The March issue of Vanity Fair depicted a compilation of up-and-coming actresses blazing through the Hollywood stratosphere. With the likes of Kristen Stewart from the little movie called Twillight and Amanda Seyfried from the latest tearjerker Dear John, among eight other Caucasian actresses, who needs Zoe Saldana from the box-office behemoth Avatar and Star Trek, Gabourey Sidibe from Precious, or Freida Pinto from, ahem, last year’s Oscar Best Picture Winner, Slumdog Millionaire?
And this after Vanity Fair segregated the actresses of mixed ethnicities from the Caucasian actresses in its February issue profiling new startlets. While hardly surprising, Vanity Fair’s cultural fixation on whitewashing success is illustrative of a cavaliar, if not deliberate attempt to import in its readers’ minds that race is one characteristic that must be reinforced along an ethnocentric divide.
Culturally speaking, race remains a powerful and motivating factor in shaping the American psyche, positing itself into our social, economic and political discourse as a reaffirmation of one’s identity, association and how we relate to others. In this era of “fair and balanced” 24-hour cable news and everyday ‘pundits’ illuminating on their experience with the ‘other,’ race is one tool in an individual and a community’s arsenal to frame the debate. Vanity Fair’s cover pictorial doesn’t even bother elevating minorities from such communities who have succeeded at the Hollywood game. While cognizant of the publishing industry’s need to increase revenues in a downtrodden advertising market by catering to niche audiences, achieving fiscal gains isn’t the only objective. A magazine as important as Vanity Fair, which contributes and often leads the discussion in popular American culture, has an added responsibility to not only its readers, but to all those who simply glance at the magazine while perusing the bookstore or getting a cup of coffee at a vendor cart. The visual medium is the most effective, and to not include a single ethnic, eligible actress on the March cover subconsciously creates the stereotype of what Hollywood success must look like. Critics may argue that such accusations have no basis in truth, but dare I utilize the “horse’s mouth,” sorta speak. Vanity Fair writer Evgenia Peretz emphasized the young cover stars by their best attributes: “downy-soft cheeks,” “button nose,” “patrician looks and celebrated pedigree,” “dewy, wide-eyed loveliness,” and “Ivory-soap-girl features.” If that doesn’t sound down right aristocratic and condescending, then race must be nothing more than trivial banter over the course of this country’s history, mere jest not intended as anything toward the faces of color.
The featured actresses deserve their fame and acclaim for their hard work in a notoriously difficult industry, but to elevate them, along with their “ivory-soap” features, as the implicit, de facto standard of Hollywood success, and by extension, beauty, Vanity Fair fails in personifying the real truth behind Hollywood’s newly-minted actresses; that a diverse palette of women not only have visibility, bankability and beauty, but represent the collective buying power of a much larger, global and ethnic audience any glossy, print magazine should be scrambling to attract in their dying industry.
— Sheheryar Sardar, Media & Policy Editor
