The world just got very slightly better:

Jezebel have brought to my attention Christian Louboutin’s new range of nude shoes, which come in five different shades of ‘nude’ rather than the traditional ‘white-person nude’ shade that has dominated fashion… forever. Hurrah. This is the latest in an emerging trend of more inclusive fashion – foundation now comes in more than one non-white shade (though the split is still woefully unequal) and I swear the women’s magazines here in the UK (and their advertisers) have begun to use more non-white models. As in, more than one per issue.

My ‘hurrah’ didn’t quite get an exclamation mark because I am reluctant to whole-heartedly endorse shoes that cost £390.

Or shoes that don’t actually have diversity as their rationale, but instead are intended to elongate the wearer’s stumpy and inadequate legs by blending invisibly into them, according to the Daily Mail (I may have paraphrased).

The shades also have names like ‘Fair Blush’ and ‘Rich Chestnut’, which may not be surprising but continues to be offensive. These saccharine euphemisms always raise the question of why black people have to be ‘chocolate’ etc., either by their own definition or someone else’s, in order to embrace blackness as a good thing. Are we really still having to justify that black can be beautiful?

Finally, when I searched for ‘nude’ on Christian Louboutin’s website, I had to scroll through like, a million ‘white-person nude’ shoes before I found the three lonely brown ones.

Might have to replace that ‘hurrah’ with a small, wry smile.

There has been a lot of discussion about Rick Owen’s step-dancing runway show at Paris Fashion Week, and I particularly like Threadbared‘s take on it, even though they disagree with my last post (which was essentially a long-winded ‘Hurrah!’).

Threadbared were not so impressed with Owen’s show for a number of reasons, and expanded their argument to include the Diversity Coalition (founded by black models Naomi Campbell, Bethann Hardison and Chanel Iman) and their open letter to the fashion industry. Their piece is well worth reading in full, but here are some of the main points they raised:

• Headline-grabbing shows like Owens’ still present black people as a spectacle
• The ‘fierce’ and ‘curvy’ step dance team ain’t breaking any stereotypes
• All the credit for the show goes to the white designer, not the dancers
• The power relations and hierarchies of race therefore remain unchanged
• Within these structures, race is still categorised in ridiculous ways, so that the Diversity Coalition fail to consider Asian models as black, although they aren’t white either. Threadbared call out the idea of Asian models as ‘honorary whites’ when they get pretty much the same number of castings as black models.

This is all true. Particularly the power structure in which a white designer gets credit for his ‘diversity’ when he uses black people as an exotic spectacle. But I’m not sure that takes all value away from Owens’ show. It might not be real diversity, but it does get people talking about it, and where that should eventually end up is with runways sprinkled evenly with models of various colours, and we can go back to talking about their weight (!).

What I really wonder is whether there is an alternative way of achieving this than shock tactics. OK, legislation would be a good start, but for that we need lots of people making noise about it… Which they have started doing.

Threadbared are absolutely right. It’s not good enough. Yet.