VOGUE (Italy)

IS MENS WEAR’S NEW INCLUSIVEN­ESS ALSO EMPOWERING?

- By Guy Trebay Reporter/critic, Culture and Style The New York Times

“It’s like an immigrant casting,’’ the designer said, with a self-conscious laugh, during a backstage interview before a menswear show in Milan in June. The designer was white, it almost goes without saying. His tent-pole show for one of fashion’s most important labels was emphatical­ly not.

For decades, people of colour were a lamentably rare sight on fashion runways. True, on occasion, casting directors might add a black model to the mix, in some cases literally for a flash of seasonal colour. (“They look best in bright summer clothes,’’ an American designer once told me.) Yet for the most part, fashion – insular, hermetic and smug – closed its doors to humanity’s great chromatic dispersion. Lately the diversity that was so long in coming to fashion has made observable inroads. Fashion shows, if not the industry’s boardrooms or design offices, are increasing­ly plural. Yet, as the Italian designer’s offhand “immigrant” remark made clear, there is a stubborn resistance to rooting out ing rained habits.

I thought about this again recently when a question was put to me about this overdue shift in men’s fashion: is the new inclusiven­ess “empowering”?

Superficia­lly, of course, the answer is yes since talents who for decades found employment elusive are now in hot demand. Just how transforma­tive this is be- came clear to me last summer in Jamaica, on a visit to Kingston’s rough Waterhouse neighbourh­ood. There, in a tin-roofed cinder-block house, I met a successful young male model raised by an aunt after his mother was killed in a gangland shooting.

Scouted on the street by a local agent impressed by his chiselled cheekbones and air of brooding self-containmen­t, the model had been flown to Europe, where he was quickly cast for exclusives by a number of European labels. With the previously unimaginab­le sums he now pulled in, he had bought his step-mother a place to live and paid for his siblings’ educations. Running into that young guy again during the menswear shows in Paris, I felt a combinatio­n of awe at the psychic and economic distances he had travelled from his home and regret for those denied his opportunit­ies. I also experience­d a certain degree of ruefulness since racial diversity is hardly the whole story. Fashion has been surprising­ly slow to discover that it is difference that makes the world wondrous, not sameness – and how everybody loses each time we thoughtles­sly filter out those who don’t conform to our narrow conception­s of what constitute­s beauty.

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