Showing posts tagged politics

The Impact Of Diversity On The Catwalk

Diversity in fashion isn’t just a nice ideal. It’s also of crucial importance to fashion, and its whole image-making machinery. The runway is the conduit through which the fashion industry picks its stars. Picture a giant hopper; that’s fashion week. Pour a bunch of models in. The ones that work the most, and the ones that work the best shows, have already been noticed by the top casting directors. On the runway, they’re seen by the editors of the world’s most prestigious fashion publications. Backstage, they work with some of the industry’s most talented and influential stylists. To the casual shopper, one runway model may look very much like another. But the runway is where models get noticed by the people who will have the most impact on their careers. The runway is where the path to much more visible work — like advertising campaigns for major designers, editorials in the biggest magazines, and, ultimately, if a model is very lucky, multi-year contracts with cosmetics companies — begins. If the girls who go into this hopper are mostly white, then the faces the rest of us will go on seeing in ads, magazines, and billboards will be white. And then the kind of beauty another generation of girls and boys will grow up being taught to value above all others will be white.

How Can Fashion Create A Better Relationship with Africa?

The New Yorker summarized this argument: “In other words… people of color don’t exist unless whites say they do – and, even then, they exist only as they are seen by whites.”

pantslessprogressive:

If I can give you only one reason why public transportation is awesome, it’s that you could converse for half an hour with a stranger about the soothing comedy of political memes (because talking about the weather gets boring after a while).

During our conversation this evening, we decided the only good way to understand memes is in the context of understanding how this circus functions.

(Reblogged from pantslessprogressive)
bigwangtheory: Hi. When you cast a colonial eye to Africa as ‘inspiration’ for your shitty Spring 2012 collection, it’s maybe (probably) a bad idea to have 89% of your runway (I did the math) be white ass Europeans…..just a thought. SAMO SHIT tbqh

bigwangtheory:

Hi. When you cast a colonial eye to Africa as ‘inspiration’ for your shitty Spring 2012 collection, it’s maybe (probably) a bad idea to have 89% of your runway (I did the math) be white ass Europeans…..just a thought.

SAMO SHIT tbqh

(Reblogged from darlingtonia-californica)
Unintentionally Eating the Other Fashion’s depoliticization of ethnicity and race rely on and reproduce what Nirmal Puwar calls “the amnesia of celebration.” The problem is that the violent racist abuse meted out to Asian women who have worn these items has no place in the recent donning of these items… “Do you remember when you thought we were ugly and disgusting when we wore these items?” […] That Renn is able to feel “transformed” through and by this cosmetic trick of racial drag – one she equates with other tricks like fake moles and freckles – underscores the capacity of white bodies to play with race without bearing its burdens, without having to even acknowledge the existence of these burdens. Thus, the transformation Renn experiences and achieves is conditioned by her whiteness and the privileges that accrue to her racially unmarked body. At the same time, her transformation is possible only because of her proximation and consumption of otherness. The function of Otherness – even one that is unacknowledged by her – is reduced to the servicing of white women’s transformation. […] [I]t suggests that practices of yellowfacing and blackfacing (like, redfacing and brownfacing) take modeling jobs away from nonwhite models. This logic assumes that these acts of racial drag are meant to represent an actual racial body. Let me be clear: yellowfacing is not a practice of racial passing, of a white model passing as Asian. Photographers, magazines, and designers know Asian models exist and know how to hire them. But they don’t hire them for these jobs because yellowfacing is not about tricking audiences into believing that the body in view is actually Asian. via Minh-Ha T. Pham @ Threadbared View high resolution

Unintentionally Eating the Other

Fashion’s depoliticization of ethnicity and race rely on and reproduce what Nirmal Puwar calls “the amnesia of celebration.”

The problem is that the violent racist abuse meted out to Asian women who have worn these items has no place in the recent donning of these items… “Do you remember when you thought we were ugly and disgusting when we wore these items?”

