In the October issue of French Vogue, which is dedicated to "Supermodels," there are no black models. No Naomi Campbell, no Tyra Banks, no Iman, no Alek Wek, no Liya Kebede, no Chanel Iman. Instead, Dutch model Lara Stone appeared in a 14-page editorial in blackface.
I personally think this was done to drag away attention to the weight issue in the modeling industry.
I personally thought the pictures look nice. I thought it was high fashion. The model didn't look stereotypical even in blackface. Should it have been done maybe not.
Yet, since it was French Vogue and not American Vogue. I will give this topic a passing comment instead of a boycott call. Since I know very little about French History and Culture. Maybe they don't have the same offensive history with blackface that we have in America. If you check out the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University. You can see why American get so upset with blackface.
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Blackface is in the news recently for a couple international incidents. Harry Connick JR. was in Austrialia, judging a talent competition and one of the acts was five white doctors in blackface. He said that if he had known an act like that was going to be on the show, he would not have agreed to be on it and he said that although he knows he's in a different country, in America, blackface is extremely offensive and comes out of a tradition of oppression. Have you seen the clip? It was pretty good on his part to be able to articulate why it was so offensive on the spot (although, he did come up in New Orleans in the Jazz community, so he's probably more educated about that history than your average American).
ReplyDeleteI think that all this blackface is in response to an international community not knowing how to embrace a Black American President (although in polls he's very popular, "blackness" seems to be an anxiety generator for our European and Australian allies).
I also think that your idea of using this to distract from the weight and photoshopping controversies is a valid theory as well. After all, the French government just came out with a study indicating that France has the highest percentage of UNDERWEIGHT women in the developed world and they are trying to figure out how to get those underweight women within the normal range. So, perfect way not to have to deal with that? Controversy!