Last week Cathy Horn, fashion writer for the New York Times, argued that the fashion world gets off the idea of pushing boundaries, when actually there aren't any to push (nothing new under the sun, Foucault said similar things about Western sexuality some fifty odd years ago), and uses Givenchy's latest advertisement featuring Stephen Thompson - an albino model - as an example.
Although he may never have produced melanin ever, seems like overall low melanin secretion isn't a bad thing when it comes to success in fashion. And Miu Miu's winter bleached eyebrows campaign, Lara Stone's pigments or Thompson's apparently just as melanin-less co-model in the ad aren't going against the phenomenon. Which got me into thinking why? What does white have that the other colours don't?
The study of colour value and colour perception is an old one that, with the advent of post-modernity's concerns for societal causes, went out of politically correct and academic style. For centuries this field followed Plato’s distinction between mind and body. Similarly to René Descartes' ideas, it was understood that the world of appearances was one of allusions as opposed to the world of thought in which ideal and universal forms existed. For Descartes accordingly the perception of colour was like any other experience of tangible substance: an automatic process itself worth studying but insignificant in the greater pursuit of selfhood and truth.
While this Cartesian dualism has received severe criticism because equating 'objective' colour seeing to 'physical' measurements (such as the Munsell chart, NeCoSyn or the Swedish Color System) excludes the less tangible implications informed by culture and context (problems of objectivity basically), the opposite end of the purely quantitive pendulum is close to a similar intellectual dead-end. What anthropologist Daniel Miller coined the tyranny of the word - a theoretical stand point in which all material things are studied and understood as projections of something else. As a result white doesn't 'just' exist in itself, it is standing in for something else - the biased aesthetic standard of a European colonizer, or the pre-pubescent innocence of childhood and birth (because of things like the 'universal' colour of breast milk and sperm). In other words these two approaches deny "the emotion and desire, the sensuality and danger and hence the expressive potential that colours possess themselves" (Young: 174). A kind of phenomenology of white.
What are the emotions attached to white? Albinos are killed in Tanzania, white hair is dull in Canada but aristocratic in Guatemala. White also reminds me of wedding dresses and real estate. White wedding dresses appeared under the Victorian era. Real estate because I read an ethnography in which London apartments with white walls sold for more than the ones equivalent in size but with, say, girlie pink walls and green bathroom wallpaper. The author/anthropologist argued that white on the market makes for a better sale because it is easier to identify to something that lacks the presence of past occupants. Which brings us back the wedding dress (remember the whole virginity thing?) - a historical construction.
So I don't know, really, is what it comes down to. Beyond ideologies rooted in biased universalist aspirations or in over-exploited identity politics, is there an agency to white? Something that intrinsically belongs to it that results in low melanin secreting people being more appropriate models (and better sellers of things)?
The study of colour value and colour perception is an old one that, with the advent of post-modernity's concerns for societal causes, went out of politically correct and academic style. For centuries this field followed Plato’s distinction between mind and body. Similarly to René Descartes' ideas, it was understood that the world of appearances was one of allusions as opposed to the world of thought in which ideal and universal forms existed. For Descartes accordingly the perception of colour was like any other experience of tangible substance: an automatic process itself worth studying but insignificant in the greater pursuit of selfhood and truth.
While this Cartesian dualism has received severe criticism because equating 'objective' colour seeing to 'physical' measurements (such as the Munsell chart, NeCoSyn or the Swedish Color System) excludes the less tangible implications informed by culture and context (problems of objectivity basically), the opposite end of the purely quantitive pendulum is close to a similar intellectual dead-end. What anthropologist Daniel Miller coined the tyranny of the word - a theoretical stand point in which all material things are studied and understood as projections of something else. As a result white doesn't 'just' exist in itself, it is standing in for something else - the biased aesthetic standard of a European colonizer, or the pre-pubescent innocence of childhood and birth (because of things like the 'universal' colour of breast milk and sperm). In other words these two approaches deny "the emotion and desire, the sensuality and danger and hence the expressive potential that colours possess themselves" (Young: 174). A kind of phenomenology of white.
What are the emotions attached to white? Albinos are killed in Tanzania, white hair is dull in Canada but aristocratic in Guatemala. White also reminds me of wedding dresses and real estate. White wedding dresses appeared under the Victorian era. Real estate because I read an ethnography in which London apartments with white walls sold for more than the ones equivalent in size but with, say, girlie pink walls and green bathroom wallpaper. The author/anthropologist argued that white on the market makes for a better sale because it is easier to identify to something that lacks the presence of past occupants. Which brings us back the wedding dress (remember the whole virginity thing?) - a historical construction.
So I don't know, really, is what it comes down to. Beyond ideologies rooted in biased universalist aspirations or in over-exploited identity politics, is there an agency to white? Something that intrinsically belongs to it that results in low melanin secreting people being more appropriate models (and better sellers of things)?
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| Benetton "Tribe (Albino)" 1992. Photography: Yves Gellie, Advertising: Oliviero Toscani |
