Blackface, Indian Headdresses, and Now "The Untouchables": Why is Fashion So Culturally Tone-Deaf?

In November, the popular street-style photographer Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist, was wending his way through India, taking beautiful pictures of locals along the way. Most of his subjects looked considerably poorer than the usual fashionistas he captures on the chic streets of New York, London or Milan, but it was one image, of a veiled woman in sandals sweeping a Delhi street, that set off a particular furor among hundreds of his Instagram commenters in India. Not so much for the image itself, but for how Schuman captioned it: “The Untouchables.”

Many insisted that just because the woman was sweeping the street didn’t necessarily mean that she was an “Untouchable,” or a Dalit, a member of India’s highly stigmatized lowest social rung in a caste system that was officially abolished in India years ago but still defines much of the country’s socioeconomic makeup and attitudes. Schuman responded that some locals had told him that’s what the woman was, but commenters still took the shutterbug to school.

“Sure, the fact that you don’t share their culture and beliefs wouldn’t allow you to understand the sensitivity of the term,” wrote one. “So this shouldn’t be debatable on what you heard or what you term as right.” Wrote another: “The term itself is incredibly offensive.” And another: “Would you say the N-word to anyone in the U.S. just cause you knew he or she was that?”

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A growing chorus of commenters demanded that Schuman delete the caption. At first he balked, “surprised that one photo is all you see from what I’ve shot in India,” he huffed and puffed. Finally he de-captioned it, on Instagram if not on his website. (Later on, he posted publicly, “I learned something from this …and I think others did as well.”)

But beyond the mini bomb caption, many commenters questioned the wisdom of placing the image—and of others like it, of poor Indians—on a blog generally devoted to showing rich westerners in expensive clothing. “Hard to imagine,” wrote one, “but not everything in the world is about fashion, beauty and elegance…I question [this image’s] inclusion in something as light-hearted as a fashion…blog.” Wrote another: “Jesus—this is the equivalent of taking a picture of an African-American slave because you appreciate their style.”

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In fairness, though, Schuman was hardly breaking new ground in offensiveness. In fact, he was following in a long tradition of people in the fashion industry: that of packaging culturally or racially sensitive images just because they pack a visual punch.

Yves St.-Laurent at the launch of “Opium” Perfume, 1978. Photo: Getty Images

Granted, this tradition—rooted in a broader and older legacy of western artists’ woozy fascination with the exoticism of Africa, Asia or the Middle East—has sometimes produced work of extraordinary beauty and style. Think of Paul Poiret’s 1910s Orientalism, Richard Avedon’s 1960s images of the model Veruschka in Japan, commissioned by Diana Vreeland, or Yves St.-Laurent’s late 1970s chinoiserie phase, which also gave us the perfume Opium, rich with its own exotic connotations of Asian decadence.

Overall, fashion—and the world in general—is the better for looking far and yon for inspiration. Says Latoya Peterson, who writes often about the intersection of style and culture on her blog Racialicious, “This whole idea of, ‘It’s my culture so no one else can use it’—if that were true, nobody would be able to do anything. I didn’t start listening to K-pop until I had a Korean homegirl.” In other words, culture is fluid and meant to be shared.

But shared doesn’t mean plundered wholesale, or incorporated in a way that’s either insensitive or ignorant about the loaded history of various images. In those instances, the result reads as tone-deaf and stupid at very least, shockingly cruel at worst. And in the past decade, even as the planet becomes more globalized (and, one would presume, more globally conscious) than ever, some of the images and campaigns to come out of mainstream fashion have taken on Zoolander ”Derelicte” levels of outrageousness.

Pharrell Williams wearing a Native American headdress on the cover of Elle UK. Photo: Elle Magazine

Consider, in just the past few years alone: The superstar Pharrell in a Native American headdress on the cover of Elle UK this year (an image for which the “Happy” singer apologized). Various European Vogues putting white models either in “jungle” makeup or in blackface—that staple of the racist American minstrel show again (2009) and again (2013) and again (2014).

