Posted by:
anybody
(
)
Date: February 27, 2021 08:20PM
In the nineteenth century, being pale and fair skinned (i.e. "white and delightsome") was the "in" thing.
Only farmer's daughters and domestics were tanned.
As women began to work indoors in mills during the Industrial Revolution, things changed. Being tanned became fashionable.
Now it's fashionable for young white women to not only be tanned, but to be "black" or adopt "urban" hairstyles and clothing commonly worn by African-American women:
https://globalnews.ca/news/4702185/what-is-blackfishing/https://metro.co.uk/2018/12/14/blogger-accused-blackfishing-says-nothing-wrong-braids-deep-tan-8246856/This brings up some interesting cultural questions.
What is culture? What is fashion? Does it matter?
Many black women in the West and in Africa adopt Western fashions and European hairstyles. Some American companies actually require black women to straighten their hair and frown upon braids and cornrows. In India, use of skin lightening cremes is commonplace. In Archaic Greece, braided hairstyles that imitated Egyptian wigs worn by the upper classes were in style.
All of of this is controversial in one way or another depending on social context, but I look at it a different way.
How you look or what hair or skin colour you have doesn't matter. What matters is how you act.
So, if you are an Western woman wearing a sari or kimono, you are just wearing a sari or kimono if you aren't trying to pretend you are Indian or Japanese. In the 1970s, lots of people wore afros -- and if they were actually black or not didn't matter. Indigenous women in Bolivia wear bowler hats and native Namibian women wear 19th Century German style dresses.
The world is much smaller than it used to be and access to culture and fashion is online and global. Everybody borrows from everybody else.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2021 08:25PM by anybody.