^ oh absolutely, I'm well aware that the changes in "representation" are driven by money - that's not a bad thing, and is far better footing for the models themselves than just being chosen because their ethnicities are the trendy cause of the moment e.g. the rise of East Asian models in the mid-late 00s. Otherwise, what happens when an editor or brand decides your "identity" is no longer "current" and want to move on to something else?
All the try-so-hard magazines (or others) annoy me and feel fake to me. I'm all for having more diversity in mags and on runways but it should be done beautifully and with enough subtlety to keep us on dreaming about the fashion world and its imagery. For example I've seen awful photographs of Paloma Elsesser while I find her insanely beautiful. Not all models are chameleons who can embody everything you ask them to, some just excel in their very own field and a good photographer-editor-stylist-CD should understand that. It's just as lame as when they used to hire teenage models to embody a fully-grown woman in editorials.
I do agree that it needs to be done in a way that's still beautiful and feels like it's actually good fashion imagery, though (and yeah, sometimes attractive people don't make good models, we had a whole wave of 'unconventional' models in the late 90s who were great.... but they still have to have some quality that makes them interesting in photographs/on a runway though) . Unfortunately, there's a lot of "everything about the previous way of doing fashion was bad, old photographers are bad, so beautiful fashion imagery is "out" and here's a load of mediocre photographs taken by people with the 'right identity and you will fawn over them otherwise you're guilty of [insert offence here]" type thinking in some major magazine offices.
Some of my favourite fashion shoots I've seen over the last year have come from the WSJ and Financial Times, which is not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd type.
Meanwhile, here's i-D, one of my favourite magazines of the 00s, continually abasing itself to prove it's woker than everyone while thinking all its current readers are too young or amnesiac to know i-D was a major champion of known sexual predator Terry Richardson into the 2010s and even hosted a whole section for his photography on their website. The hypocrisy is strong there.
(yes, I bought i-D back then but even then, I wouldn't buy issues he'd done cover or editorial photography for...which was quite a few...I'm not under the belief this is activism btw, just a personal line in the sand - I believe everyone gets to set their own).
