Word: iman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rights movement, and everything was so creative and open," she recalls. "It was all about style. Girls could be white, girls could be black, but they had to have style." There were at least half a dozen widely known black models who worked regularly, including Pat Cleveland, Naomi Sims, Iman and Beverly Johnson, who in 1974 became the first black woman to appear on the cover of Vogue...
Even then things weren't always rosy. Iman says that when she arrived in New York in 1975, she realized she was being pitted against Beverly Johnson. "I learned that magazines would only use one black girl at a time, and they were trying to create a competition between us," she says. And no one knew how to do her hair or makeup. "The colors they had for girls like me were hideous, so I started bringing my own makeup woman." (In 1994 she launched her own line of cosmetics specifically for black skin...
...anointed a "supermodel," and African-American models Beverly Peele, Karen Alexander, Tyra Banks and Veronica Webb all worked consistently. In 1992 Webb became the first black model to win a major cosmetics contract when she was signed by Revlon, but she faced many of the same hurdles as Iman. "There was never the possibility that there'd be someone on a shoot who looked like you," she says. And Webb never went on a job without bringing her own foundation and having her hair done beforehand...
Advertising is where models get the serious money, or as Iman calls it, "the spoils of war," but models who aren't white have a hard time getting companies to put them under contract. "Calvin Klein helped launch my career by putting me in ads," says Soto, "but he never put me under contract." She had similar experiences with cosmetics companies: they were happy to hire her on a job-to-job basis but, in contrast to the rewards given her white colleagues, never signed her to a contract. Companies are more likely to link their products to known personalities...
...surprised to learn that models are judged by a criterion as superficial as the color of their skin, and it's debatable whether fashion is significantly more racist than other industries; the images it projects, however, are inarguably more pervasive. "When you think back on an era," says Iman, "it's the pictures, not the words, that you remember, which is one reason fashion and beauty should be put under a microscope...