[…]
That Renn is able to feel “transformed” through and by this cosmetic trick of racial drag – one she equates with other tricks like fake moles and freckles – underscores the capacity of white bodies to play with race without bearing its burdens, without having to even acknowledge the existence of these burdens. Thus, the transformation Renn experiences and achieves is conditioned by her whiteness and the privileges that accrue to her racially unmarked body. At the same time, her transformation is possible only because of her proximation and consumption of otherness. The function of Otherness – even one that is unacknowledged by her – is reduced to the servicing of white women’s transformation.
[…]
[I]t suggests that practices of yellowfacing and blackfacing (like, redfacing and brownfacing) take modeling jobs away from nonwhite models. This logic assumes that these acts of racial drag are meant to represent an actual racial body. Let me be clear: yellowfacing is not a practice of racial passing, of a white model passing as Asian. Photographers, magazines, and designers know Asian models exist and know how to hire them. But they don’t hire them for these jobs because yellowfacing is not about tricking audiences into believing that the body in view is actually Asian.

via Minh-Ha T. Pham @ Threadbared

Women Pose Awkwardly in Public as Satire of Fashion Photography

“Poses” is a direct criticism of the absurd and artificial world of glamour and of fashion that magazines present. Specifically, the highly-distorted image of women that they transmit through models that do not represent real women and that avoid all those who are not within their restricted parameters.

Is Taping Your Eyes To Look Asian The New Blackface?

tbh i wouldn’t call it “new”

Is the Black Dandy the “Civilized” Black Man?

Throughout the piece, “dandyism” is posited as classy, refined, and aspirational, while “hip hop style” is imprecated as unrefined, coarse, and well, uncivilized. The black dandies are constantly trying to get away from the paradigm of hip-hop, but in doing so, embrace another, arguably more dominant, paradigm. As if there were any further indication needed, their largest photo shoot, “The Black Ivy” is a not-so-subtle embrace of “our kind of people.”

Furthermore, this “self-refinement” is expressed not simply as an evolution of style, but also one of growth. “I used to wear size 42 jeans. Coming from that to a tie and shirt, people perceive you in a whole different way,” says Kissi. He isn’t wrong. Those baggy pants have been quite a site of contention; in 2007, cities across the South passed anti-sagging pants ordinances. Legislators weren’t just trying to police fashion, but specifically, what they saw as an expression of a dangerous black masculinity. Atlanta Councilman C.T. Martin said such laws are a “remedy” for “a prison mentality.” Other lawmakers believed the style invoked fear in others. Ooga booga, indeed.

Yes, He Sold Fakes. They Are Supposed to Be Fake.

The items, mostly copies of luxury objects, inside the little shop in downtown Manhattan are made of thin cardboard and might not even pass muster deep in the background of a movie set.

But that did not deter the police from arresting a shop worker on counterfeiting charges for selling several items, including Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags.

There is just one problem: the items are supposed to be fake.

The store, Fook On Sing Funeral Supplies, on Mulberry Street along what is known in Chinatown as Funeral Row, sells traditional objects of mourning, mostly copies of luxury objects. The items are made of cardboard, paper and plastic, to be used at funerals as symbolic gifts for the deceased. The cardboard models are burned as part of traditional Chinese funeral practices.

[…]

Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents the neighborhood and was contacted by the store’s owners for help, said she had requested a meeting with police officials.

“You expect the police to be culturally sensitive,” Ms. Chin said. “This has been going on for hundreds of years, the Chinese burning offerings to the dead, and that’s what these kind of stores are for. It’s hard to understand how someone could mistake this for criminal activity.”

NEWSFLASH: POLICE IS DUMB AS SHIT

“
Slave does not make it ethnic. Mind you, it’s not lost in translation–the word slave, we know what it is. They might as well have called them “n***** earrings.” For somebody like Franca Sozzani, who did that whole black issue for Vogue, somebody should have said something.
iman