Travel & Humanitarian Photos
There’s no such thing as bad publicity they say. If that’s true then the publishers of India Vogue must be delighted with the reception that their latest edition is receiving around the world.
Vogue have published a 16-page photo spread featuring luxury designer clothing items, modelled not by the skinny models that we’re used to seeing in such magazines but by relatively very poor local people.
In this picture a toothless woman is seen walking along a street or perhaps through a market carrying a baby who’s wearing a $100 bib by Fendi. In another shot an equally toothless man holds a $200 Burberry umbrella whilst in a third picture a woman on a motorbike has a $10,000 Hermès bag on her wrist.
Unsurprisingly, the article has met with some very negative publicity. It’s not quite on a par with Benetton using a picture of a dying Aids patient to sell jumpers but it’s certainly in the same ball park.
You could argue that it’s preferable to see real people in magazines rather than size-zero models and I have some sympathy with that view. You could also ask why shouldn’t ordinary people be free to walk around with designer goods and I’d say that I think they should be able to if that’s they really want. The point though is this: it’s not only distasteful it’s vulgar. I honestly don’t know where to begin.
It’s clearly taking advantage of people for whom a Hermès bag is unlikely ever to be a necessity. With images from flood-struck Bihar playing on the TV as I type this, it seems unbelievable to think that at some point a person, the picture editor at Vogue I assume, who we might suspect of possessing a modicum of intelligence, would have seen the pitch for the photo shoot and declared “Yes, poor people in designer clothes, it’s a sure-fire winner”.
I’m watching images of people fighting to get into a rubber dinghy in Bihar. They’ve been stranded for a week with little in the way of shelter and barely enough food. The dinghy is dangerously over-loaded as people grapple to get off their shrinking island. There’s not a Burberry umbrella in sight.
I just hope that Vogue is encouraging its designer label advertisers to support disaster relief efforts in Bihar. Indeed, I hope it’s insisting upon it. I’d really like to see pictures in the next edition of Vogue India showing representatives from Hermès, Gucci, Alexander McQueen and all those other designers that were featured in the spread paddling canoes filled with building materials, medical equipment and food supplies into Bihar. How refreshing it would be to see these designers showing an understanding of what life is really like for the majority of people in India rather than using them as conveniently colourful clothes-horses.
The New York Times reports that 456 million Indians live on less than $1.25 a day. Could there be anything more ignorant and arrogant than showing a man in that kind of situation holding a Burberry umbrella?
I’ll stop there because I fear that I’m really going to go off on one and there’s a chance that I may be spoiling my chances of being commissioned by Vogue.
I notice that my friend Tewfic has also posted about the same Vogue feature on his blog where he calls the editors of Vogue India “mindless twits”. As ever, Tewfic is the master of the understated phrase.