Wait, isn’t Balmain’s designer black though? Thursday night IMG model Ajak Deng, who is from South Sudan, made major waves in the fashion industry with a Twitter rant that accused Balmain of dropping her from their Fall 2014 Paris Fashion Week show because she is black. She’s since deleted her Twitter account, but we were able to get a better picture of what happened thanks to a number of forums picking up the story.
Here’s the account via The Fashion Spot reports:
Thursday IMG model Ajak Deng sent out a serious of aggrieved Tweets which seemed to claim that she had been cancelled from Balmain’s Fall 2014 runway show over her race. Deng later deleted her Twitter account (some speculate that she did so at the request of her agency), but not before screenshots of her remarks were posted all over the Internet.
Deng’s comments seem to support all available evidence about fashion’s racist casting practices, however, there are still a lot of unknowns in this instance, and those are worth mentioning: 1) We don’t know for sure that Deng had been booked for Balmain, 2) We don’t know that she was canceled, 3) We don’t know what exactly transpired between Deng and Balmain designer Olivier Rousteing/his staff.
Making this all seem more complicated is the simple fact that the Balmain show was pretty diverse in terms of casting. This is not just a case of Rousteing, who is half-black himself, filling his runway with one or two token black girls: by my count, eight black models walked the Balmain runway yesterday — including Jourdan Dunn, who opened it.
That being said, racism takes many subtle forms (this concept is known as ‘microagression’ in academia and on Tumblr) that are often hard to identify. And Deng’s darker skin makes her a greater target for the fashion’s latent racism than, for example, Jourdan Dunn, who has lighter skin and is better established in the industry.
