Now that the fashion frenzy of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week has settled, it’s pertinent to note that the inaugural Australian Indigenous Fashion Week was also launched last Friday.
The event was designed to celebrate and promote the talents of Indigenous Australians in the field of fashion and design and as part of this, 18 young potential models were scouted from around the country.
As a former editor-in-chief and long time staffer of Vogue Australia, it caused me to reflect on the disquieting fact that only two Indigenous Australian models have ever appeared on the cover: the first, Queensland-based Elaine George in 1993 and the second, Samantha Harris in 2010.
Elaine was discovered at Dreamworld on the Gold Coast by photographer Grant Good, who sent test shots to the then editor of Vogue, Nancy Pilcher. Elaine was subsequently flown to Sydney and appeared on the September cover, garnering much publicity as Vogue’s first Indigenous cover girl and some criticism (even from Elaine’s elders) that she didn’t look dark enough.
Elegant and beautiful but extremely shy, Elaine quickly decided the demanding modeling world was not for her, and an Indigenous model would not feature in Vogue Australia again until Samantha Harris’s modeling card landed on my desk around 2009.
Was this due to inherent racism in the industry or a belief that the reader would not respond to an Indigenous face? I don’t think so. Had Samantha Harris, or any girl of her calibre popped up 10 years before, I would have put them in the magazine, as would most editors I know. Sam is one of the greatest beauties that Australia has ever produced.
Sales on both issues that featured these girls on the cover went up. Sam wore a Pucci dress and the designer, Peter Dundas, wrote me a note saying, “Thanks for the beautiful cover – you really get who the Pucci girl is!” I was so chuffed that he said this, unprompted, about an Indigenous girl.
Top Comments
Aboriginal women would be better off without getting involved in the social violence that is the fashion industry, subjecting every girl to the glorification of one specific kind of body-type, on every street, without any of our consent. Just shoving it in our faces everywhere. No matter what culture you come from, I think modelling is not something to be admired.
"Was this due to inherent racism in the industry or a belief that the reader would not respond to an Indigenous face? I don’t think so."
... Really? So you're putting the lack of successful women of colour in the modelling world down to apparent bad luck and mere under-representation? As the former editor-in-chief of Vogue, this assertion is at best naive and and worst completely spurious. Racism in Australian in general, let alone the fashion industry, is a huge problem, and placing the blame on some sort of mysterious lack of supply/exposure is not only a discredit to aspiring models from different races but seems to avoid the root of the problem entirely.
I absolutely agree with you, Alex. Thankfully, white Australian society is now at a stage where overt racism is outlawed and (hopefully) acted upon, but we are now at the stage where we need to consider the less obvious forms of racism in our culture. This included "unconscious racism", which is all the negative ideas and associations that we hold about non-white people (there is heaps of research on this). Another more subtle form of racism that we need to consider is are the inequalities of structure and opportunity that continue to exist for people with non-white skin, or people from different cultures and/or languages (again, there is lots of research on this).
It is uncomfortable to talk about these things, as we like to think we are a post-racial society. But we aren't (again, research) and we need to have these uncomfortable conversations about race, skin colour, and many other forms of privilege.