It matters if it´s black or white

Lara Stone gets ¨blackfaced" for French Vogue

Lara Stone get blacked and whitened in French Vogue

Lara Stone gets whitened in French Vogue

The truth is this: there is very little in fashion that is new. It´s the usual merry-go-round of rehashed ideas that need to be made desirable, because, as Roland Barthes wrote, the idea of fashion needs to be kept going in order for the industry to survive. If fashion didn´t exist, we would buy clothes less frequently, with catastrophic effects. Think of the billions of pounds, dollars, euros, yen or whatever that exchange hands every year because of fashion. Without it there would be only clothes. There would be no must-haves, no pieces to die for .. just plain old clothes.

With so little that is new around, it is now - more than it has ever been - up to the image makers to create some excitement about what is essentially unexciting. Bored of showing the same old dress on a different model? Yes!! So, let´s turn the shirt into a skirt, or make the model a man, or a child ... Anything to make it look new.

Now let´s for a minute imagine ourselves in the Vogue headquarters in Paris. There´s a brainstorming session going on, and the brains are storming to see how they´re going to make some essentially same-old clothes look interesting.  "Eureka" cries the editor Mme. Roitfield - the woman responsible for making French Vogue the Vogue of Vogues (formerly it was Franca Sozzani at Vogue Italia, but that´s gone downhill of late), "why don't we use Lara (Stone, the dutch model to who Roitfield recently dedicated a whole issue!), and paint her black, or white, or black or white? .... We can get Steven (Klein) to photograph it". Pens and notepads fall onto the floor, jaws drop. The excitment is palpable. "Mais c'est genial!" the rest of the table cries in unison. "Cést cool, non?" Madame L'editrix has come up trumps again.

Fast forward to October, the pictures are published, and Roitfield is caught in a maelstrom. The World Wide Web is in overdrive and she is branded a racist for allegedly 'blackfacing' Stone and reinforcing a negative stereotype.

But is that really so? To be honest, if I´d seen the spread with no knowledge of the uproar, the idea of racism wouldn´t have entered my mind, and I´m usually quite up for calling someone a racist/bigot/homophobe/xenophobe/whateverist-otophobe when necessary. In fact, my only thought was, "Ok, they're doing Keith Haring/Jean Paul Goude/Grace Jones again"(which to my knowledge never ended up in any race debates)

Jean Paul Goude whitens Grace

Keith Haring whitens Grace

It seems like I´m in the minority on this one.