Representation Matters : Recent FashionPhotography and Non-PerformativeDiversity
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
Recent Fashion Photography and Non-Performative Diversity Veronica Pesantes As a teenager growing up in Dallas, Texas in the pre-internet era I spent countless hours combing through fashion magazines, yet nobody ever looked like me. I emigrated to the US from Ecuador with my mother at the age of five. When she told me we were headed to the United States I asked her if that meant I would have blond hair and blue eyes when we moved? Somehow in Ecuador, by age four, I had already internalised Western beauty standards as seen in the movies, cartoons, and dubbed ads that featured models who matched that very Western criteria. In Ecuador when someone gave birth to a lighter-skin child people remarked that they were "mejorarando la raza'' translated as "bettering the race."
And as a child in Texas when I accompanied my mother anywhere I begged her not to speak to me in Spanish, saldy, I had internalized shame. Now I thank her daily for my ability to shift between two languages and cultures, a product of living with my grandmother in Ecuador during the summers. Growing up in the US there were only two, maybe three Latinx kids in my entire school, and it was not until much later that I understood that being bicultural is a privilege. I wish I had seen more Latinas represented in media during all those hours of TV sitcom viewing as a kid. As a Gen X “latchkey” kid I learned English thanks to 1970 after-school PBS programing available in the U.S. My parents were at work when I returned form school, but I had these ground-breaking TV shows to teach me English and keep me company. But aside from Maria on Sesame Street nobody else looked like me on these shows. Later, as a teenager, none of the fashion models I emulated were Latinas either. And this is why representation, whether in TV, movies, politics, Academia, or on the cover of Vogue, matters. While Fashion Photography has become more diverse, when I was growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s this was not the case. For young girls, collective ideas of beauty were nurtured by what they saw on magazine covers. Today, on the internet, celebrities and social media shape beauty standards, and if these industries mainly promote thin white women photographed by men, then as a collective we are left with a pretty narrow and distorted idea of what constitutes beauty.
