The good thing about what’s happening in the fashion industry right now is that people everywhere are getting critical of the norms that have been in place for a long time. Photoshopping, retouching, and airbrushing practices are being challenged, and women with actual curves are being presented in many campaigns, like ads for Dove and Aerie. But we still have a long way to go and there are so many creative things people in the fashion industry can do to shake up the traditional (often problematic) ideals of beauty, femininity, and sex appeal.
Enter the urban modeling world. If you’ve ever watched VH1’s Love & Hip Hop series, chances are you’ve come across someone who works in urban modeling. King magazine, Black Men magazine — you may not think highly of these publications, but there’s something different about the way models (typically models of color) are portrayed in these magazines. Tahiry, one of the cast members of Love & Hip Hop, is successful as an urban model because 1.) she’s gorgeous, and 2.) she’s got an unbelievable body. This is pretty much typical in the fashion world, except that the definition of “unbelievable body” is vastly different for models of color.
Case in point:
therealtahiry/instagram
What’s great about Tahiry‘s body is that even though her figure is stunning and she works hard to keep that waistline so tiny there’s something far more practical about a woman who looks like this, versus what we typical see in high fashion. If more women like Tahiry could be taken out of the limited and limiting box of urban modeling, people would be far less critical of the fashion industry’s portrayal of women. For many of us, there is no one, single type of body we want to see in the pages of magazines or on the runway. The point is to see variation in a world that is currently very … monotonous. A real lack of diversity (on many levels) exists in the fashion industry (as it does in many aspects of our society) and an infiltration from the urban modeling world could absolutely change that for the better.
