White Mischief

Senegal du Soleil’.  Photograph by Léonard de Silva.  Paris Vogue, May 1972, © Paris Vogue

 

The use of local people as accessories takes a more disturbing turn in this image, taken from an early 1970s edition of Paris Vogue.   In the photograph, an European women dressed in white is contrasted with an African woman. On the left page of the magazine spread we have the African ‘savage’, naked save for some beads and a small garment around the waist.  This outfit, or lack of outfit, starkly contrasts with the full-length, long-sleeved Western fashion item on the opposite page.

 

Martin Harrison has rightly argued that fashion photographs are made for the magazine page, and ‘taking them out of their original context can alter both the way we perceive them and, to some extent, their meaning’.[1]  However, it is hard to imagine that this image would seem less strikingly racist when seen in the context of French Vogue.  The image represent ‘memories of Out of Africa, White Mischief and the decadent pleasures of the white woman on the dark continent’,[2] but the most glaring message however is of the superiority of the European woman. Is it possible to believe that such images do not come with an ideological message attached?

In her essay ‘Fashion’s World Cities: London as Fashion Cosmopolis, 1945-79’ (published in Fashion’s World Cities, edited by Christopher Breward and David Gilbert) cultural historian Sonia Ashmore has analysed some of Vogue’s ethnographic imagery in the 1960s.  She argues that examples from Vogue illustrate how the magazine maintained a difference between the indigenous ‘ethnic’ garments that it sometimes celebrated and their commodification and consumption by the West. She writes about the use of aestheticised exotic settings as a background for Western fashions, and argues that the photographers made no attempt at empathy with the local people they shot, and as such the colonial mentality is striking.  She discusses a 1969 BritishVogue fashion spread (photographed by Norman Parkinson) entitled Ethiopia the Land of the Lion:  ‘In one photograph a model, waited on by native “attendants”, wore a “borrowed” local wedding dress; on the facing page, she wears a black ciré catsuit, from Harrods “Way In” boutique, posed among semi-naked local women, the shiny black material intentionally echoing their skin colour. While this attempted a kind of physical rapprochement between “them and us”, the appropriation by the western wearer of ritual indigenous dress and the overt distinction made between the raw, naked “them”, and the smooth, modern “us”, remain uncomfortably apparent.’

The question needs to be asked however, whether, when contextualised in the era that produced them, do the images become less problematic? The racism might have been less apparent to contemporary consumers of French Vogue than to us, but the ideological message, that of French colonial possession and superiority would still have been absorbed:  ‘Western interpretations only accentuate those elements of the exotic and the primitive that mirror their own aesthetic perception and pathological stereotypes, therefore perpetuating the colonialist legacy of exclusion, incorporation and domination.’[3]

[1] Martin Harrison, ‘Introduction’, in David Bailey and Martin Harrison, Shots of Style: Great Fashion Photographs, Chosen by David Bailey, V&A Publications/Faber & Faber, London, 1986, p. 14.

[2] McDowell, Fashion Today, p. 353.

[3] María Claudia André, ‘Frida and Evita: Latin American Icons for Export’, in Regina A. Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader, Berg Publishers, Oxford/London, 2005, p. 250.