“Go East!” US Vogue Sept 2011
US Vogue “explores China” in their newest issue. Now, I do not want to put too fine a point on this but this editorial is terribly racist. I am going to talk about reasons one by one, just to help me keep them straight!
1) Chinese people are not a convient backdrop for a white model. Vogue has done this before but in previous issues it was Natalia Vodianova in Russia or Joan Smalls in Puerto Rico. It was a model set against the backdrop of her own community/country. So when the people and culture became a literal backdrop to the clothes, it wasn’t quite so…awful. But this! This is a white American model using Chinese people and culture as a backdrop to sell Western designed clothes. It smack of equal parts colonialism and appropriativeness.
1a) Photographing a white model towering over identically dressed Chinese garment workers is just gross.
2) I do not understand why, if Vogue wanted to do this story, they did not hire a Chinese national as the model. There are not a lot of Chinese models in high fashion, but there are a handful. And I certainly believe that Liu Wen is talented enough, and famous enough, to carry this editorial.
3) I am especially disturbed by the way that Vogue “exoticized” the model’s features. This is a clear example of “having your cake and eating it too”. You hire a white model but then through hair (a short black wig) and makeup and lighting that change the appearance of her eyes and cheekbones, you transform an “all-American girl” into a model who can be read as “Asian but not too Asian”. I simply don’t understand this make-up choice in any way that is not racist.
A picture of the featured model, for comparison’s sake.
If you were maybe planning to buy this issue, I urge you not to. This kind of racism underlying the decisions that went into a shoot like this should not be rewarded with your money. The presentation of this editorial, from the staging to the make-up uses tropes of colonialism, the white beauty standard and appropriation to make its points.
