Nichole Hooks

I feel as though this article hits fashion photography and runway fashion on the button. Hooks writes “the’real fun’ is to be had by bringing to the suface all those ‘nasty’ unconscious fantasies and longings about contact with the Other embedded in the deep structure of white supremacy” (366).

ttp://nymag.com/fashion/fashionshows/2008/spring/main/newyork/womenrunway/dianevonfurstenberg/index1.html

This is a picture of well known fashion designer Diane Von Furstenburg. Many of her runway looks use an African model like the one seen here. This is the perfect use of The Other longing that Americans have that Hooks describes. I also feel that much of his argument could and would be refuted by Lyotard. As he argued against modernist and expressionism art, like my favorite artist Dali, it is only appreciated because it is new and there is nothing that has been done like it before. The Other is not necessarily a fantasy like what Hooks would say but instead a means for a cheap art form simply because it has never been done before.

However, Hooks writes that the reader often “becomes vulnerable to the seduction of difference” (368). I think this is an important idea to keep in mind especially when we are trying to learn to free ourselves from control mechanisms like the fashion and advertising industry. Perhaps the reason that African women are suddenly becoming popular on the runway is because people like Diane are finding that people are buying more because they have been seduced by this “other” concept. Capitalism, as we are studying and learning, takes control over all other purposes in today’s society and as Hooks and Diane are discovering, using “the Other” is just one of the means of gaining more capital.