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A post called "Darker Skinned Glamour Girls" on Racialicious caught my eye this morning. In it Latoya Peterson wrote about something she noticed while paging through an issue of the UK beauty magazine "Pride." She writes:

Hmm, I thought to myself, they have a lot of dark skinned women in this magazine. Wonder why?

Then I wondered to myself why I thought it would be strange to have dark skinned women in a magazine that caters to black women. That should have been a no-brainer. So why was I surprised?

and later,

It just seems like fashion has a specific look that is acceptable for dark skinned women. It is almost as if the woman is not dark with close cropped hair and a bone-thin physique, she simply does not exist.

I've had that same thought go through my head. Nothing will get me to pause on a page longer than the inclusion of a woman with dark skin. It's like I'm staring at a unicorn or something.

Aside from Naomi, off the top of my head I'm having a little trouble thinking of a "glamour girl" model who has very dark skin and honestly even Naomi is probably somewhere in the middle of our color spectrum.

This is not to imply that they aren't out there but when one does see them, they usually fall into a certain mold.

There seems to be a handful of lovely Africans dividing up some of the crumbs brushed down to non-white models in the industry but in spite of the many different types of beauty represented on that continent, most fashion mucks seem to only want to focus on the girls with keen features like Liya Kebede or the cropped hair darker skinned models like Alek or Ajuma.

The first type can appear in the Estee Lauder and Tiffany and Co. ads while the latter is going to see a lot of leopard skin in the course of her career.

Of course there are exceptions.

Sessilee Lopez is currently appearing in ads for Lanvin but her dark skin is seemingly used as one the stylist's props.

Also, Naomi is still thriving in her career but she is such an icon at this point that it hardly seems fair to compare her success to the plight of a model of color with no real name recognition. Her ads for Pinko (see above photo) has the feel of a celebrity endorsement.

Of course, none of this is new especially in this industry but I always find myself hoping that one of these days I'll be surprised in a good way when paging through a mag.

photo source: TFS/simplylovely

Work It Girl

Style.com has named London native Jourdan Dunn among its list of Top Models for the Fall 2008 ready-to-wear season. She made news earlier by becoming the first black model in TEN YEARS to walk for Italian fashion giant Prada.

Ms. Dunn and Chanel Iman seemed to be the black "it" girls of the moment. Hopefully they will also get the much needed support of fashion magazine editors and photographers to boost their respective careers to the next level. I'd hate to see either woman's career taper off the way former "it" girl Gerren Taylor's did.

The 17 year old beauty was also seen on runways for Louis Vuitton, Zac Posen, and Dries Van Noten among others.

Not surprising, Dunn is the only woman of color on this season's list.

King James Covers Vogue's "Sh-ape" Issue

You know what? I don't even know if I have the energy to go there with this jacked up cover so I'm only going to make two points.

First, why does Anna Wintour have such a hard nipples for black folks with their mouths hanging wide open on her magazine? Specifically, I'm thinking about Jennifer Hudson's horribly unflattering cover last year.

Second, the first image that came into my mind when I saw Lebron's contorted expression and Gisele (in Calvin Klein) looking like a windswept maiden was this one:

That is all. I'm think I'm going to have to lay down now.

Will There Ever Be an African Vogue?

Do you remember when Vogue India hit the stands and Australian model Gemma Ward was front and center flanked by two presumably Indian models in what I like to call "the coveted Beyonce spot?" All I could do was laugh at how predictable that move was on the editors part.

In the months since that launch last year, Vogue India has featured a dazzling array of Bollywood actresses and models on the cover. It's as if to say, "yeah, we thought the cover on that premiere issue was lame too but we fully intend to make up for it!"

Anytime I think about that launch I wonder if an African country will ever get its own Vogue. Maybe a Vogue Nigeria or a South African Vogue.

I've debated back and forth on message boards about who would be chosen for the imaginary inagural cover. Legendary Iman? Alek Wek? Liya? Oluchi? Gemma in a safari hat?

I read an article in The Times this morning about Oluchi in which she was quoted as saying that top magazines in South Africa (like Glamour and GQ) refuse to put blacks on their covers. This in a country that is 79% black.

She said:

“As a Nigerian and an African I have done so much in my career to represent everything African in Western countries. There is a diverse group of people in South Africa, be it black, white, Asian. ...If you pick up Vogue India everything about it, from the first page to the last, is very Indian...I would like to see that in South Africa. They [magazines] need to embrace diversity and show more love ...It doesn’t give me joy to pick up a copy of South African GQ and feel like I’m reading American GQ."

Damn.

This saddens me. I recall seeing the cover of South African ELLE once with a dark skinned woman on the cover and for months I tried to find an issue at various newsstands only to come up empty. I was dying to know if the cover I saw was an anomoly. So far, I'm not willing to pony up the $90 or so for a subscription to find out.

