In Fashion, Blacks Need Not Apply, These Days

A sad story in the NYTimes, about the current whitenicity of runway models:

[from Runways Fade To White by Guy Trebay]

[…]

“Years ago, runways were almost dominated by black girls,” said J. Alexander, a judge on “America’s Next Top Model,” referring to the gorgeous mosaic runway shows staged by Hubert de Givenchy or Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s. “Now some people are not interested in the vision of the black girl unless they’re doing a jungle theme and they can put her in a grass skirt and diamonds and hand her a spear.”

And some people, said Diane Von Furstenberg, the designer and president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, “just don’t think about it at all.” Ms. Von Furstenberg herself has always employed models of all ethnicities on her runways. (This September, she hired seven black women, more perhaps than any single label except Baby Phat and Heatherette.) Yet she is increasingly the exception to an unspoken industry rule.

“I always want to do that,” she said, referring to the casting of women of color. “I can make a difference. We all can. But so much is about education and to talk about this is an important beginning.”

But isn’t it strange, she was asked, that she would have to invoke the rhetoric of racial inclusiveness at a time when Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in media, and Barack Obama is running for president?

“Why did we go backward?” Ms. Von Furstenberg asked.

Agents blame designers for the current state of affairs. Designers insist agents send them nothing but skinny blondes. Magazine editors bemoan the lack of black women with the ineffable attributes necessary to put across the looks of a given season.

The current taste in models is for blank-featured “androids,” whose looks don’t offer much competition to the clothes, pointed out James Scully, a seasoned agent who made his mark casting the richly diverse Gucci shows in the heyday of Tom Ford. In today’s climate, it is far more difficult to promote a black woman than her white counterpart.

My take is that this is all part of the new Gilded Age, the excesses in the glitzy world of the fabulously wealthy, who is a time of trouble and uncertainty want to filter out anything different or that smacks of social upheaval. Those are the people that make the world of fashion possible, not the middle-class and working class moms at home that are watching Oprah.

Oh, and I hate the use of the term ‘ethnic’ to denote ‘non-white’: it’s a cover-up term.