Projects such as this Vogue cover, though appearing to counter racist practices in fashion through celebrating the dark beauty of Black, African women, are nonetheless deeply imbricated in racist histories of imaging minoritised communities. The sad truth is that nine models on the cover of British Vogue – or on the season’s runways – do not amount to a revolution in an industry where whiteness remains the standard default of beauty. Both danger and sexuality are suspended in favour of a docility that is startling, alongside the claim of revolution that Eninnful and Fetto – and indeed, the high-fashion world as a whole – make. Black skin, or rather Black flesh, is a blank canvas on which a creative director and photographer grafted the culture’s racist unconscious. The images call to mind pictures of primitive bodies in civilised places, to riff off of Sally Price (Primitive Art in Civilized Places). One is left to ask who is imagined as the viewer who would see this as radical? Additionally, not one afro or any kind of natural hairstyle is apparent in this so-called “revolutionary” image.
#Black super model skin#
The “lighter” skinned models are sandwiched between the “darker” skinned models making bursts of “lighter” skin tones apparent as the tiered structure of the photograph has the “darkest” skinned models morphing into one black feild, with any individuality quickly disappearing. The cover image that shows all nine models together, in particular, has an interesting and troubling structure to it that is worth noting. As a result, we are greeted with a flat-blackness that lacks in distinction, even as some other shades of black manage to emerge. The statuesque nature of the models are exaggerated in post-production, in a way that renders their movements mute. In these ways, photographs that claim to celebrate Blackness call to mind Anish Kapoor’s super-saturated blackest black pigment. Colour photographs are manipulated, post-production, making skin glossy and ultra-dark. Skin tone, especially, is made dark and shiny – giving the appearance of polished wood. The cover – and all the other images used to illustrate the cover story – reproduce European colonial, fetishistic obsessions with depicting African people as inanimate statues: objects without life, mobility, movement.
The photographs accompanying her story, however, open up questions about what exactly we are being asked to celebrate.Īlthough Enninful and Fetto claim a revolution, “a major shift, a major, powerful moment,” the photographs seem to give us – unwittingly, perhaps – the same old-same old. “For an industry long criticised for its lack of diversity, as well as for perpetuating beauty standards seen through a Eurocentric lens, this change is momentous,” she writes. Spring/summer 2022 runways, she explains, have been “awash with dark-skinned models”. In the story, Fetto invites readers to celebrate what she deems a “seismic shift” in the fashion industry. The February issue, which has been available on newsstands since January 18, includes an accompanying story by contributing editor Funmi Fetto, exploring “the rise of the African model” and “spotlight the new generation”. During the past few weeks, Edward Enninful, the British-Ghanaian editor-in-chief of British Vogue, has been celebrating the new cover of his magazine, where he introduced nine “dark-skinned” models of African descent.
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