Back to my magazine fantasy...I picture two covers. The first one featuring a mix of models from all over the continent with Iman or Liya Kebede, Alek Wek or Ajuma to show the very different types of African beauty. My second thought has editors mixing it up a bit more with the likes of a Jourdan Dunn, Emanuela dePaula, Chanel Iman, Chrystelle Saint-Louis Augustin, or Damaris Lewis to illustrate how there isn't a corner of the world that hasn't been touched by this so called dark continent's beauty and influence.

Seriously, I could ponder this for hours. I am so much more satisfied by made up magazines than by their real conterparts. Maybe there's an editor out there dreaming of this launch too, and of Gemma Ward posing on an elephant for the cover.

London Telegraph: Model Waris Dirie Says She Was Abducted

Waris Dirie, the former supermodel and James Bond girl turned United Nations women's rights ambassador, has claimed she was abducted and assaulted during a three day period she went missing in Brussels last week.

Miss Dirie was admitted to hospital, in her hometown of Vienna, with an arm injury and abrasions to her legs. Gerald Ganzger, her lawyer, alleged the injuries had been inflicted by a Belgian taxi driver who abducted and attempted to rape her while holding her hostage in his flat for two days.

Miss Dirie, a 43-year-old naturalised Austrian, went missing in the early hours of last Wednesday morning just hours before she was due to speak alongside Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State, at a top level European Union conference on women's rights.

Her disappearance sparked a national manhunt. Following her initial reappearance on Friday afternoon, Miss Dirie apologised for a "misunderstanding" and said she was "lost".

Walter Lutschinger, her manager, has tried to explain why Miss Dirie did not tell police of the attack. "I think that she was simply in extreme shock," he said.

Jos Colpin, the Brussels prosecutor, expressed police bafflement. "It was made clear by her that she was the victim of nothing. Naturally we will open a new dossier if a new charge is made."

The mystery over Mis Dirie's missing days also deepened after a 45-year old Belgian man, known only as William D, came forward to say that he picked up Miss Dirie in a bar.

The window cleaner first spotted the former model on Thursday in a scruffy Brussels bar, Chez Henri, before approaching her over a glass of red wine the next day. After inviting her back to his home to eat, William D. and Miss Dirie were stopped by police officers, who had recognised her.

"If only I had taken another way home or a taxi, I could have had a good time with a splendid woman," he told La Dernière La Dernière Heure newspaper.

Source

Essence, I wish I could quit you

I used to love Essence Magazine...when I was 16. Back then it was like Cosmo for black teens full of articles about famous people, lifestyles and hairstyles that I could never quite pull off. There was also the occasional article about sex which made reading the magazine seem like a very grown up thing to do. I always looked forward to seeing who would be on the next month's cover and then gobbled up the issue in no time flat.

Flash forward more years than I care to reveal and the magazine is still around, only my feelings for it have changed.

As a girl growing up reading the magazine I guess I thought it would grow up with me but this is clearly not the case. Everything about Essence is the same as it has been for twenty years. It looks the same, weighs the same, talks about the same "safe" celebrities ad nauseum and features damn near the same articles month after month.

You always know what you are getting with Essence and maybe that's good enough for some readers but it's like boring sex. Everyone has it at some point, but if it's always the same it might be time to see a therapist.

To be fair, Essence is really the only magazine of its type out there. It has a healthy circulation and doesn't seem to be starved for advertisers. Its closest rivals might be Jewel or Heart & Soul but really, the former is still too green and the latter makes me feel like I'm reading a browner version of Redbook.

After it became clear that Suede was never coming back from its hiatus, I secretly wondered if some Suede's fresh attitude would eventually start to invade

Essence but it didn't. Suzanne Boyd left the company and it was back to business as usual.

So what about that content? There's usually an "inspirational" letter from the editor that I don't read, some beauty products shot against a white

background, a page or two of hairstyles, the ubiquitous "I'm in an interracial relationship" article, one page confessional essays, the cover story, a poorly

shot fashion layout sometimes featuring an America's Next Top model contestant, some recipes,and another "inspirational" essay by former editor Susan Taylor.

The end. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I guess their philosophy is "if it ain't broke why fix it?" I'm sure there are a lot of Essence readers who like it just the way it is. I'm just not one of them and I refuse to believe I'm alone in that.

One particular issue of Essence that stands out in my mind is one that featured Lil' Kim on the cover some years back. At the time I was surprised that Essence would put a rapper of Kim's particular niche on the cover so I snapped up the issue only to get home and find that there was no interview with Kim in the magazine. There were just details from the 10 hour plus photo-shoot and an "open letter" to Kim written by an editor. Not even a write around, just a letter saying nothing new about her provocative image. It was, in a word, lame.

That pretty much sums up what Essence has become to me. A pretty cover photo to draw you in and not much going on between the sheets.

Will I buy this month's issue featuring Erykah Badu? I don't know, but I won't lie, I will probably page through it at the grocery.

Naomi in Paris Match (1996)

Photography by Patrick Demarchelier in 1991.
Source: Omifan9/TFS