Hadley Freeman on race issues in fashion world
The modelling business has always been dominated by Caucasian faces but not for a long time has the situation been so extreme. This season’s catwalks have been whiter than ever. “It’s true - it has been particularly bad,” says Michael Roberts, fashion director of Vanity Fair. “There seem to be only three or four models [from] ethnic minority [backgrounds] around at the moment. The fashion industry, for all its airs of sophistication, has very insular ideas of beauty.
It’s supposed to be a global industry but this is not being reflected on the runway.” I saw two black models and two Asian models during the whole of Milan fashion week - compared with hundreds of white ones. They were the same four I saw in New York. And in Paris it has been even worse. It is absolutely the norm for a show to be entirely Caucasian.
If a black or Asian model is used it is either in a streetwear show, such as Babyphat in New York, or as a form of what the London-based Nigerian designer Duro Olowu calls “tokenism - you know, just the one black girl, and she’s usually wearing the crazy printed dress”. A good example of this was at the Dior show in Paris this week when the Asian model was assigned the Chinese-style dress. “Then these designers claim they get their ideas from the street or from Africa! It’s crazy!” says Olowu.
“This is just not reflective of our time.” According to targetmarketnews.com black women alone spend 10bn on fashion every year, and that isn’t even accounting for the increasingly high-spending Asian markets.