I heard about French Vogue painting Lara Stone black for its current issue before I saw the images. The night before, I had just watched a cringe-inducing YouTube video of a group of men performing in blackface as the J
ackson Jive on an Australian variety show. So I was curious to see the Paris Vogue article. Shortly afterwards, I saw two images from the magazine on a blog: Lara Stone painted dark brown, like me, resembling an African princess of sorts complete with a headdress. Oh-
hell-to-the-nah.
I was not impressed and grabbed my laptop to blog about it and tell you so. The next day, a co-worker showed me the complete story in the magazine. “It’s not as bad as it’s being made out to be,” he said. And as I continued to follow the stream of irate coverage that followed on television, in print and online, I began to realize that something was wrong. Yes, blackface is hugely offensive. But is this fashion spread really blackface?
“I would say no. But anything that is even suggestive of blackface, rings a bell. Does that make it offensive? That response is up to the individual reader or viewer,” says John Strausbaugh, the cultural critic and author of the book “Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture.”
“They could have painted her any color. They could have painted her green but they knew they were choosing black. But is it blackface? That’s the great enigma that is at the heart of blackface performance since the early 1820s and 1830s when you had mostly Irish, poor guys imitating black musicians,” he adds.
Only, it is now 2009. Intellectually, it would be too easy to lump the fashion spread in with that heavy, back-breaking piece of baggage that carries Al Jolson, Bert Williams and the N-word. But our notion and experience of race and racism is too subtle and complex to interpret the photos in such a superficial way. The work is clearly coming from a different place than racist mimicry. Lara Stone is also painted white in the same story (most news articles have failed to run those photos.) The American photographer, Steven Meisel, meanwhile, also shot Vogue Italia’s all-black edition. Surely, he wouldn’t be so obtuse as to alienate an entire segment of people in such a simple way. Whether or not the story is an attempt to court controversy is another matter. But it’s clear this is a case of an artistic statement gone all kinds of haywire (whether the statement works is up to interpretation). But when is it art and when is it blackface? And is art that blurs the blackface line always a horrible, racist thing?
Bethann Hardison doesn’t think so. “Presumption is an amazing thing and perception is an amazing thing,” she says. A longtime model agent, Hardison became an activist figure in fashion during the ’80s when she established the Black Girls Coalition, which eventually crusaded to convince fashion brands to hire more models of color for their ad campaigns. Two years ago, she spearheaded the movement to promote diversity in fashion that lead to the Vogue Italia black edition among other milestones.
“Blackface to me is Al Jolson. But even with that, we’re in this place where people are like, ‘Let’s not bring up Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben,’” she says. “Fashion is a creative industry. You can express things in a lot of visual ways. Paris Vogue painted her brown. They also painted her white. I’m not going to get mad at that. You have to look at the whole story and not just one or two images out of context,” she adds. The magazine also painted Indian model Lakshmi Menon dark brown and put a massive Afro on her head earlier this year to little fanfare. So which race is being painted black, clearly plays a huge factor here.
Hardison recounts how she canceled a public one-on-one panel she was planning to have with Naomi Campbell in New York this week. The two were going to talk about their experiences as black women in the fashion industry, but quickly called it off out of fear that its intention would get lost in Blackface-gate. “People would misconstrue our panel as being a reaction to that story. When really all of the misguided anger surrounding the article is just a distraction from more meaningful dialogue. We didn’t want our message to get distorted,” she says.
Rather than ranting about whether or not Paris Vogue should have painted Lara Stone black, why not examine how representations of beauty in fashion became so overwhelmingly white and narrow in the first place?
“We’re trying to promote long-term change regarding diversity,” Hardison says. Strausbaugh, meanwhile, thinks its great that people are talking, period. “We have this thing where we think, ‘If I don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.’ But it’s good to have people talking about these issues in public,” he notes.
