Vogue Cover Criticised Online For Featuring Black Women Models Through "White Gaze"

Vogue Cover Criticised: The British Vogue, the world's top fashion magazine is under fire, again, for its cover picture which shows nine black women. This is Vogue's February edition to celebrate the rise of African models and them "redrawing the map." However good the intention was, it falls short as people online criticise cover for "fetishising" black women and looking at them through the "white gaze."

Although, this is not the first time that Vogue and Conde Nast are embroiled in controversy with relation to the race and skin colour of their models on the cover page of the magazine. Last year, in January, they were accused of "whitewashing" photographs of the Vice-President of America Kamala Harris, who was their cover star. Their US Vogue August feature with Simone Biles was also criticised for the bad lighting of Biles skin tone. Read about that by clicking here.

Vogue Cover Criticised Online For Featuring Black Women Models Through "White Gaze"

The February feature is being criticised online for "repeating its mistake again." Yvonne Obi, the Head of the identity at Booking.com wrote on LinkedIn criticising the cover. The post read, "Dear Vogue and Conde Nast, really appreciate the creativity of this shoot and thinking of Black women's beauty. However, Black women are much more dynamic than portrayed from your colonialist lens. We have different melanin skin tones and are of different body sizes. We wear our hair in different ways, shapes and styles. You have simply succeeded in parading a Black aesthetic that says that 'Black skin has value when it fits into an extremely luxury aesthetic' while not doing the assignment to state their actual mixed heritage! Please just stop!"

Suggested Reading: Dear Neighbourhood Aunty, My Future Doesn’t Depend On My Skin Colour

Like Yvonne Obi people online are furious, Lwando Xaso, a lawyer and writer, wrote on LinkedIn about the cover. "The fashion industry has a fetish for the thin and very dark-skinned model and representing them in a very particular way, like museum pieces- why is that?" Lwando Xaso wrote while acknowledging that even though the creatives for this shoot reportedly was a black team, it does not mean that "it will be uncritically embraced by all black people."

In an interview with Deadline, the black cinematographer Bradford Young said that they are not satisfied with the way they say their people are being photographed in films. "I think it comes from a lack of consciousness- if you grew up in a community where you don't know black people, I wouldn't suspect you would photograph them in a concerned way."