Meam jacket, vintage bikini
PHOTOGRAPHY: VALERIA FARINELLA
STYLING: ANNA CURTEIS
WORDS: GAVIN HAYNES
Make-up: Coni Oyarzun Balboa
Hair: Claire Harvey
Model: Jules at M+P
This fashion shoot takes a Western girl and puts her in an Eastern world, homaging those washed-out screen prints you see on the walls of Chinese takeaways. It’s the photographer taking a certain culture and messing with it – cultural appropriation, essentially, just like Harry Styles tweeting a photo of himself in a Native American headdress, or Gwen Stefani employing four mute Japanese girls to follow her around at awards ceremonies.
People weren’t very happy about either of those incidents, just like they’re not happy any time someone is photographed borrowing from a culture that isn’t their own. Following that logic, I wonder whether this shoot will cause offence – white girls dicking around in traditional Chinese garb, playing in a setting that they’re manifestly not a part of and don’t understand?
Vintage Versace T-shirt, Absolute Vintage shorts, Cassandra Verity Green
After all, the internet recently spent a week or so beating the shit out of ageing Canadian mall-rat Avril Lavigne because she wanted to play dress-up with Japanese culture. Set in Tokyo, her cupcakes and sushi-based video for a song imaginatively titled “Hello Kitty” sent the professionally morally-outraged racing for their emergency hashtags. Avril, it soon became known, was a stuck-up white bitch who was flagrantly demeaning Japanese culture.
Unfortunately, her defence wasn’t terribly eloquent: “RACIST??? LOLOLOL!!! I love Japanese culture.” But it did convey the basic idea that we’re all sailing on a global soup of pop culture nowadays; we all get to pick ’n’ mix, even if we are shit at it (like Avril). It’s nothing new; cultural appropriation is the career of Mick Jagger. It is the career of George Harrison, and of Grimes. It is the career of Ronald McDonald, who has taken the culture of Nepal’s indigenous Clown people and bastardised it for the purpose of selling his glutinous hamburgers. Yet, certain well-meaning types still suggest that we stick to the shallower coves of culture, specialising only in people-like-us.
Christian Cowan-Sanluis jacket and trousers, vintage camisol, vintage Nike trainers
At its most flat-footed, that rigid concept of cultural ownership is the liberal equivalent of Nazi genealogy trees rising endlessly up towards Thor himself. Even being a bona fide authentic doesn’t mean you can hang onto it. Does Jamaica own Bob Marley? He’s certainly very Jamaican, but surely he’s an international figure now? Are The Beatles really the property of Liverpudlians? Kurt Cobain is intrinsically linked to Seattle, but considering his Jesus-like position across the planet’s youth, can the locals claim him any more than people from Bethlehem can clam a special unique kinship with the original J-man? These days, who cares most about the Wu Tang Clan? Is it Staten Island corner boys? Or is it 40-something unmarried men with lucrative but dull corporate jobs who habitually blow a lot of money in Offspring?
The morality of this stuff is generally decided after consulting the “what my ancestors did to your ancestors” league table. For instance, imagine if every year there was one day where everyone in North America went down to their local bar wearing Cherokee headdresses, waving peace pipes and dancing around with oversized plastic tomahawks sponsored by beer companies. Gross, right?
Absolute Vintage dress
Now change “headdress” for “ginger wig”, “peace pipes” for “pints of Guinness” and “plastic tomahawks” for “some blarney-based crap”. Congratulations – you’ve just imagined St Patrick’s Day. Colonialism and the damage it did is, of course, not something to be taken lightly. But is Iggy Azalea’s Bollywood-themed music video really that much of a travesty? And does a twerking Miley Cyrus signal hurtful appropriation of black culture, or is she just a 21-year-old who doesn’t realise how stupid she looks on stage?
The one thing we can all probably agree on is that it would be patronising to call the world’s third largest economy a marginal group. And besides, while so many complained on their behalf, the Japanese – for their part – didn’t really seem offended by this 29-year-old Dorian Gray’s reduction of their culture to three or four obvious tropes.
ASOS jumper, Cassandra Verity Green skirt, vintage shoes
In part, this is because they’re all about the dress-up. Their concept of play doesn’t come weighted with a concept of morality – it’s an exploration of archetypes, an attempt to go beyond themselves, to find out what they like about something by trying on its pants. For proof, you’ve only got to look at “Ganguro girls”, teenagers inverting Japanese femininity ideals and dressing up as caricatures of Valley girls – nuclear orange glo-tan, bright pink lipstick, slutty cocktail dresses, big blonde hair-dos. Yet, no one is moved by this blatant stereotyping of the oppressed minority of rich, white American women.
Vintage jumper, Absolute Vintage dungarees, Vintage Ferragamos from Absolute Vintage
Of course, that may be because – like the majority of Europe – the US are immune from cultural cringe. Even here in Britain, our reaction to people slicing off bits of our lives and re-gifting them to us is often to simply feel flattered. Jack White picked up a cricket bat for the cover of Elephant; he dressed as a Pearly King for Icky Thump. Even Madonna marrying Guy Ritchie and stropping about in several acres of Buckinghamshire estate for a few years seemed like it was making Britain more relevant.
Christian Cowan-Sanluis choker and top, American Apparel jeans, Absolute Vintage shoes
Win or lose, simply to be acknowledged by North America is to feel better about ourselves – “they know who we are” is often close enough to “they like us”, and in those moments we can dream that we’re not just more gristle in the Nato-buffer between Russia and Uncle Sam.
The important thing to remember is that it’s not other people’s views of us that we should be wary about; it’s our own.
More fashion on VICE: