Cross-Cultural Exploitation
Interesting comparison to find between the cordaid campaign images presented few days ago and this fashion spread from Vogue playing on the same kind of "luxury VS poverty" image shock value.
While the message communicated is fundamentally different... Cordaid wanting to make us confront our "needs" to their "needs" & Vogue using people as props to contrast with the product they are trying to sell... judgement, in terms of art direction is suddenly facing a dilemma it rarely encounters: "moral values".
Visually, the difference are not so obvious between the 2 sets of photographs... but with a little deduction we can imagine how it went down.
For Cordaid, just by looking at the pause of each model, we clearly see that some precise work went on to capture some of the ridiculous situation we often see in fashion commercial. We can imagine the discussion with the model, showing him some of these magazine images, testing & imitating various pause and various angle... &... most importantly, explaining exactly why and how the photographs are being made & how they will be presented.
With Vogue, we do not see any indications of such dialogue & exchange going on. We can imagine a small team of photographer, assitant & stylist asking around in the street, paying few rupees equal to a month salary to some of their encounters asking them to wear these accessories for an "impromtptu" photoshoot. The photographs are taken from far away, positioning the viewer as a tourist... and not part of their life. The man modeling the burberry umbrella looks like a revival of pre-colonialist imagery. The girl left behind a baby in Fendi bub, looks a living dead with the deep shadow on her eyes.
To illustrate the mind set at Vogue, here some commentaries by their editors collected by the New York Times:
Vogue India editor Priya Tanna’s message to critics of the August shoot: “Lighten up,” she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the “power of fashion” she said, and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,” she said.
“You have to remember with fashion, you can’t take it that seriously,” Ms. Tanna said. “We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world,” she said.
... So in other words, let's all of wait for the "power of fashion" to transcend our economical inequalities... that we are not in the business to solve anyway.
I am left wondering what kind of other interest they may have in the human race, beside using a certain category of people as "human background" and profiting from the other category able to afford what they print.
To keep it fair, Vogue did exactly the same mistake in my view as Cordaid. They both did not show any kind of interest in who these people are or giving a little bit of background. It is spectacularly cynical with Vogue of course sending the message "we do not know them and we do not want to know them".
Crossing-culture is a tight rope excercise and when shallowness drives the initial concept, while living in the "hub" world of fashion, editors & art directors better not even start to try.
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“You have to remember with fashion, you can’t take it that seriously,” Ms. Tanna said. “We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world,” she said.
• "Fashion is no longer a rich man's privilege" ... except for the rich man's pricing.
• “We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world” ... we were trying to sell stuff.
• "Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful" ... because we can airbrush away the open sores and digitally plump the half-starved faces ... and hunger SO brings up the cheekbones, dahling!