To judge not by the color of one's skin, but by the content of one's... fashion?

I was walking over to Kim, Stanton, and Rachel’s indecently posh apartment the other day, and for some reason I started paying attention to the clothes of the people who were passing by me on the street. Now, as someone who nowadays wears free T shirts (mostly Pton Prerade ’10 or ’09), I was in no position to judge style or fashion, but I did start to notice color.

I should probably preface this by saying that there’s a surprising (and sometimes refreshing) frankness to the talk of race in South Africa. The tentative, “Should I say black or African-American? To what extent is it okay to make jokes about Asian-Americans if I am one myself? What about the cultural and familial reasons for XYZ socioeconomic disparities”— types of questions that we dance around in the States— are openly declared, debated, dissected, and disseminated here, sometimes haphazardly and with questionable substantiation, and at other times with a direct honesty that’s necessary to bring to the table.

So we begin with the premise that certain colors match better with certain skin tones. I just did a simple search on Google, and it turns out that people’s skin tones (and their undertones) can be divided into four seasons (in the sense of spring summer autumn winter), and that each “season” of skin tone carries accompanying undertones of skin and overtones of emotions.

Now, the pleasant topics of oppression and racial discrimination had been simmering in the back of my mind for a few days, and I began to wonder whether there existed an unintentional, unconscious “discrimination” in the fashion industry. I’m not talking about it in terms of discrimination against certain models (though the lack of minorities on the walkway and in catalogues may be a valid concern), but rather in terms of the sheer choice and availability of clothes that match one’s skin color.

The fashion industry came into being with “a confluence of English ingenuity, German chemistry, French fashion, and American entrepreneurship” (The New Yorker, Vol 29 No. 2). All were, of course, of Western origin and thus tailored to a Western clientele with, well, predominantly “white” skin tones. (“white” in the sense of a race, and not the physical color of the skin, and thus “white skin tones” denotes an entire palette of skin tones) And so, perhaps certain dyes and colors slowly came to be used more often as people figured out that they went better with their skin tones. (not accounting for seasonal variation and fashion “in”s)

After World War II, when France fell from its tower in the fashion industry and had to share a pedestal with the UK, Italy, US, and later Japan (which has a host of very interestingly-cut designs and use of stark monochrome), we still saw a fashion world that was dominated by Western styles and tastes.

And even if the nexus of fashion is now distributed across a few poles, my hypothesis is that there exists a distribution of colors that perhaps leans toward a particular mean of skin tone that isn’t necessarily the global average. Granted, every country or region has its own local styles, with whites and reds used in Eastern Asia, and earthy colors (from what I’m seen, at least) in Africa, but nevertheless the dominant fashions are the ones that you seen in advertisements, catalogues, movies, and in the streets all across the world.

The way I see it, there may be potential for a market for clothes that cater to a different mean and different distribution of skin tones, a market that is fashionable but also fills in the color deficiencies of our current fashion industry and takes advantage of the fact that there might be people who would like to find colors that go well with their skin tone with more ease. With the internationalization of the fashion industry, such a market might eventually evolve, but why wait when this opportunity awaits?