ApertureRomance
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People in the fashion and media industry who know Bethann describe her as an icon. Admittedly fashion has its fair share of luvviness, but watch her at her meetings and the affection people feel for her is obvious. Both inspiring and outspoken without being self-righteous, she's able to rouse and provoke in equal measure, poking fun at a business that she clearly loves but one which takes itself rather too seriously at times.
However, her background had little to do with designer shops on Madison Avenue. Hardison's father, a practising Muslim, was a supervisor in the local housing authority. After her parents separated she was looked after by her mother and grandmother who were domestics in Brooklyn. 'You've got to leave Brooklyn,' she says, 'to be proud of where you come from.' Her mother loved the local bar scene, dancing and dressing up - 'Though in those days, the Fifties, everybody dressed in the same silhouette, whether they were black or white.'
Hardison fell pregnant at the age of 18 - 'I had never had sex before and I got pregnant on the first time, which is the worst thing in the world.' When her baby son, Kadeem, was small, her mother and grandmother looked after him (he grew up to become a successful actor, based in Los Angeles) and for a while she had a mixture of jobs working at a telephone company and in a prison before she found a position in a firm that made hand-painted buttons for design houses.
She'd inherited her mother's sense of style. 'That first day I wore a white straw hat, a one-off white suit, slingback shoes. The owner was worried I'd get covered in paint so he decided I could be the one to take the buttons to the designers.' It would be true to say she never looked back. Hardison worked her way up through an industry that back then was focused on a few streets in midtown Manhattan. She was an assistant for a dress company, which meant she was secretary, receptionist and book-keeper. Finally two Jewish women who ran a salon allowed her to be the first black saleswoman in the Garment District. The idea of a white woman with money to spend being shown the collection in the showroom by a black woman was unheard of.
Hardison's hair was cropped short, as it is now. She was also very skinny. 'Boy was I skinny! Big eyes. I looked like I was from Biafra.' Her unusual look came to the attention of some of the designers she met at work. 'I wasn't a pretty girl but there was something about me that attracted them.'
Her debut as a model was in the early Seventies for a designer called Chester Weinberg. The audience, made up of industry buyers, was wholly white. 'They looked stunned. I looked like a little African girl. There were a few other girls of colour but they had a sort of bounce about them. I was just straight.' By the third outfit the uproar was so loud, she could barely get to the end of the room. 'I was dying inside. I wanted to walk right through the door onto the subway and go home. But somehow I kept my head up and it became a point of defiance. I wouldn't let them see how much they hurt me. That became my style. They had never seen anyone who looked like me but that defiance changed the way models could look.'
It wasn't long before black models were in demand. 'They called us the black stallions. Black or white it didn't matter. It was a great time because it was so creative and stylish and bohemian. You didn't have to have lots of money to be at the party.' Sensibly - and Hardison, you come to realise, has a very sensible head on those shoulders - she never gave up her day job. By this time she was working as a design assistant. She knew everyone from the Studio 54 crowd to Truman Capote, Jerry Hall to Woody Allen, but, as she says: 'There wasn't a lot of bullcrap then. All you had to do was have interesting dinner-party conversation.'
A man once told her she was too busy to be committed to a relationship and, though she was married twice, neither marriage lasted long. In the Eighties she decided to start her own modelling agency. She found premises in the then unfashionable SoHo area of New York. 'As a black businesswoman you can't believe anyone is taking you seriously because you have no one before you who has done what you are doing. It's like walking down the Yellow Brick Road before it's been laid.' She would run the agency for 21 years and set up a pressure group called Black Girls' Coalition with Iman. By the time she sold up there may not have been parity between white and black models but she imagined she'd done enough.
The industry changed with the influx of Eastern-European models. Bewitching-looking women: tall, translucent, angular, with flinty cheekbones and piercing eyes. 'They flooded the market,' says Carole White, who owns Premier Model Management. 'They are beautiful, but it is a bland beauty. It's a certain look. We can all spot it.' As a reaction to the reign of the supermodels, labels like Jil Sander and Prada wanted anonymous faces. 'It was almost as though they were revolted by what they had created,' says Michael Gross, the author of Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. According to Hardison: 'The model was reduced to a coathanger.'