Elsewhere, Dolce & Gabbana accessorized models with earrings that look like a female slave’s head (2013). (The fact that they also put out white-woman-head earrings and explained that the black-woman earrings connoted imagery specific to their native Sicily couldn’t quite mitigate the earrings’ essential wrongness.) Rodarte sent models down the runway in aboriginal-inspired prints (2012). The white model Crystal Renn had her eyes stretched back to make her look Asian for Japanese Vogue (2011).

Model Crystal Renn in a fashion spread for Japanese Vogue, 2011.

Then, not necessarily related to race or culture but projecting a certain glibness, we’ve had German Vogue giving us homeless chic (2012) or American Vogue serving up models in couture amid the devastating aftermath of New York’s Hurricane Sandy (2013). Then, after Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, Donna Karan admirably lent support—but that didn’t detract from the oddness of her using Haitians as backdrop for lighter-skinned, product-draped models in her ads.

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Says Lisa Wade, a sociology professor at Occidental University and creator of the media-analysis blog Sociological Images, “There’s a constant pattern in fashion of putting very, very tall, slender white models in front of indigenous people in locales where pretty architecture, a market, an animal or a human being all serve exactly the same function: as backdrop to make the model look beautiful by contrast.”

She raises a tricky issue: At least since the days of Vreeland, part of the allure and aspirational quality of fashion photography has been driven by photo shoots in visually sumptuous, far-flung lands. It’s just unfortunate when, as Wade puts it, “a local person and a cheetah are treated the same.”

American Apparel advertisment for their “Afrika” line. Photo: American Apparel

And of course, because—as Miranda Priestley so acidly reminded us—high fashion trickles down to the masses, we’ve also had American Apparel’s “Afrika” line and Urban Outfitters’ Navajo prints.

“It’s brain-dead,” said one well-known longtime industry observer when I asked this person, who spoke anonymously to preserve a job at a big fashion media brand, for thoughts on these examples. "This nineteenth-century exoticism notion of using people as decorative backdrop is so antiquated and bizarre. Fashion is one of the industries that’s keeping this alive so uncritically. People in the business are in love with imagery and they don’t think beyond that, even when the imagery has a long history they don’t understand.”

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With the industry itself so silent, it’s been blogs like Jezebel that have played watchdog on culturally wrongheaded fashion campaigns, time and again. “The problem is broad and deep and it’s been happening for a very long time,” says Dodai Stewart, who wrote on the issue often at Jezebel before leaving recently for Fusion, another culture and lifestyle website. “Fashion itself is very surface. It’s easy for people to disregard the larger meaning behind what it means to adorn your body. Getting dressed is a deep and complicated thing and when you’re like, let’s just pick and choose what’s pretty without context, you get into trouble. If something looks cool to you, is it because it’s exotic? That’s a warning sign.

“With Vreeland, you can say it was another time,” she continues. “It’s not as upsetting as Marie Claire going to Bhutan to put an old Bhutanese man in a $400 knit Ralph Lauren cap when the average monthly income there is $116. Or Vogue India putting a Fendi bib on a poor baby there.”

Of course, in Vreeland’s day, there was not only less racial consciousness but no Internet where these unfortunate choices were forever captured and dissected. “Today, you can tweet directly at Vogue if you don’t like what they’re saying,” notes Stewart. No wonder that so many of the above-mentioned offenders have put out post-furor apologies.

Of course, some fashion images elude outrage more than others. It’s hard not to be aghast at a white model in blackface. But Beyoncé in blackface as part of a spread to honor the late Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti? That’s trickier to cry foul on, because Beyoncé is black. Likewise, some spreads—such as Steven Meisel shooting Kristen McMenamy on a fake oil spill for Vogue Italy, shortly after BP’s very real disaster of a spill—are so ludicrous they make you wonder, if only for a nanosecond, if fashion is indulging in a bit of subversive cultural critique.

