There’s some debate about whether the Christian Dior ad campaign Shanghai Dreamers is racist. It depicts tall white models against a background of “identical maoist robots.” I don’t really understand the debate. Of course it’s racist.
Most advertising is.
When it’s not out-rightly racist, sexist, classist, ageist and/or homophobic it often implies it. The industry is based on making people feel bad about some normal human thing then selling them the solution to their imaginary problem. On the occasions when it’s not doing that it’s pretending that you’ll stand out from the crowd or become part of some fabled elite if you just buy this product that everyone else is now buying to do the same. As if shoes were ever a substitute for a soul.
pic nicked from here
Most who point out the normality of this brand of nonsense seek to excuse Christian Dior. I don’t.
Nor do I take any refuge in that tired old cliché about “fashion being fantasy not reality.” Racism is also fantasy. Something being fantasy does not absolve it from criticism. (Am I going to be able to say to book critics: “You can’t say bad things abut my book because it’s fiction not reality?”) A fantasy must be judged on its quality.
And this is not exactly Borges.
It relies on the grossest and most vulgar form of characterization, the racial stereotype, is dreary to look at and has no aim higher than selling you a jumper or whatever Dior makes anyway. It’s fantasy of owning a product making you superior to the masses. That’s reprehensible whether or not racism is invoked. That people are accustomed to this crap is not a point in favour of Dior but a point against us all. With fantasies like this, we can hardly expect much improvement in reality.
On the other hand, it did start a conversation about orientalism . . .
