not a “white” human (or any other “human”), a real human knows that a black, brown, red or yellow woman is just as beautiful as a white woman. That is what a real person recognizes.

A “fake” imitation human, would not know beauty if it came up in front of him and started strangling him. (I say “him” beause it is mainly men, and some women, but mainly men who have set this vicious hatefulness into motion by denying the beauty and humanity of women of color for so many centuries.)

And because of the devaluation of black women, starting with white men telling lies on their brutal treatment of black women during slavery, the whole world has come to believe the lie that no black woman can possibly be considered beautiful, much less desirable to any man on earth. (Nevermind that many of all those black girls raped by white men during slavery were virgins; nevermind that many of those black women raped by white men during Jim Crow segregation, single or married, were either virgins or celibates.)

So, after having done an excellent job in brainwashing the rest of the world (including some black men) into believing that white women, and white women alone, are the only women who can be beautiful, the white man and his media images have created this sick, twisted garbage that no woman can be beautiful unless she is “light, bright, and damn near white.”

But, there is some consolation in all of this.

White/European people represent a small portion of the world’s population.

Many of them are realizing that marginalizing more than three-fourths of the world’s population is starting to go the way of the dinosaur. Well, some white people are recognizing this.

And many white people are realizing: “Hey, we are just a tiny, small fraction of the world’s population. Whatsay, we all get our act together and stop this “only white can be right and beautiful s++t? Whatsay we cut this ignorant, fighting a losing battle BS out?”

Yeah, right. On a cold day in Hell.

And it is high time white people stopped bamboozaling themselves with the lie that anything other than white is less than.

There is nothing inherently wrong, externally, morally, culturally or geographically with the women of the world who happen not to have been born white.

They are just a nicer shade of beauty that certain parts of the world (well, those whites who are guilty of it), still don’t have the brains, the guts, or the balls to come right out and acknowledge.

Beauty comes in all colors.

It’s high time certain people out there in the world stopped lying to themselves that it can only come in one color.

Posted 07 Jul 2006 at 6:41 pm ¶
mtevc wrote:

it is quite annoying…especially when people start to ask, where are you from…since i don’t speak street, or am too light-skinned or not quite what they expect (profile wise)…and then i ultimately realize that they assume i am from another country??? i always wonder where that jump comes from, but white folk can be funny sometimes (or the same questions can be annoying when i am tired)…i usually answer east coast! i love it when my best friend gets the same question when we are out (she’s first generation indian, and her parents are from hyderabad, india)…and i usually butt into the conversation and answer for her…she’s real exotic man, straight from baltimore

Posted 07 Jul 2006 at 11:17 pm ¶
mtevc wrote:

forgot to say, plezzzzzz Lord, anyone but Kimora…can we all say a simultaneous “crass”

Posted 07 Jul 2006 at 11:22 pm ¶
mtevc wrote:

by the way, not to defend the folks who make cristal, but being a reporter and editor myself, the most racist thing about the whole interview was the reporter…the leading racist questions he asked were more insulting to me…not defending the spokesperson from Louis Roederer Cristal…but his comment was more of a response, and yes, his comments were loaded and racist, but you need to read it in the context of the questions from the reporter…

Posted 07 Jul 2006 at 11:34 pm ¶
Gandalph Mantooth wrote:

The catch 22 of being a critic of color. You want to write about some set of things, however you find that things of importance to minority groups are not being covered. So you start to cover them, and you become “the black writer.” And you do a lot of hip hop.

What is most messed up abt the Cristal/Courvoisier thing is the stat: 75% of their new customers are young and black. Across from every church there’s a liquor store . . . .

Posted 08 Jul 2006 at 4:57 am ¶
Stephanie B. wrote:

To Ann,

This is well put! I second that! Yeah, as long as white supremacy exist, there’s always a racial/psychic need by white men and women to put white women on the pedastal and proceed to tell lies, big lies about women of color not being beautiful. What they are afraid is that there’s beauty other than white and that white men are attracted to various women of color. Powerful white men and white women are so threatened by that, so they put in place the nordic white women on the pedastal.

