High fashion is opulent. High fashion is South Korean street style with sports luxe.
High fashion is a Saint Laurent jacket with a silk lining and high fashion is racist. In a time where women are beginning to realize that beauty norms spoon-fed to us are unattainable and, in most cases, involve self-harm to maintain there is one bastion that remains constant. A gold light glowing as the catwalk spotlight reflects off Chanel belt buckles adorning the fash pack promoting the caloric intake of a can of coke and a pack of Marlboro golds.
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When recovering from my own eating issues my mother, knowing how much I love fashion, got me a copy of Vogue. This felt like salt to a deep cut – probably because I didn’t look like the models at all. I wasn’t as thin nor was I as tall but, most jarringly, I wasn’t white.
People explain away complaints of lack of diversity by reducing it to an issue of ‘perception’, but when it comes to high fashion the only thing to perceive are the statistics. Before Jourdan Dunn graced the cover of Vogue in 2015 there had been no black cover girls in twelve years. In fact, Harpers Bazaar and British Vogue included no solo woman of colour on its cover at all during 2014
Though the proportion of models of colour is slowly rising -with just over 30% of models on runways this season being non-white – I still find tokenism reigns over genuine diversity in the fashion industry.
(Photo Credit: www.guardian.co.uk)
Even when it comes to marketing products for ethnic minority women, labels don’t use models that are like the women that actually use their products – D&G’s hijab range is a case in point. While Yeezy’s demand got people’s backs up on twitter over its exclusion of white women, many women of colour also took to the floor to ask what multiracial meant to Kanye. In expressing their frustration they brought out another thing that diversity for diversity’s sake skates over – in Prada flats of course. Even when recruiting women of colour the fashion industry remains tokenistic by hiring models with the lightest skin and the most Eurocentric features. Ethnic minorities are often told that “light is alright” and this toxic message permeates into the already seriously prejudiced fashion industry.
Yeezy’s show did see a range of women of colour but the question remains as to why there was so much vitriol towards him for wanting to recruit women like this.
The fact that Kanye’s “ethnic minority only” criterion caused such a stir shows that there’s a long way to go for high fashion, where white and light skinned women only has been the casting call for decades. I hope, as is the case with his music, Kanye is offering us a slice of the future. A future where all shades of beauty are accepted.