The issue of race comes up a lot in discussions of modeling, and a lot of misinformation gets written about it. Age and sex (gender, to misuse the term as it is commonly misused) don't get discussed much at all, but they should.
Fashion
If jobs were given to models on the basis of their distribution in the population, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But advertisers are less interested in population numbers than in the portion of the market for their product that each ethnic group represents, and in how to reach that portion with their message. The fashion world has struggled with these issues.
Fashion advertising through the 1970s and beyond mostly used Caucasian models. There are many reasons. One undoubtedly was racial stereotyping. Fashion ads are designed to create an association between the brand and whatever people aspire to. Designers viewed white women as “higher class,” setting the pattern for emulation by others, so it was natural, if not desirable, that they should choose white models almost exclusively. They reasoned that if their labels could achieve prestige and desirability, the ethnic minorities would be brought along with everyone else.
Another reason was the perception that African-Americans were not a significant market for high-end apparel, despite their numbers in the population. It remains true that the median household income of African Americans is substantially less than Caucasians, a fact not lost on the fashion houses. Only in relatively recent times have two additional demographic facts become understood: African Americans spend nearly a third more than Caucasians on apparel as a percentage of their income; and African Americans tend to form brand loyalties much earlier and more strongly than Caucasians. As the advertising industry came to appreciate those facts, the African-American market segment seemed suddenly more important.
There remains the problem of how to reach it. African-Americans are hardly a unitary bloc when it comes to purchasing power. Urban/Hip Hop lines like Baby Phat and Sean John may appeal to a part of it, but that portion of African-American consumers who might purchase Calvin Klein, Donna Karan (or even Tracy Reese) is little impressed by the hip-hop approach. There remains a debate as to whether it is best to advertise through African-American oriented magazines and media, or through more general-interest media.
In the last decade there has been an increasing trend to use African Americans in magazine editorials and covers and as runway models. High-profile models like Imam and Tyra Banks have shown that black models can be attractive to white audiences, and models like Alek Wek have changed the perception that black models have to have light skin and European features to be seen as beautiful. Even so, although there are no authoritative numbers available, the perception remains that African-Americans are under-used by fashion designers.
Designers are not the only important source of fashion advertising, though. If the designer sets the “national” tone for use of models, retailers set the regional and local pattern. In recent decades they have become much more willing to use minority models in their advertising, although the distribution changes depending on the local demographic. A mall store in Bangor, Maine is more likely than one in Atlanta to use Caucasians in its advertising. But overall, from about the middle of the 1990s on the number of African Americans used in retailer fashion ads has approached their distribution in the population.
The situation is different in the other “major minorities”. Hispanics are more fragmented than African Americans, since they may share a common home country language, but they come from many countries and different cultures. Hispanic is also not a “race” and many Hispanics are cross-identified (or see themselves) as Caucasian. Finally, even though they are numerically about the same as African Americans, they spend a smaller percentage of their household income on apparel, and their brand identification is weaker. It has been easy for advertisers to treat them as simply another kind of Caucasian, perhaps advertise in Spanish-language media, and leave it at that.
Asians present a different problem. As a group they represent only a small portion of the US population (roughly 3%). But there really is no such thing as an “Asian group”. They are primarily Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, and each of those differs markedly from the others. What you do to target one with advertising doesn’t work well for the others, and using a Korean model may not improve your label’s desirability with Japanese.
There are other issues as well. Asians tend to be shorter than Caucasians, and to have relatively long torsos and short arms and legs. That is precisely the opposite of the “fashion model” mold. If Caucasian and African fashion models are something of a rarity, recruiting slim, 5’10” long-legged Asian girls as models has proved a challenge for the agencies. It’s hard to have a large number of them on the roster – and when they are there to chase 1-3% of the market, it’s hard to justify the effort. Needless to say, fashion advertising tends not to overachieve in using Asian models.
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07-11-2007, 06:08 PM
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