School kids, rickshaws, and dancing natives

Fashion photography trades on clichéd ideas of non-Western people and places, I have identified and labelled a further three of these clichés:  We have happy, dancing ‘natives’, smartly uniformed school children, and that topographical signifier of the Orient, the rickshaw. The first four images below are examples of the former.  In each image the fashion model is shown enjoying local forms of cultural entertainment, in Salvador, Brazil, in Polynesia, and in China.  In a 1997 New York Times article,[1] journalist Margo Jefferson describes these kinds of images as ‘visual tourism’, images that trade on ‘old hat racial and cultural conventions:  Lush tropical paradises, funky third world streets accessorized with natives in native garb.’  Academic Dorinne Kondo has been more critical writing that in such images ‘native’ people become ‘nameless features of the … landscape … racial anxieties are both thematized and allayed’.[2] 

The second theme identified is the use of schoolchildren in uniform as stylish accessory.  In the next set of images below, the children, wearing white shirts and coloured skirts, trousers and pinafores have been included in the photographs because of the aesthetic attractiveness of their outfits.  Whilst there is nothing wrong with appreciating aesthetic beauty wherever it may be found, do these images not exoticise the children (who in every case are non-Caucasian)? ‘When it comes to fashion, esthetics [sic] can’t really be separated from how we visualize race and dramatize ethnicity.’[3]

Paul Jobling, a design and photography historian based at the University of Brighton argues that ‘much fashion photography beckons us into a world of unbridled fantasies by placing fashion and the body in any number of discursive contexts.  Thus it would be myopic to argue that such imagery is innocent or without deeper ideological signification.’[4]  What ideological signification are we to read in the final images below?  Seating the model on a rickshaw is shorthand for saying, ‘We are in the Orient’.  Like the idea of dancing African natives, the rickshaw reduces Asia to a tired cliché.   Thomas Y. T. Luk, a lecturer in the modern languages and intercultural studies department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong has analysed the use of Hong Kong as a dramatic setting in the American films The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1955).  His analysis is equally applicable to these photographic essentialisations of Asia.  He writes that in Suzie Wong, Hong Kong’s topography is reduced to ‘Wanchai bars, rickshaw, harbor and ferry, sampans, floating restaurant, huts hillside shantytowns, joss-sticks burning ritual become structural elements of the oriental other’.[5]  He goes onto to say that the city ‘becomes a setting for the dumping of the wish fulfilment of the West … [the film] depicts Hong Kong as an ideal setting to accommodate different flows of western fantasies, a space especially for the projection of desires and anxiety’.[6]  In just the same way, Asia, in the fashion photograph, is conflated into an imaginary destination on a designer clad sartorial voyage.

 Photo Credits

1.      ‘White Heat’.  Photograph by Arthur Elgort.  © American Vogue, March 2006

2.       ‘Love, Brazil’.  Photograph by Michael Roberts. © American Elle, April 2006

3.      ‘Ticket to Paradise’.  Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. ©  American Vogue, December 2004

4.   'China'. Photograph by Arthur Elgort. © American Vogue, 1994

5.      ‘Cool Khaki’.  Photograph by Kim Knott. ©  British Vogue, May 1994

6.       ‘Hot Shots’.  Photograph by Arthur Elgort. © British Vogue, July 1998

7.      ‘All The Raj’.  Photograph by Arthur Elgort. ©  American Vogue, June 1999

8.      ‘Meet Me In Havana’.  Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. ©  Harper’s Bazaar, May 1998

9.      ‘Cool Khaki’.  Photograph by Kim Knott. ©  British Vogue, May 1994

10.      ‘The Shape of Summer’.  Photograph by Arthur Elgort. ©  British Vogue,  

June 1994

11.     ‘All The Raj’.  Photograph by Arthur Elgort. ©  American Vogue, June 1999

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[1] Margo Jefferson, ‘Looking at What Black Looks Like’, New York Times, 11 June 1997.

[2] Kondo, Performing Race, p. 92.

[3] Jefferson, ‘Looking’.

[4] Jobling, Fashion Spreads, p. 2.

[5] Thomas Y. T. Luk, ‘Hong Kong as City/Imaginary in The World of Suzie Wong, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, and Chinese Box’, New Asia Academic Bulletin, Vol. 18, 2004, p. 75.

[6] Ibid., p. 77.