Or are they pretty much cool with being annually called out on their racism? Or do they just do it for the free publicity? (If that’s the case, sorry for contributing.)

Once again, Vanity Fair‘s big ol’ “The Newest/Coolest/Freshest/Hottest People You Should Look At Right Now” cover, which is almost always a fold-out, puts all the people of color on the folded part that you can’t see on newsstands. AGAIN. Jezebel breaks down their history of it, with photographic evidence:

In 2008, it was Zoë Saldana and America Ferrera.
…
2005: Rosario Dawson, Ziyi Zhang and Kerry Washington, on the right and not the left.
2004: Salma Hayek and Lucy Liu, on the right and not the left power panel.
…
In 2001, no black ladies were pushed aside because no black ladies were photographed!

But it’s so, so worth the outrage to see those 1995 and 1996 covers, right? (No, seriously, go look.)

12 replies on “Do They Actually Never Learn?”

  4. Is it naive to suggest that perhaps the photographers were more concerned with the overall composition of the single photo?

    (I’m actually being sincere — I wonder if the photogs considered the folds as they were framing their shots? I have no idea at all of how these things are executed.)

  5. @4 – It is a bit naive, yes. So much consideration went into who was placed where, and where those people would end up on the page. This process involved the photographer, but also several layers of direction above him all the way up to the King of Vanity Fair, or whatever their leader is called.

    I don’t think there’s a deliberate bias against black people going on here, but it would do them a lot of good to look at this pattern and reconsider whom they think to be cover material.

  7. There probably aren’t a whole lot of brown-skinned people buying Vanity Fair – especially in the northeast (which is all these people know or care about).

  8. I expect there is deliberate bias, not about the photographers/designers/publishers working on the cover, but about what sales/marketing wants. Brown skin apparently equals fewer newsstand sales for magazines–whether that brown skin is on a celebrity or on a model. This is widely quoted about fashion mags at any rate–while Vanity Fair isn’t quite in that category, I bet a lot of the demographics are similar.
    It’s really dramatic seeing it on the fold-out covers. Normally, the closest is just seeing the all-white faces on the covers, then paging through to spot an occasional brown face in an ad or editorial spread.

  9. @4/5: It’s also likely the case that rather than trying to coordinate all the schedules to get one photo shoot, they did several photo shoots and composited in post-production. Anyone doing a cover shoot for a magazine like Vanity Fair’s best selling/most heavily advertised issue of the year knows to make the photo subservient to type and fold placement.

Comments are closed.