There is another race issue going on in fashion world (again). This time its featured in the March issue of Vogue Italia. The spread plays up images of lots of long fingernails, toes hanging over the edge of heels, brown babies in strollers, candy-colored towering hair styles, insane monogram bags and fast food pregnancies. And it’s high-profile models like Coco Rocha, Joan Smalls and Jessica Stam (in addition to a few fierce trannies) who are decked out in these outrageous “hood” fashion.
A lot of blogs were talking about this spread including Black Girl Long Hair, who wrote:
My problem with images like these has and always will be the same. The wise old debate as to are they laughing with us or at us? In other words, is this coming from a place of great affection for a certain culture and their specific fashion? Or is this Vogue’s magazine way of mocking Black women? Maybe it is a little bit of both as they also recently did a shoot for Vogue Italia where they had sistas with natural hair. Which is a step forward but they still seem to lack consistency in how they portray people of color overall.
Meanwhile, Vogue’s editor Franca Sozanni doesn’t know where all the negativity is coming from:
“ We wanted to make something quite extravagant. It’s more to push people to be creative and extravagant. … Because I read everything in the blogs, but honestly, we just thought it was the concept of extravagance, of creativity, even something over-the-top, something that is not usual. If you want, you don’t dress like that, you don’t put on this kind of makeup, but it’s just to make a fake, to go over-the-top, it makes you happy in a way, more alive, more colorful — sometimes fashion looks sad.”
A racist image, I really do not understand. I went through the pages so many times. Like when we did the Black Issue, everybody said that we did that on purpose because Obama was the person chosen to go to the White House, and if you just think one second, not more than one second, you can see that to make a magazine like what we did for the Black Issue, it takes six months [to do]. … People wanted to see an economical and a financial [decision], just to get more money, because we talk about Black Issue, it’s probably because the president is black. What do you answer? They don’t know what it means to work at a magazine. That’s it.”
Well we can see that this spread is mocking hood people, not black people in general. There are a lot of pics of white girls with the colorful weave & long finger nails. Around my way, black people dont look like that.
But what do you think? Is Vogue Italia portarying black women in a negative way?
I dont see the problem i actually like the photo shoot idea and style people tend to over read things a bit to much and we as black folks like to say dont make certains tuff define us
ReplyDeleteso why make this bother us.not every black person dresses like this
i seen white woman with long nails and colored hair as well…
No Franca Sozanni, you wanted to create controversy at the expense of African American woman. I hate when stuff as clear as this happens and the person who created it acts delusional as shit and has a 1 million excuses as to why its not what we think. The writings on the wall bitch.
ReplyDeleteI really get tired of people hollering that is racist or any other predjudice.
ReplyDeleteRight!! I know plenty of white girls that dress like this. Ghettoooo white girls lol.
ReplyDeleteI don’t dress like this so I’m not offended.
I think that Black people that say it’s mocking uses part of the issue because if WE don’t identify with this hot mess than no one will feel like it’s geared toward us.
How dare a single black person get upset and say they are moking us as a whole.
ReplyDeleteIM TIRED OF BLACK PEOPLE COMPLANING ABOUT "THERE IS STILL RASICM" . Its soo stupid
ReplyDeleteThis is NOT a black thing – its a hood thing and the hood is diverse.
ReplyDelete