‘Vogue Italia’ Retracts Tasteless ‘Slave Earrings’ Feature on Website
Vogue Italia’s feature in their “Shop The Trend” section on hoop earrings ignited a firestorm of controversy recently. Sometimes with international magazines, language translations can cause problems, but the words were big, bold, and crystal clear on Vogue Italia‘s website reading, “Slave Earrings: Hoop earrings, a classic always in evolution.”
Sometimes it just seems like the fashion world just can’t get it right. They’ve been accused of numerous offensive comments about eating disorders, plus-size models, natural disasters, and matters of race that more often than not have come across as tasteless and tactless. In 2008, Vogue Italia caused a sensation as well as mixed reviews in the fashion industry with its “all-black” issue, which went on to become the magazine’s biggest-selling issue ever.
Below is the original posting on the site that upset a lot of readers. In an attempt to “glamorize” the slave trade, Vogue said the following:
“If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.”
In referencing the slave trade as the inspiration for jewelry, Vogue Italia elevated a bad translation into the realm of the sublimely ridiculous — and ignorant. Vogue Italia has issued an apology and taken down the offensive wording, changing it to “Ethnic Earrings.” Vogue Italia’s editors apologized saying the writer’s intention was lost in translation:
“We apologize for the inconvenience. It is a matter of really bad translation from Italian into English,” Franca Sozzani, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, told Britain‘s Telegraph. “The Italian word, which defines those kind of earrings, should instead be translated into “ethnical style earrings.”
After reviewing the images above, what are your opinions on their tasteless feature? Should the enslavement of Africans in the United States be mined for style inspiration and featured as a trend? –mckenzie harris
