Black Models Don't Sell

Cashmore, Ellis. "Black models don’t sell." Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama’s America. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. 85–96. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 24 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781780931500.ch-008>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 24 September 2021, 03:43 UTC. Copyright © Ellis Cashmore 2012. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 8 Black models don’t sell ‘Tyra Banks is nobody’s fool and certainly no pawn of patrician white executives. Yet she operates in a way that complements perfectly the colorblind code of postracial America.’ ewel Ciera Washington was 15 when she appeared on the Tyra Show Jlate in 2009. She had apparently responded to a request on the show’s website. “Are you obsessed with sex and unable to control your sexual impulses?” read the solicitation. “If so, share your story and maybe we can help.” The following year, Washington’s mother Beverly McClendon alleged that Banks’ producers got in touch with Jewel directly to arrange for her to appear on the talk show and discuss, among other things, how she lost her virginity at the age of nine, had sex with over 20 men by the time she was thirteen, and had been pregnant three times. Beverly fi led a $3 million federal lawsuit, claiming her parental permission should have been sought. It was a rare, perhaps unique, contretemps for Tyra Banks, a woman whose rise was not so much smooth as velvety, whose bewitching amalgamation of extreme glamour and unstoppable ambition captured the imaginations of a legion of young women, and whose buzzwords “fi erce” and “smize” (smile with your eyes) were not just babble, but babble à la mode . When she told Lynn Hirschberg, of New York Times Magazine , “I think I was put on this earth to instill self-esteem in young girls,” it was possible to believe that she was actually being serious about her destiny (“Banksable”, June 1, 2008). “We’ve seen with Tyra that the audience is changing. In the past, her audience would have been primarily African-American, but the television audience in general is becoming increasingly colorblind, and younger viewers are particularly colorblind,” refl ected Leslie Moonves, president and chief executive of the CBS Corporation – a parent company, along with Warner Brothers, of the CW network on which Banks’ show appeared. “It’s similar to the pattern we’re seeing with voters and Barack Obama — he and Tyra have a similar appeal to the youth audience.” Colorblind is one of those terms that have been around for at least a half- century and probably longer: it means not infl uenced by racism or racial prejudice. So a colorblind society was one in which no-one was evaluated on his or her color, or any other kind of visible marker of his or her ethnic origin. The term drifted out of the popular vocabulary in the 1970s, when it appeared 85 BBook.indbook.indb 8855 114/06/124/06/12 44:14:14 PMPM 86 BEYOND BLACK naïve and idealistic – the colorblind society seemed to exist only in the imaginations of the most optimistic liberals – but roared back into vogue with the election of Barack Obama. Does Tyra really have “similar appeal” to the president? Banks is a product of Inglewood, an ethnically diverse suburb of Los Angeles and home of the sports and rock venue the LA Forum. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her mother and brother. The story goes that, on her fi rst day at the all-girl Immaculate Heart High School, Banks was told: “You should be a model.” She wasn’t the fi rst young woman to have heard that, of course, but in this case, the person who said it was a photographer and took some shots for the then 15-year-old Banks to circulate around model agencies. A French agency summoned her to Paris, where she began to sashay along the catwalks for the likes of Givenchy and Chanel. She abandoned her studies. By the early 1990s, she was earning a living in Europe, dreaming of becoming one of the future generations of supermodels. Up to that time, catwalk and photographic models were largely interchangeable. Only occasionally would a prominent fi gure separate herself from the others: Twiggy in the 1960s, and Elle McPherson and Christie Brinkley in the 1980s were exceptions. But, in the 1990s, a clique known collectively as supermodels emerged, headed by Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista, the last of whom famously declared: “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” Even allowing for exaggeration, the point was clear enough: supermodels’ earnings were up there with those of movie stars and premier rock performers. This was refl ected in the corresponding shift in status from anonymous ambulant coathangers to glittering occupants of the celebrity A-list. Both magazines and fashion designers were reluctant to employ black models in the 1990s. But there were exceptions. One was the Somalian Iman, who moved to the USA and began modeling for the Wilhemina Agency in the mid-1970s, working for, among others, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan. In 1992, when she was 37, she married David Bowie, and had transferred from fashion to fi lm. Another was the perplexingly androgynous Grace Jones, who was born in Jamaica but essayed modeling in New York and Paris, where she probably designed or developed her trademark dominatrice sauvage image. Jones alternated between singing and acting and still performs, even in her sixties. Nothing stands still for long in the fashion industry, though some things endure. By 2008, Carole White, co-founder of Premier Model Management, which supplies models to top fashion brands, confessed that fi nding work for black clients was signifi cantly harder than for the white models. “Sadly we are in the business where you stock your shelves with what sells,” she said. “According to the magazines, black models don’t sell,” White told Rob Sharp, for his article “Fashion is racist: insider lifts lid on ‘ethnic exclusion’” in the British Independent newspaper (February 16, 2008). Fashion was anything but colorblind, though in 1987 Naomi Campbell, the London-born model, became the fi rst black subject to appear on the cover of BBook.indbook.indb 8866 114/06/124/06/12 44:14:14 PMPM BLACK MODELS DON’T SELL 87 the French edition of Vogue. There were echoes of the Michael Jackson/MTV episode covered earlier in this book when the late French fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent (1936–2008) threatened to break all ties with the publication if Campbell was not put on the cover. Campbell became part of the elite group of supermodels, modeling for the world’s pre-eminent designers before, perhaps surprisingly, posing nude for Playboy in 1999. Surprisingly in 1999, that is: over the next decade, Campbell became involved in several shenanigans that served to maintain her public profi le, not always in a dignifi ed way. In addition to verbal assaults on hotel and airport staff, she whacked her housekeeper (for which she was sentenced to do community service). Campbell won a privacy case against a British newspaper that had published pictures of her leaving a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in London in 2001, while she was receiving treatment for drug addiction. Her brief appearance at a United Nations war crimes tribunal investigating Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president, was made eventful by impromptu remark that the trial was a “big inconvenience” to her. Campbell’s turbulent but supremely newsworthy career was ornamented with serial affairs with some of the world’s best-known and most eligible men. Google “naomi campbell” then select Past 24 hours under “More search tools” on the left of your screen, and there will be a fresh story. Campbell seems to have made a career rebelling against blandness and, as such, still commands the attention of the global media. If there is a way of causing outrage, she can fi nd it: in 2009, for example, she modeled clothes by the luxury furrier Dennis Basso. While wearing fur is itself an incendiary act, Campbell’s action was near treasonous; in 1994, she had appeared with other supermodels in a campaign for PETA (People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals) in which the strapline was, “We’d rather go naked than wear fur.” ––– Banks’ career offers comparisons and contrasts, the latter probably a function of the former: in the early 1990s, when Banks was a new recruit to the fashion world, she probably stock-checked the industry in her own mind and realized there was pile of one kind of human merchandise and a scarcity of another. The then upswinging Campbell was usually the only black model on the catwalk at the premier events, and her historic appearance on Vogue ’s cover was more like a one-off haute couture creation than the fi rst of a new retail line. Perhaps Banks thought the way to secure a place in the industry was to be Aphrodite to Naomi’s Athena (or, possibly, the lesser known Enyo, goddess of war). Banks no doubt realized that modeling ranks alongside sports as one of the most ephemeral careers. In both lines of work, a performer depends on her or his body. In the 1990s, with heroin chic the fashion industry’s main and only aesthetic, Banks’ body began to look too voluptuous for the catwalk.

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