(left) Destroy this Mad Brute—Enlist ca. 1917 by Harry R. Hopps (right) LeBron James and Gisele Bündchen on the cover of Vogue April, 2008. Photo: (right) Getty Museum (left) Vogue.

And sometimes, images can go both ways. I was among those who initially wondered if critics were reading too much into Annie Leibovitz’s April 2008 Vogue cover image of growling basketball star LeBron James holding a smiling Gisele Bündchen in one arm. Detractors said it made the large and black James look like a wild King Kong stealing away with his white and willowy female prey—a historically charged trope, to say the least. I thought that was silly. Wasn’t the image simply of two megacelebs being playful?

Then Stewart showed me the image side by side with a remarkably similar WWI-era poster of a Kong-like brute that Leibovitz, who relishes recreating iconic historical images, allegedly based her shot on. After that, the image didn’t seem so innocent to me. (And if Leibovitz did use that archival image, did she share it with James before coaxing him into that pose?)

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In some ways, the image is a reminder of how fashion imagery in America—a country, after all, with a civil-rights history and a fair degree of racial self-consciousness—can be more deeply coded than in Europe, whose racial engagement, until recent decades, was relegated to colonies rather than the continent. Certainly it’s hard to imagine an American magazine depicting Michelle Obama on its cover topless, in a nod to an old portrait of a slave woman, as this Spanish magazine did in 2012.

Of course, the question is, where do you draw the line? If we can all agree that white models in blackface or wearing Indian headdresses is heinous, what about, say, those Urban Outfitters Navajo prints? Should they be banned? My anonymous insider friend says that’s going too far. “It’s all part of our cultural menu,” this friend says. “You don’t want to be too literal about borrowing, but fashion comes from a million different sources.”

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But others think that ethnic prints or elements shouldn’t be used at all unless they’ve been sourced in partnership, and profits are shared with, the originating communities. “If you want to do it right,” says Wade, “go to the Navajos, find the aspiring fashion designer there and work with them to figure out a respectful way to incorporate their motifs into fashion. Then give them the money.”

Jean Paul Gaultier’s spring/summer 2008. Photo: Imaxtree

Meanwhile, all these fashion faux pas don’t mean that some folks in the industry aren’t also”getting it right” when it comes to bringing culture into fashion. Gaultier, Ghesquière (for Balenciaga) and Dries Van Noten have all incorporated Indian dress including saris into their runways in sophisticated ways that don’t smack of callous appropriation. And of course it’s always nice when ethnic prints are reinterpreted by designers who have the same provenance as the prints themselves. That’s the case with Stella Jean, an emerging star in Milan who brings fine and inventive tailoring to the exuberant prints of Haiti, her mother’s homeplace.

A little perspective, too, is needed. No one would ever argue that, of all the injustices in the world, cultural callowness in fashion is the worst. Bethann Hardison, the iconic black supermodel-turned-agent who has devoted much of her life to getting more models of color into the business, nearly laughed when I spoke with her. She’d been following reports of mass protests in the wake of failures to indict cops who’d killed unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York City.

"With what’s going on right now in America, someone putting on blackface or a Mammy outfit—that’s light stuff to me,” she said. “I just think of it as ignorance.”

But racial and cultural ignorance can exist on a continuum, with offensive fashion shoots on one end and police brutality on the other. Both point to an inability or unwillingness to see those they target as fully human. The Sartorialist’s Schuman was only the most recent fashion insider to learn that a little education before publication can go a long way. “I don’t think he’ll approach photographing other countries quite the same way after this,” says Peterson.

But she says it’s unlikely that, even as the industry gets taken to school on race and culture over and over, such gaffes won’t happen again. “It’s great that now there’s a conversation every time this happens, but will it stop fashion from visually consuming culture out of context?” she asks. “I don’t know. Fashion memory is short.”