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Vogue Gives $200 Umbrella to India's Poor, Snaps a Photo and Quickly Gets in the Car

Posted by Nicole Pasulka

 

This is a photo from the August issue of Vogue India. It shows a man from Rajasthan in India holding a $200 Burberry umbrella. The woman has an Etro bag. It's probably safe to assume the models in these photos cannot afford a $200 umbrella and would have the good sense not to buy one if they could. But, it looks like Vogue figured using average Indians to model expensive good would make a pretty picture, or at least be cleverly tongue-in-cheek.

Obviously, not everyone agrees. 

There’s nothing “fun or funny” about putting a poor person in a mud hut in clothing designed by Alexander McQueen, [Kanika Gahlaut, a columnist for the daily newspaper Mail Today] said in a telephone interview. “There are farmer suicides here, for God’s sake” she said, referring to thousands of Indian farmers who have killed themselves in the last decade because of debt.

Vogue editor Priya Tanna's defense:

Vogue is about realizing the “power of fashion” she said, and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,” she said.

We are all about the message that the trappings of wealth and power are no longer just available to those with wealth and power. But in order for that to be a convincing message, you'd actually have to redistribute wealth and power.  Photographing supposed "have nots" with $10,000 handbags does not send the message that fashion is for everyone, it reinforces the message that very few of India's 1.2 billion people have access to luxury goods (shit, plenty of people don't have access to enough food). The photo's conceit "works" because you'd never see this in real life--not because you should, or could as Priya Tanna claims. 

While this is definitely not the first time regular folks have been appropriated for the profit and amusement of privileged readers, viewers, visitors, etc., to do so in the interest of selling useless, over-priced crap is even more infuriating.


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Comments

thea said:

Actually they're using the people to accessorize the clothes. The bag's got sort of ethnic patchwork and beading, so the wizened old Indian couple with the teeth and nose and eyebrows set it off excellently. Models' identities are usually diminished in service to the items advertised but this is a little tasteless, especially whatserface's totally disingenuous comment about high fashion not just being for the rich. Um, ok, you can have your diffusion lines and mass proliferation of the tacky Coach and LV bags on every middle-class suburbanite arm, but Fashion (as opposed to style) really is all about $$$$.

Forget about food for a sec; lots of Indians don't even have running H20 and latrines. Not having a place to shit is a big, big public health issue because it leads to the spread of dyptheria, E. coli, etc etc. Diseases that could-should be GONE just with some very basic technology and modern sanitaion.

Seriously, who cares about the umbrella. The print's too big anyway. Bhopal's still all Superfund, the truly EVIL man who let that happen is still on the loose at a ripe & randy 87 years... I hope they paid their models comparably to the willowy sylphs that usually grace their pages and I look forward to seeing child factory workers posing with the handbags whose parts they assembled. Now that editorial could be truly tongue-in-cheek, meta and dark. Way too much so for Vogue, naturally.

September 4, 2008 1:48 AM

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