Such is the power of ethnic ambiguity that even megastars like Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera, and Beyoncé Knowles have, from time to time, deliberately tweaked their looks, borrowing from diverse cultures and ethnic backgrounds. Thus, Beyoncé, an African-American, sometimes wears her hair blond; Ms. Lopez, who is Puerto Rican, takes on the identity of a Latina-Asian princess in the latest Louis Vuitton ads, and Christina Aguilera, who is half Ecuadorean, poses as a Bollywood goddess on the cover of the January Allure, which arrives on newsstands this week.
Their willful masquerade reflects a current fascination with the racial hybrid, according to Linda Wells, Allure's editor in chief, a fascination the magazine does not hesitate to exploit. "Five years ago, about 80 percent of our covers featured fair-haired blue-eyed women, even though they represented a minority," Ms. Wells said. Today such covers are a rarity. "Uniformity just isn't appealing anymore," she said.
Global marketers like H&M, the cheap chic clothing chain with stores in 18 countries, increasingly highlight models with racially indeterminate features. "For us the models must be inspiring and attractive and at the same time, neutral," said Anna Bergare, the company's Stockholm-based spokeswoman. The campaigns contrast notably with the original marketing strategy of Benetton, another global clothing chain, whose path-breaking 1980's ads highlighted models of many races, each very distinct. These days even Benetton's billboards play up the multiracial theme. In a typical campaign, a young man with Asian features and an Afro hairdo is posed beside a blue-eyed woman with incongruously tawny skin and brown hair with the texture of yarn.
Such a transition — from racial diversity portrayed as a beautiful mosaic to a melting pot — is in line with the currently fashionable argument that race itself is a fiction. This theory has been advanced by prominent scholars like K. Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at Princeton, and Evelyn Hammond, a professor of the history of science and Afro-American studies at Harvard. In a PBS broadcast last spring, Ms. Hammond said race is a human contrivance, a "concept we invented to categorize the perceived biological, social and cultural differences between human groups."
More and more, that kind of thinking is echoed by the professional image makers. "Some of us are just now beginning to recognize that many cultures and races are assimilating," said John Partilla, the chief executive of Brand Buzz, a marketing agency owned by the WPP group. "If what you're seeing now is our focus on trying to reflect the blending of individuals, it reflects a societal trend, not a marketing trend."
| Go back for the rest of Ruth La Ferla's New York Times article "Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous"
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