Background Color: a bang-on indictment of racialized fashion :: blog

Background Color: a bang-on indictment of racialized fashion

Our friend Dawn Babs Davenport gave us the heads up on a thoughtful, must-read article by Mimi on ThreadBared (a weblog that critiques "the politics of fashion"). The article discusses a 'racialized' photo shoot in trendy fashion rag Nylon. The Nylon photo spread seems to represent an emerging way of being "edgy" in mainstream capitalist fashion that many are catching on to, of explicitly playing up racial inequality like you just couldn't care less. This may seem like nothing new (readers of No Logo and Adbusters might remember discussion of Diesel ads from the mid-90s). "Slumming it" always seems to be recurringly fashionable. But in the case of the Nylon shoot, the indifference is carried through to the likely drafting an unwilling model (in this case, a housekeeper) and being well aware (and not giving a shit) that the worker knows they have to do it or likely lose their job. ("Hey, we can do this because we're hipsters at Nylon and you're nothing.") While we at thoughtcrime ink ponder the implications of this for our own present and future "model photography" for our shirts (we definitely don't want our highlighting of this article to be taken as saying 'look at us, aren't we so perfect or immune to critique'), here is the article on Threadbared.

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Background Color: a bang-on indictment of racialized fashion

posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008 by Rob Butz

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