High-street brands and racial representation

[SuperLoudPoppingAction]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/16/high-street-brands-blackness-beauty-fashion-adverts

Really thoughtful article about a mother's observations of her daughter's reactions to how white models are in the high street. I like that she wrote to companies and reports the responses here - it doesn't take much to get people thinking.

Thanks for this.

Yikes at this comment And she continued: "If we search for a mixed-race or coloured girl … the models are more overtly sexy, vampish and not at all right for the brand. It's difficult and somewhat depressing, but this is the situation we are faced with.

Surely this is just projection - you know that old chestnut about women of colour being presented in a racist stereotype as being sexual/animal/base/etc.

What an appalling thing to say.

at 'coloured girl'.

Wow, those responses from 'Toast' are pretty awful, aren't they?

I can only hope it was supposed to mean 'We deal with one particular agency and only choose from what they offer us and they are the ones who can't provide a decent range of ethnicities with the qualities we are looking for." Rather than what sounds a lot like "Non white models don't have what we're looking for".

But, either way, they really need to sort themselves out - if they want to show a better range of models, I have no doubt they could find them, or encourage a model agency to find them. They just don't really want to.

Even Next girls wear, who are way better than most for having ethnic child models, still have the black girl in hot pants and stereotypical blondes in bridesmaid dresses.

That's horrible about Next. Once you start noticing this particular type of racist misogyny you quickly see how pervasive it is.

No surprise really. It's depressing as hell though.

The is a picture doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment showing the front page of Nylon magazine with the model how she is and how she was depicted. Needless to say there are several shades of difference.

Try this (not sure if it will work as I don't normally link from Twitter)

twitter.com/bitterarab/status/424402905035456512

It's so blatant. That's what I find shocking.

"Hey Photoshop people, can you lighten this coloured girlie for me, she's a bit too brown."

I have a friend who works in modelling and is mixed race. She pretty much either gets jobs because of her skin colour (exotic!) Or doesn't because of...her skin colour (too dark).