Minority Groups and Fashion Term Paper

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Unintentional Appropriation in Cultures

The cultural appropriation concept of using another culture's symbol, genres, artifacts, rituals, or technologies, as per Rogers is just inescapable when two of them had to meet at a certain point of time. This includes both the virtual as well as the representational contacts. Such appropriations involve in exploiting the marginalized and colonized cultures and help in the survival of subordinated cultures. Their resistance to dominant cultures is also quite visible. According Rogers, the definition of cultural appropriation is the association of one culture to another and ends their own culture. This imitation or borrow tactic might have been done unintentionally to deconstruct or distort one's culture and this is a form of appropriation. [footnoteRef:1] [1:. Ibid., 476]

We can even say that the Cultural appropriation as an active process that represents the meaning as 'taking'. However, cultural appropriation does not include the mere exposures to music or film of other cultures. It always speaks about 'making others as their one's own' under a certain or various conditions. This has different functions and outcomes as per the requirement. There are certain factors that affect the degree to which such individual or cultural appropriation happens. Some of them are the symmetry or asymmetry of power relations, role in domination or resistance, cultural boundaries, factors such as 'shape' or 'shaped by'. [footnoteRef:2] [2:. Ibid., 476]

The word cultural appropriation has a certain denotation among the people of America. The distinction between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange is blurring quickly. This kind of appropriation manifests mainly because of high fashion and people feel privileged to generalize or stereotype those. In most of the cases, the appropriation happens without knowing the significance of the culture but it is a 'just for' kind. Often, we can see it as the livelihood of marginalized communities by the concept 'just clothes', 'just hair', or 'just slang'. [footnoteRef:3] [3:. Ibid., 476]

The Fashion Industry

According to Wissinger, the quantitative data of employment rates of the black models versus the white models are scarce. The reports often glean data from journalistic sources or anecdote. Sometime in the early 1990s, the U.S. bureau of Labor started tracking the number of 'product promoters, models, and demonstrators'. Also, they have started categorizing as per the race or the gender.

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Though the media has created an attention for racial discrimination in hiring the models, the industry does not support a reliable statistical data of the racial constitution of the modeling workforce. [footnoteRef:4] [4:. Elizabeth A. Wissinger, This Year's Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour (New York: NYU Press, 2011): 217]

Media reports reflect the fact that the employment rate of black models is lower than the models of other color on the catwalks and in the magazines. Though this data does not refer to an authoritative source, it has truth in it. Almost 35% of fashion shows being held in New York's fashion week have no colored-models and it was reported in the fashion periodical Women's Wear daily in the fall of 2007. Around 18% of the runway displayed black models the following year, a 6% improvement over the previous year. The slight improvement also paved the way for the famous issue of Italian Vogue that devoted an issue to black models to draw an attention to the color imbalance. The statistics regarding the race or ethnicity of other modeling professionals is also scarce. Some of the modeling professionals are model agents, or the editors, designers, photographers and the hair and make-up professionals who work with models. When we consider the overall modeling industry, the level of black employment is a negligible proportion as a representation of the population. [footnoteRef:5] [5:. Ibid., 218]

The Model Look

As per Wissinger, the glamor labor of a model has to commodify their looks to match the ever-changing whims of the clients. However, looks are not completely arbitrary and they are governed by a system of "types." A "type" is referred to as a euphemism for a combination of qualities such as gender, age, ethnicity, and appearance. They often racially defined although they are not declared explicitly. A client who is looking for an "exotic" type or an "all-American" model, uses the language such as a model of color or a blue-eyed blond. Other definitions of models are based on shape or experience in their profession such as "in development," "new faces," runway models, commercial models, high-board or high-level models (they get top fees). They also often look for men, children, etc. Historically, in the United States market,.....

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