Issue 3 Issue 3 | Page 16

Page 16

As if the infamous Pepsi commercial didn’t paint Kendall Jenner in a bad enough light, she recently faced more backlash when she was featured on the front page of Vogue India for its tenth anniversary.

Some of you may think “Why is this a big deal? She’s a model, it’s her job to do photoshoots.”

Well, this isn’t just an ordinary photoshoot. It is the ten year anniversary for Vogue India, a magazine meant to celebrate brown women (who are already drastically underrepresented in the media), but instead they chose to feature a white woman on the cover.

The message Vogue India sends out by choosing to shoot with Jenner is “Let’s place a white woman on a cover of a magazine that is supposed to be representing South Asian achievements, culture, and heritage.”

There are plenty of other brown women who are more than deserving of this cover. Actresses Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone, or Sonam Kapoor all have expressed their appreciation and love for South Asian culture. Though Jenner may not have been directly responsible for choosing her photoshoots, she still has the final authority to approve one. She must have also anticipated backlash because she didn’t even promote the cover on her social media as she does for her other photoshoots.

There is a deeper underlying issue behind just choosing a white woman over an Indian one: colorism. Colorism is prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a darker skin tone, even though they’re in the same ethnic or racial group. South Asian women are rarely given any representation in the media, and when there is finally a successful magazine that is created BY and FOR South Asians, the glory is handed over to a white woman.

As someone who is South Asian, this was a chance for me to finally see some more representation, but I feel like Vogue India has failed. They should be showcasing the beauty of women with a darker skin complexion to represent the entire South Asian community. Due to lighter skin models always being chosen over darker ones, South Asian beauty standards have evolved into the idea that the lighter your skin color is, the more beautiful you are. Companies like Fair and Lovely target brown women’s insecurities and constantly tell them that they would be beautiful if only they used the company’s skin bleaching products.

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Vogue India Sparks Controversy

By Zunera Ashar

Imagine being a twelve year old girl constantly being told that in order to become beautiful, you must rid yourself of your own skin and become someone new.

In countries full of South Asian people, it would seem that there should be unique definitions of beauty based on their looks, but instead they still revolve around Eurocentric beauty standards set from the colonization one hundred years ago.

If bigger companies such as Vogue India started to recognize the beauty of darker skinned women, beauty standards would stop revolving around assimilating yourself with Eurocentric beauty standards and finally loving the skin you’re born in.

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Top: Kendall Jenner in Vogue India May 2017

Bottom: Deepika Padukone in Bajirao Mastani