Vogue Italia editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani runs a web portal, Vogue Black, dedicated to black women and fashion, issued a famous all-black issue, and has recently put Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Jay-Z on the covers of her magazine and its counterpart, L’uomo Vogue. So Sozzani’s a little pissed that Liz Jones didn’t call her for her “Is Fashion Racist? Yes” piece in the Daily Mail last week. On her editor’s blog, as rendered by Google Translate and lightly polished by us, Sozzani writes, “Let’s step back. It is true that the models of color are a very small percentage. It is also true that those who succeed, then become famous and remain forever, whether Naomi, Iman, Pat Cleveland, or Jourdan Dunn, Liya Kebede, Tyra Banks, and many others.” Sozzani puts the origins of the problem in modeling agencies and their scouting methods, which largely target Eastern Europe and (the whiter parts of) South America: “There would be more if the agencies did more scouting in that direction.” Of course, you could also say that if more magazines used black models, agencies would scout more of them. [Vogue.it]
Alexandra Shulman, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, told Jones in that piece that the fashion industry isn’t racist “in the slightest. There have always been black players on the scene — at the moment look at the stylist Edward Enninful, make-up artist Pat McGrath and [models] Jourdan Dunn, Liya Kebede and Joan Smalls, who are at the top of the tree.” Well, for his part, Enninful says, “You know, I look around the industry, there’s still very few black people.” [HuffPo]
Protesters are calling for São Paulo fashion week, Brazil’s largest fashion week, to require designers who show there to hire at least one black model for every four white models. In 2008, São Paulo’s public prosecutor found that of the 1,128 models booked for fashion week, just 28 were black. (The prosecutor was investigating because the event receives partial public funding — meaning that millions of Brazil’s black, mixed race, and indigenous citizens were paying to support an event that only hired just 0.02% black people for its most visible positions.) After that inquiry, event organizers agreed to a voluntary 10% quota of black and indigenous models for two years. But this season, the first quota-free season, almost no models of color models were hired says Frei Davi Santos, who organized a protest of the event. “São Paulo fashion week sells the image of a Swiss Brazil where everyone is white and blue-eyed. The organisers…forget that more than half of Brazil’s population is black.” [Guardian]
Tavi Gevinson wrote her first piece for xojane.com. It’s a “What’s in my bag” piece. She writes: “For some reason I’m always expecting ‘What’s In My Bag’ to become some juicy confessional, with descriptions like, ‘My will, that body I killed, and a convenient Google Maps of where Amelia Earheart and Biggie Smalls currently reside.’ Sore disappointment follows when it’s just a lot of really pretty makeup and Prada iPhone cases.” Gevinson writes about what was in her locker by the end of the school year: jazz shoes, play-doh, a wig, and “a very questionable Ziploc bag full of some strange half-liquid/half-solid green/brown mush. I wanna say it’s from an old lunch but I don’t eat healthy stuff.” [xojane]
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