RACE IN FASHION; DOES REPRESENTATION REALLY MATTER?
by Nadya Sualang
February 9th 2017
op-ed

Fashion is taking the world by storm. Almost everyone uses fashion as a way to express themselves or their culture; after all, even ancient traditional dances and folklore often uses costumes to depict how a story’s character should be perceived. Today, access to social media is easily obtained, and we see fashion ads practically everywhere. Pretty soon, the fashion models and whoever the fashion industry puts on those billboards, posters, videos or Instagram posts become society’s new beauty standards; one that people strive to be, and one that people associate with beauty. 

This is, in a way, a one-sided process; it is who they put as the face of the brand versus the diverse people in society that sees it. In this time of civilization, diversity, particularly racial diversity, sounds like a quality that people should appreciate, and racial tolerance sounds like a quality that most people would have, but it might do us all good if we think again. 

There are people living under oppression or prejudices everyday because of the color of their skin. #AllLivesmatter is one example where ignorant people try to justify unjust treatments to the black community, where #BlackLivesMatter is a popular and necessary movement against black prejudices. Yes, even after slavery. Yes, even after the wars. And yes, even after Barrack Obama. The ‘All Lives Matter’ movement is as effective as saying ‘All Words Matter’ as a response to ‘No Means No’; a movement against rape, as in it is not effective at all. 

The population of the world has gone through so much, both of the World Wars, recessions, the holocaust, and genocides. Moreover, since Donald Trump is now the POTUS, media organizations everywhere have made visible efforts to remind the people of the world that we are all equal, we are all human, no matter what member of religion, what sexual orientation or what race we are. Companies like Buzzfeed regularly features diverse staffs or personalities in their videos, and Hollywood films now also frequently tell the stories of diverse persons through the movies. When the 2015 Oscars nominees were announced and revealed to be almost all white, people spoke out their opinions and dislikes easily on social media, and personalities like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon made comments about that as well. Diversity, in this case, brought people together in protest of the lack thereof. 

Yet the fashion industry seems to be taking baby steps in endorsing the tolerance for diversity. Branding, of course, is everything for fashion houses; after all, they’ve built an empire based on image and look, and they seriously are not about to ruin that same look that they have worked so hard for by casting a black/fat/Jewish/transgender/other-beauty-standards-non-conformist person as the face of the brand, or even walk in their fashion show. 

While there are brands that are taking action in promoting diverse beauty, there are also established brands that don’t seem to be following the footsteps. Vetements’ Demna Gvasalia stated in an interview, “I would never compromise the credibility of a collection, for instance, to cater to what someone might think regarding our politics, or to send an insincere, first-degree message about something people expect for the sake of correctness,” the designer said when asked about his all-white models line-up at Vetements’ F/W 2016 show. 

While some of you reading might think stances on artistic integrity like Gvasalia's is admirable and new, it is also treading dangerous grounds. Unless the message of the collection is to express white supremacy of fashion, the use of only one race and refusal to cast other races is frankly unrealistic. The customers are diverse, and so the brand should also be. People all over the world migrated and married and have mixed-race children that are now consumers of the fashion industry. As the world now feeds on fashion diligently, the danger is not how consumers seem to gravitate towards a specific –and often unrealistic—type of beauty standards; it is that the designer is doing so. Now more so than ever, we are still eagerly waiting for the fashion industry to fight against divides, and upon its spectacular arrival sometime in the near future, we will embrace it with open arms.