Friday, September 19, 2008

The suspect of beauty

The M&S clothing adverts bother me. Why is that the only woman of colour featured is the one who is always in the underwear?

The other women get to keep their clothes on far more. On the bright side, at least M&S do actually sell clothes and have a range of undies, so it's not women in their undies for no apparent reason as it so often is in advertising.

Still... somehow feels suspect to me.


Oh, and another thing - you know that series "Britain's missing model"? While I appreciate the idea was to get people to think about disability not being incompatible with beauty (a big subject to tackle), it also troubled me that all the women featured were white. The trailers for the series showed pretty much identi-kit blonde white women, distinguished only by their disabilities.

This makes me wrinkle my nose up in probably a rather unattractive way.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's loads of racism in modelling. I saw a programme about it. The people who make the magazines claim they sell a much smaller percentage of magazines when there's a black model on the cover. And mixed race models go along to shoots and get rejected for "not being one thing or another", ie the people setting up the shoot want an "Asian" girl or a "black" girl but someone who is mixed race and who can look Mediterranean, or South American or Asian, or any number of different things, gets no work because she can't be easily pigeonholed. It makes me very annoyed cos I have loads of mixed race cousins and I'd like to think if they went into modelling they would have as much chance as the next person, but at the moment they don't. Abster x

Mephitis said...

Yes. :(

Anonymous said...

When you think about it the modelling industry is body fascism in the extreme - they all have to be tall and very skinny and as you say disproportionately white. I get what's being said about the disability prejudice but an industry which basically wants newer and younger versions of the same tall skinny models is hardly one which is going to accept disability as normality.

All good to challenge but it's like peeing in the wind.

Twizi said...

You mean to say there were different models in the advert? Well ok so there were a few more but I was convinced everytime I saw an advert there was 1 main model appearing lots.