The Today Show Talks Italian Vogue
To be completely honest, the extent of my news watching is having it on in the background while chatting with my parents— most of the time the volume is so low we can’t even hear it. It bores me to no end, and after about 30 minutes you’ve heard all the news stories, and they’re just talking about the same stuff over again. I do, however, quite obviously, read many, many other blogs, and luckily they watch the news or at least know someone who does. While scoping out the blog Model Liberation, I stumble upon a clip from the Today Show talking about the epic all black Italian Vogue.
I know this topic is sort of beaten to death, especially in the blogging world. We’ve been talking about the pros and cons for months, and yesterday Fashionista even posted scans of the entire issue on their site— though I haven’t seen them because the load time is so slow and the files are so large it keeps freezing my browser, joy!
Back to the issue at hand, The Today Show brought Veronica Webb, Jerri DeVard, and Neal Hamil on the show to discuss the issue (I’m thinking that’s a double entendre in this case). Among the many fantastic points brought up in this interview, they landed on the discussion of the ads in the magazine being predominately white. It would have been insane for the magazine to ask all the designers to re-shoot their campaigns with black models, so I never really thought about the ad factor. Now that I think about it, I sort of find the conflicting nature of the ads and the content funny. However, I’m not sure what would be an acceptable median for advertising diversity. That’s the problem with focusing on race instead of clothes, there will never be an end to this situation.
My favorite ideas from the interview:
- People have to vote with their dollars!
- Veronica compared having more black models on the runway to a trend like miniskirts. (Its so true though!)
- Get more diversity in the photography, designing, hairstyling, magazine, etc. fields
- WE HAVE TO BE CONDITIONED TO SEE BEAUTY! (this is the truest statement I’ve heard in a while.)
What do you guys think about this interview? Did you like it or are the just beating a dead horse?
