Offensive?: Vogue Italia does "Haute Mess"

Vogue Italia is catching some flack this week for perpetuating stereotypes of black women and ridiculing the culture, after releasing a photo spread titled, ‘Haute Mess’ [or in other words, 'Hot Mess']

The feature runs in the March issue and plays up images of lots of long fingernails, toes hanging over the edge of heels, brown babies in strollers, candy-colored towering hair styles, insane monogram bags and fast food pregnancies. And it’s high-profile models like Coco Rocha, Joan Smalls and Jessica Stam (in addition to a few fierce trannies) who are decked out in these outrageous “hood” fashions you probably haven’t seen since, check them out o_O

Very interesting images, especially coming from a high fashion magazine! Many have slammed the spread, including LJ Knight over at Black Girl Long Hair, who wrote:

My problem with images like these has and always will be the same. The wise old debate as to are they laughing with us or at us? In other words, is this coming from a place of great affection for a certain culture and their specific fashion? Or is this Vogue’s magazine way of mocking Black women? Maybe it is a little bit of both as they also recently did a shoot for Vogue Italia where they had sistas with natural hair. Which is a step forward but they still seem to lack consistency in how they portray people of color overall.

Meanwhile, Vogue’s editor Franca Sozanni doesn’t get where all the backlash is coming from and definitely doesn’t see it as racist:

“ We wanted to make something quite extravagant. It’s more to push people to be creative and extravagant. … Because I read everything in the blogs, but honestly, we just thought it was the concept of extravagance, of creativity, even something over-the-top, something that is not usual. If you want, you don’t dress like that, you don’t put on this kind of makeup, but it’s just to make a fake, to go over-the-top, it makes you happy in a way, more alive, more colorful — sometimes fashion looks sad.”
A racist image, I really do not understand. I went through the pages so many times. Like when we did the Black Issue, everybody said that we did that on purpose because Obama was the person chosen to go to the White House, and if you just think one second, not more than one second, you can see that to make a magazine like what we did for the Black Issue, it takes six months [to do]. … People wanted to see an economical and a financial [decision], just to get more money, because we talk about Black Issue, it’s probably because the president is black. What do you answer? They don’t know what it means to work at a magazine. That’s it.”

What do you think?

Check out more images from the spread in the Gallery

There’s also video of the girls posing for the spread here

Source: Necole Bitchie.com 

Posted in: Fashion,Haute Mess,hot mess,Magazine,Vogue