Are there too little coloured women in magazines or too many white women?

This post is part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival

The fashion industry often is criticized for not using enough coloured models. This lack of coloured models in the high-end fashion industry is merely a reflection of the racism in our society. And a reflection of how the fashion world is merely interested in capturing the time spirit and that it does not have any vision of their own on how the future will or should be.

However, I feel like black people are in a better way presented than white women in fashion magazines, because ...

Only smart and eloquent black models are featured

At first, one of the reasons the fashion industry does not like using black models is because black people are associated with poverty, violence and hip hop. Luxury brands and fashion magazines don’t want to become associated with these things in any kind of way.

So when a fashion magazine does feature a coloured model for a major fashion spread, usually the fashion spread is accompanied with an interview of the black model to explain that she do is rich, not violent and not into dancing like a **. 

Often the articles are written in such a manner that it looks like these black models are one of the few signs of intelligent life in the fashion industry. 

Only succesfull and responsible black women are used as a spokesperson

(Racist) people see black people as poor, lazy, aggressive and stupid. If a black person does something that only slightly does not confirm to the stereotype, (racist) people won’t notice it. Only when a black person does something completely the opposite of what (s)he would be expected to do according to their stereotype, (racist) people will see that black person as not poor, aggressive or stupid. 

So if a brand chooses for a black woman to represent their brand, they usually choose for a famous successful hardworking woman that would also be a perfect daughter-in-law, because otherwise she’ll be assumed to be poor, lazy and aggressive. White women that are chosen as spokespeople don’t have to be that much. Just being the daughter or girlfriend of someone famous or rich is already more than enough.

So for a black woman to be featured in a magazine they need to be intelligent, responsible, eloquent, successful, hardworking and beautiful too. A white woman just needs to be 15 and beautiful or the daughter/girlfriend of someone famous or rich.

This makes black women feel that you need to be intelligent, responsible, eloquent and beautiful to get what you want or you would need to be white, while it makes white woman feel that only beauty matters and that beauty can give you anything you want, unless you're the daughter/girlfriend of someone famous or rich. In that case you don't need to be or do anything at all.

Note: what does affect coloured people’s self image is how these coloured people that do are featured often have ‘a white face’ with another skin: black women with a more narrow nose and Asians with almond shaped eyes. What also affects them in a negative way is how these models often are more fair-skinned than other people from their race.


Note 2: Is the tide turning? Walter Van Beirendock used exclusively black models for his Autumn/Winter 2011 fashion show. He's not the most known fashion designer and might not be the first one to do is, but he do is  the head of the fashion department of the Royal Antwerp Academy of Arts, an academy that is educating the latest generation of fashion designers.  

The circle of fashion

When they draw a collection, they envision their clothes on a drawing of a woman with a head to body ratio of 1:8 instead of the normal or human  1:7. So first they think about how it would look like on an unrealistically tall and skinny 'woman', before they think about how it would look like on real women.


When the clothes are ready, they put them on extremely tall and skinny women that approach the looks of the elongated women on paper. When the models run down the runway, editors and potential buyers will tend to like the clothes that make these models look fatter.
Why? Because the models that were chosen are far too skinny to be healthy and unhealthy isn’t pretty. Clothes that make these women look fatter; make these extremely tall and too skinny women look healthier and thus prettier. 


While fashion magazines used to only be able to use those skinny models that don’t look unhealthy, thanks to photoshop these days their skinny-fever is no longer tempered by the limited availability of skinny models that don’t look sick. Fashion magazines nowadays can pick the very skinniest models and use photoshop to make them look healthy.
All fashion brands will send only the smallest sample sizes to fashion magazines, to make sure that their clothes can only be used to dress the skinniest women in the magazines. When the skinniest model wears their clothes, people tend to conclude these clothes make you more slim because thanks to photoshop you can't see anymore that she looks skinny in these clothes because she is far too skinny.


When the new season arrives, fashion designers will pat themselves on the back because the mainstreet store chains are totally copying their clothes.


But strangely though, their own clothes don't sell.


Why? Because they never thought on how it would look like on most women. Only early teens look good in these kinds of clothes, but they don’t have the budget to buy such expensive clothes, so they buy the cheaper imitations of these clothes in the mainstreet stores.


Now the fasion crowd will get annoyed on how people these days don’t appreciate good craftsmanship anymore and on how shamelessly mainstreet stores steal other people’s ideas and make profit out of it.