Vogue India

Vogue India

MEMO TO ANNA WINTOUR
Dear Anna: I'm Outsourcing Your Job To Vogue India. 8 Pictures That Explain Why…
Anna: Trust you're having a merry Fourth. Please don't let what I'm about to say put too much of a damper on it. Listen, you've been impeccable these past 20 years. You're British, everyone fears you, there was that movie, etc. etc. And let's face it: in your absence, everyone who works here will probably start eating again and that's bad for health insurance premiums. But when in the course of human events you have to cut off the clothing allowance of an old paramour, well…you give them the good news first! It's not Carine. No, I'm actually giving your job to Priya Tanna, the editor of Vogue India. Have you ever looked at Vogue India? I hadn't either, really, but the other day I was in Bombay or Mumbai or whatever they're calling it these days for a business meeting and it occurred to me that the whole reason we have ceded so much of the old "service economy" to them is that they know English there, and if they know English I might be able to read their magazines, not that stylish prose was the first thing on my mind when I walked into the newsstand and found myself face to face with the most fucking wildly gorgeous specimen of femininity I have ever seen. It not being some overspackled underfreckled overexposed celebublonde, it took me awhile to process that it was Vogue I was looking at.

See, all this time I'd been assuming the developing countries would always imitate the useless consumption fads and phony neuroses that comprise the sorry substitute for purpose we call "lifestyle" around here. Otherwise, what is the West even good for? Well, funny you should ask, because I have an answer for that: nothing. We are good for nothing. Because I opened the fucking magazine, Anna. I couldn't not open it. And in a few flips of the page I almost regained my belief in something I should know better than anyone is a cynical con designed to sell shit to insecure women and perpetuate a lucrative unending cycle of the creation of new wants, which is to say: beauty. Beauty, of all things! Seriously, I was surprised as you. But check her out.

Vogue Italy launches all-black issue

Vogue Italy launches all-black issue

29th June 2008, 10:07 WST

She insists racism has nothing to do with it, but admits the world of fashion has a predilection for Eastern European models with their "blonde hair and long legs."
"Of course they are very beautiful, but they also kind of look all alike," said Franca Sozzani, editor of the magazine, Vogue Italia.

During her 20 years in charge of style-bible Vogue's Italian edition, Sozzani has earned a reputation for a culture-savvy take on cutting-edge elegance.

In the past, Vogue Italia has focused on topics the fashion industry, it would seem, prefers to ignore, including the growing use of plastic surgery.

Few however, were prepared for Sozzani's most audacious move to date: the July 2008 issue of her magazine which features a cast exclusively made up of black models, including actors and music industry stars.

The idea, Sozzani told Deutsche Presse-Agentur DPA in a recent interview, first took shape a year ago during a conversation with supermodel Naomi Campbell, one of the few non-white models who has managed to emerge and dominate the catwalk over the last decade.

"Then I was in the US for Super Tuesday," she said, referring to the Democratic Party presidential primary showdown in February.

The event catapulted black candidate Barack Obama ahead of the then favourite, Hillary Clinton, and into the spot of top contender.

"We saw something was changing, so we said, 'why don't we try to do the same?'" Sozzani explained.

Stressing however, that US politics was not the only source of inspiration, she added: "There was also the wish to offer space to another type of beauty."

Back in Milan, Sozzani set about transforming her American dream into reality with the help of celebrity photographer Steven Meisel, known for his work with Madonna in the 1992 book Sex.

Established supermodels including Alek Wek, Iman, Tyra Banks and Campbell were chosen, along with emerging faces like Jourdan Dunn.

Their images and those of others grace the 170 pages of the magazine which goes on sale next week in Italy and abroad.

Still, while American voters may be ready for a black president, are magazine buyers in Italy, or elsewhere for that matter, drawn, to pictures of non-white models?

British-born Campbell, a former girlfriend of Italian Formula One manager Flavio Briatore, enjoys diva-like status in Italy, but in Milan as in New York, London and Paris, black models a rarely seen on the catwalk. They are rarer still on magazine covers.

A long-held view in marketing circles is that advertising agency clients are reluctant to associate their products with non-white models for fear of alienating affluent consumers in the West. Campbell has been vocal in claiming that black models face growing discrimination.

In 2007, she repeatedly accused the British edition of Vogue of subscribing to the view that non-white models don't sell, and revealed that she made the cover of French Vogue, only after the late designer Yves Saint Laurent had threatened to break off relations with the magazine unless it featured her.

"A precise choice like this one always has its risks," Sozzano told DPA of her decision to publish Vogue Italia's "all-black" issue.

"People can like it or they can hate it. I personally think they will like it ... Obama's 'wave' has also been felt over here."

DPA
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