Ed Diokno, Views from the Edge
We shouldn’t be all that surprised that actress and model Gemma Chan is on the cover of Allure magazine’s April issue. At the helm of the magazine is editor-in-chief Michele Lee, an Asian American trailblazing journalist.
Allure is leading the way for magazines after being named Magazine of the Year for its groundbreaking covers such as the July 2017 “This Is American Beauty” cover featuring model Halima Aden in a hijab.
I like the way the beauty magazine sneaks in social commentary in its articles supposedly about fluff personality profiles and beauty tips. Read deeper and you find yourself immersed in a discussion about identity, politics and race.
In Allure’s cover article about Chan, who zoomed to worldwide fame for her role in the historic movie, Crazy Rich Asians, the Chinese Brit, who studied law before deciding to become an actresss, talked about representation in Hollywood. Here’s an excerpt:
“Due to the dearth of Asian actresses with significant fame, Chan has become a de facto standard-bearer for Asian representation in film and TV. I assumed that she would be tired of talking about it after doing so in nearly every interview during her Crazy Rich Asians press tour and countless others. She is not. She is fully Chinese by heritage, but Chan describes her racial identity as ‘compound. I feel British, and European, and English, and Chinese, and Asian.’ She brings up the Internet trolls who took issue with her playing Queen Elizabeth’s confidante, Bess of Hardwick, in the period piece Mary Queen of Scots because she isn’t White.
“’Why are actors of color, who have fewer opportunities anyway, only allowed to play their own race? And sometimes they’re not even allowed to play their own race,’ Chan says. ‘In the past, the role would be given to a White actor who would tape up their eyes and do the role in yellowface. John Wayne played Genghis Khan. If John Wayne can play Genghis Khan, I can play Bess of Hardwick.’”
“’I feel like Hamilton opened minds a lot. We have a Black man playing George Washington. They describe it as ‘America then, told by America now.’ And I think our art should reflect life now,’ Chan says. And life then, too. Last year, Chan worked on a documentary about the Chinese Labor Corps. ‘I studied the First World War three times at school. And I never heard that there were 140,000 Chinese in the Allied effort,’ she says. ‘We would not have won the war without them.’”
“I never heard about those Chinese laborers, either. In large part, it’s because of the images that remain. Chan tells me about a mural made to commemorate that war. It was massive, she says. There was a whole section dedicated to the Chinese, but it was painted over when the Americans joined the war effort.
“They left one kneeling Chinese figure, which you can still see,” she says. “If people understood that, my parents [might not] have been told, ‘Go home, go back to where you came from’ multiple times. If we portray a pure White past, people start to believe that’s how it was, and that’s not how it was.”
RELATED:9 things Gemma Chan hasn’t done before
Chan landing a cover of a prominent beauty and fashion magazine is no accident. Since taking the helm of Allure in 2015, Lee has transformed Allure into an innovative, multi-faceted brand that champions diversity and challenges old-fashioned beauty standards. She was named Adweek’s Editor of the Year in 2017, while Allure was named Magazine of the Year for their groundbreaking covers.
1/Words can’t even express how happy I am to share our three new June covers with you. This is our Hair Issue, starring Soo Joo Park, Fei Fei Sun, and Fernanda Ly. This cover also means a lot to me personally… pic.twitter.com/kwi705NN8f
— Michelle Lee (@heymichellelee) May 15, 2018
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Just as earth-shattering as using a hijab-wearing model on its cover, was the Allure cover that featured a blond Asian model and an article on hairstyles featuring Asian models. Lee acknowledged the importance of the magazine’s Hair Issue, which features models Fernanda Ly, Soo Joo Park and Fei Fei Sun on its covers:
“When I look at how people of color are treated in typical magazines—if you look at either ads or editorial—I feel like there’s always the token person, she said in the Columbia Journalism Review. “To me, having three Asian women on the cover just seemed so much fresher and so much more modern. In hindsight, after it had closed, I really do see it as sticking our stake in the ground and being like, ‘Tokenism is a thing of the past.’ The more modern way for us to feature diversity is that you can’t just have like the one token person of color thrown into the mix.
“My preteen self couldn’t even fathom seeing an Asian face on the cover of a mainstream magazine, or leading a TV show or headlining a movie,” the Asian American journalist continued. “So being able to feature three game-changing Asian models, especially after a pretty sad track record, has significant meaning to me.”
“When I started, Allure had a lot of great things going for it,” said Lee in an interview with The Blonde Misfit. “My big goal, though, was to refresh its message on every platform, to focus on being more culturally relevant and to examine what modern beauty even is today. To me, beauty is incredibly diverse and it’s intertwined with personal identity, so we’ve had great success in showcasing that.”
(As an editor for almost three decades, I’ve always tried to tell the up-and-coming journalists of color to not be ashamed of the communities they might have come from and that their experiences are just as valid and important as anybody else’s. I encouraged them to seek to tell the stories of those people most often overlooked and ignored by other journalists who might have had.)
Lee and others who have been able to climb their way to a position of influence are doing what we all should be doing, pulling up others — either as journalists or as subjects — so that they can rise up to become the best person they can be and all the while, passing on their good fortune to those they can help reach their own goals.
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