When women of color began invading once-white territories, the ruling class white women were threatened and used their psudo-feminism to claim victimhood and to exclude women of color because they are insecure and that white men calm them down by putting them on the pedastal while da**ing women of color.

What do you think?

Stephanie B.

Posted 08 Jul 2006 at 11:21 am ¶
the joy princess wrote:

Amen, Ann!!!

I’m all over the map on this one, but, man, the stories I could tell about white women at the various women’s magazines I once worked for and their confusion about women of color.

Many really are clueless and exoticize us (well, not so much “monoracial” black women, LOL. They tend to think we are the sassy stereotype.) but they love to play up Latinas and everyone else with all the same stereotypical words like spicy and exotic and foreign and global– and they think they should be patted on the back because they are diverse!!!!!!

Of especial confusion: “bi-racial” African-American and Asian-American folks. Someone actually said to me: Wait, how can that be? when we were looking at a model’s portfolio.

I did not answer that. I simply stepped back from their cubicle and walked away.

I actually had an editor in chief say we had to be careful not to put too many women of color models in the magazine (there were 3 in this particular issue) because we couldn’t risk alienating the magazine’s white women readers!!!!!

WTF!!!

They once tried to describe Asian girls has having “Asian skin.” I had to have a little chitchat with the one Korean woman on staff. We had a good laugh.

They once started to describe Beyonce as “dark.” LOL I nipped that in the bud and their use of that word. White women do not need to start categorizing black women’s skin tones. I’ll let Essence hold that down (I heard they once had a long heated discussion in a staff meeting when they put a particularly lighter-skinned woman on the cover, lol).

I love magazines and fashion too, don’t get me wrong, but I also recognize that nothing’s going to change in either industry because they don’t have to.

There’s no mandate, no real interest or concern. They can go on successfully practicing white supremacy while exoticizing/tokenizing women of color as they please. What a deal!

Posted 08 Jul 2006 at 8:39 pm ¶
Merq wrote:

thumbs way up, joy princess.

Posted 09 Jul 2006 at 12:41 am ¶
Susanna wrote:

Paradise has to be somewhere. I think that’s the reason why white people insist that anyone who’s not their kind must be utterly different, and they’re the ones to say how. It reminds me of some men insisting that every woman with good looks and no university degree or nobility title must represent “nature”. What would white people dream of, if other people were just people wanting to live a normal life, instead of thriving for “romance and adventure”??
Fashion is a great deal about setting oneself in scene, about pretending to be someone who does not have to bother about daily necessities and is free to spend his or her time transforming the world into a better place.
While white people are free in their choice about the roles they want to represent, people of color are not. It is always white people making up our roles, and these are always about sensuality and never about words. Wanting to resist this game by arguing, that is by words, must result in a failure because they are the only subgroup of mankind who manage to close their ears. Because, listening might mean they had to wake up from their dreams. And what living hell would they find themselves in then?

Posted 09 Jul 2006 at 8:41 am ¶
Susanna wrote:

Ann,

There’s a big difference about how white folks talk about women of color in general, and about women of color they know. Black women are ohhhh so beautiful!! As long as they won’t come too near and, God forbid, start talking. Remember all these pictures of Native Americans?
“These moves! This natural dignity! This grace!”
Objections about the looks of women of color start only when white folks want to shut us up.

Posted 09 Jul 2006 at 9:12 am ¶
Susanna wrote:

Hi, I’d appreciate it if you had the decency to erase ALL of my comments, and not only those ones who have a more serious critique of the Zeitgeist than you can bear.
I’d appreciate it very much if I would know I do not have to let myself be thrown into the same basket together with people who can handle stupid, emotional anti-Semitism, but not substantial critique about the way the Holocaust is dealt with, which has no chance yet to show in this forum.

Posted 13 Jul 2006 at 12:28 pm ¶
site admin wrote:

Susanna, the only comments I have deleted on this blog have been some ring-tone related spam over the past couple of days. It’s possible that I deleted a legit comment by mistake. If so, please feel free to re-comment. If it still doesn’t show up for any reason, please email your comments to me and I’ll post them for you. –CVK

Posted 13 Jul 2006 at 12:54 pm ¶