Rick Owens at Paris Fashion Week: Use of black women's step team instead of models sets back diversity
OPINION - His Paris Fashion Week show is an example of cultural appropriation on par with the recent acts of Miley Cyrus, who many in the mainstream accused of using black women as props at the 2013 Video Music Awards...
Understanding step in context
Understanding these ironic reversals in black performance arts comes from cultural and personal experience of these arts as an expression of double consciousness. The point of this form of perceiving life is that you are only capable of attaining it if you have had to stand on the outside of society looking in.
Those in the audience at Rick Owens’ Spring 2014 Paris Fashion Week Show are, by contrast, the ultimate insiders. They certainly lacked (for the most part) the double consciousness than enables one to truly understand that bad can be good, and that showing “grit,” which is the steppers’ term for “thizz-face,” hardly makes one angry. It’s a sign of being playfully determined.
The fact that many media outlets insisted on referring to how “angry” the models’ faces looked underscored the mainstream media’s misinterpretation and preoccupation with black female anger, as opposed to their positive expression of power. And yet, bloggers and editors seemed oddly titillated by the elite glamour of Paris during Fashion week being bombarded with live specimens from black culture, full of authenticity, alleged “anger,” and the incipient danger of it all. One writer even referred to the women performing in fashionable outfits as a stampede, as if these skilled dancers were mere animals acting out of instinct.
When black women are portrayed as overly agitated, ferocious, unkempt, or animalistic, it is an affront to black beauty. Like all women, black women want to feel happy, sexy, alluring, maintained, elegant and beautiful: all the ways white women are portrayed in contemporary fashion photo and runway productions.
Black models and their allies, particularly fashion activist Bethann Hardison, have been asking for inclusion on the basis that black women are beautiful, not show ponies used for a thematic presentation that ups the thrill factor of a one-off show.
The opposite of black beauty?
Owens’ show was the opposite of dignifying black beauty. Instead of speaking to Hardison’s recent calls for greater inclusion on the runway with more professional black models on his stage, this step show seemed to say, “Look at these snarling, full-figured, stomping women. How ironic that they’re wearing designer clothes. But they’re black!”
The presentation seemed to mock true diversity at black womens’ expense. And some people just didn’t think the stepping itself was very good, perhaps due to the context, and the moves being watered down.
I can appreciate Rick Owens’ creativity, based in industrial, subversive aesthetics. But stepping is not his culture to appropriate. As a consumer, I know that it is appropriation, and that it is inauthentic.
Cultural appropriation must end
This show is an example of cultural appropriation on par with the recent acts of Miley Cyrus, who many in the mainstream accused of using black women as props at the 2013 Video Music Awards. If the wrongful assimilation and skewed interpretation of black women’s bodies and dance styles upset you then, Owens’ show should upset you now.
Respect for black beauty will not achieved by appropriated inclusion. It requires acknowledgement and respect for how black women see themselves, not picking and choosing elements of their experience and presenting them out of context for good publicity.
We don’t know Owens’ true intentions, which were perhaps positive. But the misinterpretation of the press — which sees this show as an example of positive inclusion — only shows how his choice to use a black women’s step team has confused the fashion world regarding the need for diversity.
This is an obfuscation we should not take lightly, even though it was not Owens’ intent.
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