No doubt it's been a very long time since Vogue published the first issue of it's magazine which was in 1892.
Apparently, Progress within the halls of Vogue's offices has moved at a very slow pace.- Yes! I mean really slow. It actually took 82 years for Beverly Johnson to become the first black model to grace the cover and it took another 15 years before a model of Puerto Rican descent, Talisa Soto, appeared to represent the Latin audience. In that same year, Naomi Campbell became the first model of color to grace the cover of the September issue.
Since Campbell's September issue cover in 1989, there's been only three women of color who followed suit and they are : Halle Berry in 2010, Joan Smalls in 2014, and Beyoncé knowles in 2015.
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Image source: E! News |
A 23-year old African-American photographer, Tyler Mitchel, was commissioned for the shoot after seeing his past work where he photographed gun rights activists for a Teen Vogue cover earlier in 2018.
Vogue's parent company creative director Raul Martinez had actually sparked to Mitchell's Teen Vogue work, the story goes, which earned him a spot on the short list of photographers presented to Beyoncé, who approved him immediately.
"Until there is a mosaic of perspectives coming from different ethnicities behind the lens, we will continue to have a narrow approach and view of what the world actually looks like. That is why I wanted to work with this brilliant 23-year-old photographer Tyler Mitchell," Beyoncé explained in the cover story.
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Image source: E! News |
"There was a ladder for the people who came before me, and there's a ladder now—it's just a new ladder. I want to open the eyes of the kids younger than me, show them that they can do this too." Mitchell said in his Vogue profile.
The young photographer who revealed his work on Monday "Here's Beyoncé by me for the September 2018 cover of American Vogue." tweeted "I cried three times already this morning".
This is an impressive way forward for Vogue after a very long time but we can only hope it don't take ages for the next one just like it did for this one.
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