In March, Dior made headlines for choosing Rihanna as the face of their new campaign. According to Rihanna, “It is such a big deal for me, for my culture, for a lot of young girls of any colour”. I guess it is. She is the first black spokesperson for Dior, ever.
But Rihanna’s appointment is not because she is black. She is a pop star and sex symbol whose face and body are already admired all over the world. She has worked for Armani. She has been graced with CFDA’s muchcoveted Fashion Icon Award. Even Anna Wintour has admired her “incredible style”. So, of course I am delighted that Dior have managed to see past her skin colour, but this hardly means that they have thrown open their doors to non-white ideals of beauty.
Rihanna is the exception, not the rule. Vogue UK has not featured a non-white woman on a solo cover for 12 years, and that’s despite Cara Delevingne being featured twice. As for the argument that there are not enough non-white models, that’s “BS” according to Jourdan Dunn. If designers want more non-white models in a selection, they only have to ask. Yet when it came to the 2015 Spring catwalk, 79 per cent of models were white. 79 per cent white, and 21 per cent everything else.
As Olivier Rousteing, director at Balmain, said a few months ago, “What the fuck, you put just one black girl in to make sure you’ve ticked a box? Like, do you go to London, to Paris, to New York? I think you see as many black and Asian people there as white people. Fashion wants to be modern and reflect the street and talk to people but at the end of the day they just talk to themselves.”
The industry keeps sending the message that Caucasian features are the norm, and everything else a deviation. It is a message received across popular culture. When Kendrick Lamar states in his new single, ‘The Blacker The Berry’, “My hair is nappy, my dick is big, my nose is round and wide / You hate me, don’t you? / You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture,” it is as if he is daring the world to look at him as a black man and tell him that it likes him.
But it can’t do it, not as far as Lamar is concerned. And not in fashion. Let’s face it, if River Island wants black mannequins, they produce Caucasian models in black, not mannequins with flat noses or afro wigs.
The industry needs to construct new beauty ideals. To become truly multicultural, rather than appropriating or attempting to fit black models into white fashion, we have to stop categorising women in such limiting terms.
In the words of Marlene Dumas,
‘It’s not the babydolls I want
nor the Amazons. It’s everything
mixed together to form
a true bastard race.’
Now that would be a catwalk.
