REPRESENTATION IN FASHION BY NAFISA KAPTOWNWALA

9/30/2019

Lorde Inc. is a Toronto-based modelling agency founded by Nafisa Kaptownwala that aims to promote representation in fashion with their diverse roster of models from various backgrounds who challenge conventional beauty standards. This is her story. Find out how her perspective on representation has changed over time.

Lorde Inc. founder shares her story, including how her perspective on representation has changed over time.

I started a street-casting modelling agency in 2013, centreing the representation of models of colour. I started an agency motivated to assert models of color in fashion and in some ways, in 2019, regret it.

Our intention as an agency was to fill a gap in modelling where we saw a need for change. We were interested in just models and the space they take up and what it means to have a cast of entirely white or conventional models. Representation felt like a big deal, and people seem to still chirp about how moving and meaningful it is, And though, my feelings towards the meaning of representation has changed, I would still argue that in a lot of ways it is important and does change consciousness about marginalized groups and most importantly felt like a way of forging power. But I think what’s become blaringly more important is that representation is just not enough.

I started the agency in 2013. This is when I first started asking friends to help on this project, get models together and shoot some test shots. It was an idea of a friend and mine after long conversations of feeling pretty disheartened by fashion and art industries with their lack of diversity and very little opportunities for creatives of colour. Rather than waiting for these industries to make space for us, we really didn’t have a choice but to do it for ourselves. People like to grandize this as this heroic thing, but really we didn’t have a choice, at least if we wanted to have a creative career. For probably the first three years of the agency existing, I was still learning the ropes of managing a fashion business. In our third year of business, we started to get inquiries to work on casting direction, given the nature of our style of scouting, we were offering an approach to casting that was really new. This was when I started to take in some of the decision-making that goes into producing campaigns and probably at the same time I started to believe less in the importance of representation. I got loads of offers from all sorts of brands that had damaged reputations for making insensitive comments about a cluster of marginalized identities, looking to align with a “social justice” type platform to clean up their image. And simultaneously, didn’t want to align with anything overly political, overly anti-status quo, because that would also disturb conservative clientele, which actively just pushes the people marginalized in marginalized groups further into the periphery.

Though, it feels like a paradigm shift to see the stories of people of all identities shared on mainstream platforms, I really had to start taking in: but who is in control of telling these stories? Very often, we’re hearing stories of minorities, produced, funded and profited by the same types of people that make up the status quo. And often the stories that get funneled through a white cis able-bodied gaze aren’t going to represent the nuanced experienced of those at the margins, but just exist as this refreshed version of the same capitalist agenda that’s always existed.

So what started for me about seeing people that look like me and my community in fashion, has quickly spiraled into a critique of the ways people of colour are carefully placed in these industries. At the time what felt like an insertion of power, now is becoming more clear that the system was never made with us in mind. It certainly doesn’t know how to support us, and we were probably naive for thinking we could change any aspect of that. The way that activism has been co-opted by fashion as a sexy, edgy way to brand consumer goods, while simultaneously never hiring a designer of colour, paying their garment workers less than minimum wage, producing so many toxins from the materials to make the clothes that it’s causing irreparable damage to communities of colour who make those materials and the environment (which will disproportionately affect communities of colour first, which we know because it’s already happening). So yeah, given all of that, it does feel like representation is a pretty marginal concern on the hierarchy of issues with fashion. But one thing I can have confidence in, is if we’re still having these opportunities to have conversations about modelling and diversity, I’d like to quickly address that the lack of racial sensitivity available in the images is most definitely going to be felt in every aspect of producing that garment. I think, in the process of starting an agency, drawing attention to racial inequity in fashion, we’ve opened people and an industry up to having more difficult conversations about the role marginalized people play in this industry. Though representation isn’t the most important conversation, for some, it’s been an entry point to shifting consciousness.