What Did Kendall Jenner Do?
You’re looking through instagram today and you scroll by some Kylie Jenner (double tap), then right after you see Kendall Jenner with a new modeling campaign (double tap). She’s becoming a huge supermodel recently. Her newest campaign is with Mango. Oh, I remember that brand. They’re pretty cool, kind of like Zara but not as well known. She’s going to make them well known. You keep scrolling.
The way campaigns are announced in the age of social media is through instagram most of the time. You get these supermodels with huge followings on social media and they post their newest campaign with a big high fashion brand or in Kendall Jenner’s case, a lesser-known Spanish brand looking to become more popular in America.
When you’re scrolling through Instagram, you don’t think too much of these ads. “Oh, that’s a really cute suede jacket, could be really cute for festival season”. When deciding what type of clothes you want to wear, you probably don’t pay much mind to why they designed something a certain way or where they took their inspiration from. You’re probably thinking, “suede is in, that will look cute”.
Then, you go on your snapchat and click on the Cosmo app and starting reading your news for the day. You see a headline “Kendall Jenner’s newest Mango campaign is a little offensive”. You just saw that ad on instagram and you thought it was really cute. What could be offensive about that? You swipe up to read the story.
You start to read the story and find out that this campaign was called “tribal spirit”, and the clothing was inspired by the African Savanna. You’re still confused why there is controversy about this. You keep reading and they start mentioning something called cultural appropriation, and you’re not really sure what that means. As you continue to read, you do something deductive reasoning and figure out that it has something to do with offending someone else’s culture or ripping it off.
People are angry because Kendall Jenner, a Caucasian female, is modeling clothes that are supposed to be representative of Africa. People don’t think that this quite adds up, and would have liked to see an African model in the campaign instead. You think that makes sense, but you’re also wondering why an African model would have to be the model for this campaign. How is that fair? Would people be angry if an African model was modeling clothes by an American brand?
This whole controversy has inspired you to look in to this whole cultural appropriation thing. You find out that it is the borrowing of someone’s culture in an offensive or inappropriate way. The Kendall Jenner campaign is neither offensive nor inappropriate. The clothing may be inspired by the African Savannah, but that doesn’t mean that someone of another culture can’t wear the clothing. That wouldn’t be fair because then only African women would be allowed to buy the clothing. There is a difference between borrowing a culture and offending someone’s culture. Kendall Jenner and Mango are taking inspiration from a culture to make beautiful clothing that is available for everyone to buy, but the media has decided to look at it in a way that takes away from that and makes it offensive. When can we stop attacking everything that is put out and just accept things for how they are? TBD.
