White celebrity poses on naked 'Black Woman' chair. Ugh.

We’re scratching our heads over how it didn’t occur to someone – ANYONE – at this shoot that depicting white dominance might not be such a good idea.

Online magazine, Buro 24/7, has run an image of a Russian socialite perched atop a chair made of a bound black woman. And they’re run it on the day that America is celebrating Martin Luther King’s activism against racial discrimination.

Street style darling Miroslava Duma runs Buro 24/7 and the Russian heiress, and editor of Garage magazine, photographed is Dasha Zhukova. As Jezebel points out, Zhurkova was educated in the US and as a daughter of a Russian oil magnate and an American professor, she really should know better.

One commenter on Buro 24/7 said: “Lost all respect for you Mira and The Buro247 team.”

“YOU ARE DISGUSTING! How can you publish, let alone DO such a thing!!! That photo needs to be taken down &you need to apologize-first to the model and then to the rest of the world!!!” said another.

“Seriously…as women we should fight together against violence against us but not encourage it. This is not art!! Demoralizing a woman’s body especially a BLACK woman. I wonder how you will feel if the races were reversed,” said Essi Emnia.

The accompanying interview, which when translated from Russian using Google translate so maybe we’re missing something, doesn’t allude to any reason why Zhukova would be sitting on this controversial sculpture.

By way of explanation an administrator for Buro 24/7 left a comment along the lines of ‘Because: ART’:

“Dear readers,

The chair Daria is sitting on is sculpture by British pop-artist Allen Jones, who is best known for sexually provocative sculptures like Chair, Table and Hat Stand (1969), which present the female figure as a piece of furniture. He worked on a tree-dimensional illusionism with obvious erotic and fetish components. To celebrate his 70th birthday Tate Britain presented best Allen Jones’s works: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/jones-chair-t03244”

Sure, the Tate presented a retrospect of the artist’s work, but a gallery is a very context to constructing a narrative in a fashion image. Jones’ work is from the Pop Art era, and the world is a very different place to what it was 45 years ago.

As the eagle eyes over at Jezebel noticed, once the image was picked up by website, Fashion Bomb Daily, Miroslava Duma deleted the image from her Instagram and Buro 24/7 cropped the images so that you could only see a pair of black heels randomly poking out from the bottom right of the image.

As Claire on Fashion Bomb Daily says it best, “The art and fashion industries are the few bastions of society where blatant racism and ignorance are given the greenlight in the name of creativity.
This must stop.”

What was your reaction to Buro 247’s editorial?

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