Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder: Diversity in Fashion

Flick through any magazine, or flip through any reel of TV adverts, and chances are the same kind of female face will smile vapidly back at you. She’s typically blonde, but not always; pale, slim, long-legged, her face perfectly symmetrical: eyes large, nose small, cheekbones high and lips bee-stung. This is the face of Westernised ‘beauty’. The product of empire and globalisation, she is a commodity. Throughout society – in myth, art, literature and the media – this image of femininity has been preserved as the ‘ideal’. We live in a world where the rhetoric of Westernised beauty is cultural currency: today Victoria’s Secret Angels are literally worshipped as semi-divine beings and women objectified to the point of being either ‘hot’ or not.

This sort of ideology is extremely damaging. “We're losing bodies as fast as we're losing languages,” says psychotherapist Susie Orbach in the upcoming documentary The Illusionists on the Westernisation of beauty (released later this year). “Just as English has become the lingua franca of the world,” she says, “so the white, blondified, small-nosed, pert-breasted, long-legged body is coming to stand in for the great variety of human bodies that there are.” This is only too clear in the fashion industry. The Fashion Spot recently reported that white models got almost five times more covers than black models, and that many other major publications failed to picture coloured cover models in 2014. Shockingly, Jourdan Dunn who, gracing the cover of Vogue’s UK February 2015 issue, was the first black cover model to pose solo on Vogue UK in 12 years since Naomi Campbell in 2002.

Western ideals of beauty not only alienate women of colour, but also disabled and transgender women. Fashion is not an inclusive industry, and, in regards to diversity, it is not representative of society. This is just the tip of the iceberg however, and its effects are devastating, spawning a rise in eating disorders and plastic surgery procedures across the world. Sex sells they say but, in reality, its insecurity. Its common knowledge that happy people buy less; therefore, by repeatedly employing the image of idealised Western beauty, businesses can capitalise on the insecurities it generates.

Following Rick Owen’s Spring/Summer 2014 show (which was modelled by an American step team), the successes of Vinnie Harlow (a model who suffers from Vitiligo) and Andreja Pejić (a transgender model), and Carrie Hammer casting of disabled models (which are industry firsts!), it’s easy to say that fashion is making a radical change. Whilst these are all amazing choices, they are sparse compared to the sea of white, able-bodied and slim models in the media; in fact, it seems that, for the fashion industry, diversity is more like a trend that it can play with for a season or two before moving on to the next. This is not ok. Fashion is rooted in innovation and originality; it is fed by change, and it feeds larger social changes. It is also one of our most powerful tools to promote and critique, and the industry needs to step up and do just that; not half-heartedly for a season or so, or as a sensation, but as the new and improved norm.

In February of last year Lupita Nyong’o delivered a speech about beauty and diversity at the 7th annual Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon. Beautiful and heart-breaking in its entirety, one line stood out for me in particular: “beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume; it was something that I just had to be.” It is this message that fashion needs to promote: that diversity itself is beautiful.

Images: https://ericajmarshall.wordpress.com/category/advertising/, http://www.styleite.com/news/jourdan-dunn-is-the-first-black-model-to-score-a-solo-vogue-uk-cover-in-over-12-years/ and http://heidepadilla.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/carrie-hammer-fashion-show-role-models.html