Thursday, May 13, 2010

Fashion photographers like to be racist, call it "edgy"

This latest spread from Interview magazine is soooooo not OK.



The copy reads:
Let’s get lost. The hour is late, the air is thick, and the evening is charged with a steamy sensuality. What works? Tone-on-tone swimsuits, slithers of silk, and plenty of skin, as flesh meets flesh, body meets soul, and Daria gets lost in the heat of the night.
From Africa is a Country: 
You would think that if they’re going to keep using Black people as the exotic background on which white people get to project their fantasies, they’d at least be more original with it. In the heat of the night? Really? Sorry, Interview, but the joke’s on you.
From TLo:
Aren't we past this whole colonialist idea of the fetishized black person? It's fine to cast a bunch of gorgeous black models, but they're more like props or backdrops for the white girl to play with or lean up against. Plus everyone's inexplicably sweaty, like sex is gonna break out at any second. This is all deliberate button-pushing and it's tired. "Let's be controversial" in a very 1979 kind of way.
Memo to fashion: stop being effing racist.  It is not edgy.  It is not artistic.  It is shameful.

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