Of 200 models on White's books, only seven are black or Asian women and she says they have to work twice as hard to get the jobs. White thinks that fashion has become dominated by a white aesthetic that goes beyond the designers. 'Photographers used to be apprenticed for five years. They would learn about lighting and printing,' she explains. 'The thing is that now they probably use digital cameras and don't know how to light a black girl. It's the same with make-up artists. Black make-up artists like Pat McGrath work magic on white models but you don't see it the other way around. It's probably ignorance, and they are probably frightened. They just don't know how to do it.'
There is an unspoken presumption that white readers want white models, white women only want to see an image of themselves on the catwalks. It's what academics call 'the white hegemony' and it's so casual if you're white you don't even notice it. But might the pundits be talking down to their consumers?
'Editors say customers won't have it, it won't sell,' says Barbara Summers, a black model in the Seventies and the author of Black and Beautiful and Open the Unusual Door. 'But it's self-defeating. They're projecting their own failure and using black people to make the excuse. It's just cowardice. The irony is that the industry is shrinking in the current financial crisis. It can't grow again if it stays stuck in these past ideas. You can't expand your customer base if you only make products for white girls.'
The result, according to Rebecca Carroll, is black teenage girls growing up thinking that they're not admired, a sense that goes beyond what they see in the mirror. 'It's painful,' she says. 'No one likes to be excluded and they grow up thinking they don't exist, therefore people don't care.'
Even if one goes along with the view that Italian Vogue was, as Enninful says, 'historic and monumental', look through this month's bunch of British monthly glossies and you'd be hard pressed to find any black images. Editors often maintain that the number of black models they include proportionately matches the population. However, in this month's British glossies, the main fashion spreads are universally white.
When you do see black models in magazines the same tropes are repeated again and again, says Zoe Whitley. She is a curator and visiting fellow at Sussex University, whose MA thesis was about blackness in Vogue. In mainstream magazines there is traditionally a proliferation of leopard-print and other animalistic symbols. Certain postures are popular - crawling, leaping in the air and smiling. There are lots of accessories and jewellery and colours that deliberately show up the contrast between fabric and skin - vivid reds, turquoise, white. 'The stories can be stunning,' says Whitley, 'but you don't often get a sense that you'd see a black model in a story about tweed, or a muted palette.'
The alternative is to create an atmosphere of exoticism by putting a white model in a foreign environment like an African country or India. 'She becomes exotic and they don't even have to resort to using a black model.'
Whitley has a theory that, when a black image is used on the front of a glossy magazine it is often in February, traditionally the lowest-selling month anyway. 'The poor sales become a self-fulfilling prophesy.' As a young woman growing up in Washington and Los Angeles, her family would rush out to buy any magazine with a black person on the front. They imagined they could boost sales single-handed.
The lack of black images prompts some commentators to wonder whether magazines are interested in black readers at all. Fashion is a business and like all businesses it goes where it thinks the money is. 'This is a commercial industry,' says Michael Gross, 'run by a bunch of old people. Their job is not to change the world, it is to sell frocks. It's not racism. It's not even unconscious racism. It's an utter cluelessness about the real world.'
There is a view, though, that if Senator Barack Obama does win on Tuesday, the response will be profound, even on cosseted, inward-looking Planet Fashion. Michelle Obama has wowed the industry with her fashion instincts. She's already reinvented the way a potential First Lady can dress. She might soon be the most sought-after woman on any glossy magazine front cover anywhere in the world. True, she's not a model but it could mark a sea change. 'It will be a wake-up call,' says Gross. 'The reaction in the fashion business will be a blatant and almost laughable attempt to catch up. Such is this craven industry and such is the way they behave.'
source : same as before.
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I am convinced that if there is a silly thing to be said about models, one can find it right here at tFS. 
Of three fashion spreads and 4 models used, 0 are visible minorities
