Update on Pop Culture Notes: Mousy Models

And their model treatment


Minority Models:

I have written about the type of minorities (Indian, East African, Black Americans) who get big modeling careers. I call them mousy models - I just find their looks nondescripts, and not beautiful. I actually think that the modeling industry is doing them a great service. They get high paying jobs and exciting careers. They get to travel everywhere, be on magazines and television shows, and have a strange adulating following. They, in short, have a great life.

Here is Iman, the Somali model, making outrageous claims about her professional life. She says:

One had the field nigger and the house nigger. There was this notion that I was chosen by white fashion editors to be better than the rest, which I am not. I did not like being thought of as the house nigger.

This is the thanks that the editors, photographers and fashion writers of Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and the list is endless since it also includes hundreds of obscure fashion magazines, get. They have put Iman on a pedestal for at least two decades. I am sure some mentioned her as a minority model, but none of them have treated her as a minority. In fact, she was a major pop culture icon.

Of course, I have my reservations about why the fashion industry invested so much time and money on her (and her "off spring" - Halle Berry, Liya Kebede and Padma Lakshmi). By having just the right mix of dark skin and Caucasian features, she appears familiar and exotic at the same time. I don’t know how her countrymen view her, but the Ethiopian model Liya Kebede would not be considered a beauty, let alone appear on fashion magazines. Iman, by Ethiopian standards, even less so. Thus her very presence on those magazines was actually a favor to her.

But, in a way, she is right. She was chosen for the benefit of white readers. She was a “house nigger” so to speak. But, the reality, as I have discussed above, is that she reaped a fantastically rich (monetary and otherwise) life, which she owed to all her white “slave holders”. But then she forgot something. Slaves, house or otherwise, never got paid.