Vogue India shares a photographic vision of the topic front and center of our fashion industry minds: skin color.

Just now, I found a 2009 AOC short speaking about Padmi Lakshmi, former wife of Salman Rushdie, and a quote from Paula Karaiskos, of Storm Models saying: “The whole discussion about using more ethnic women in fashion has broadened the debate on models in fashion in general and designers are now looking for more discerning faces to front their campaigns.”

In retrospect, I’m not quite sure what Karaiskos meant, given the meaning of ‘discerning’. She meant well.

The Guardian article was focused primarily on the rise of Asian models in fashion. A decade later, AOC remains proud of our heritage and headline: Is the Entrenched Dominance of White Fashion Models Ending? I admit never dreaming it would take nearly a decade to smash through fashion’s white supremacy mentality once and for all. Without social media and the Internet, this breakthrough wouldn’t have happened. Old ways would have prevailed.

Vogue India’s May 2019 issue takes the convo into one of nuance with “Fifty Shades of Nude”, lensed by Bikramjit Bose with styling by Anaita Shroff Adajania. / Hair & makeup by Manaisha

The list of all 50 women featured in this editorial is in the last image. But wanting to honor the long struggle fashion has experienced in breaking through our industry’s own ideology of white supremacy (sorry to be provocative, but what else is it?), we share the models names and not in any particular order. AOC uses alpha order to avoid unnecessary hierarchies, but yours truly has no time to organize this list!!

“Fifty Shades of Nude” features: Sonam Singh, Teesta Dalvi, Janani Jayaprakash, Suzanne Nayana, Samruddhi Shirodkar, Aishwarya Gupta, Divya Jadhav, Tisha Jain, Varsha Chaudhari, Anurima Chakraborty, Gayatri Hariharan, Akanksha Corda, Ridhi Khakhar, Isha Dhillon, Archana Nair, Anandita Rajawat, Ritija Malvankar, Virken Raina, Aishwarya Sushmita, Sehaz Malhi, Kiyara Sandhu, Appoorva Rampal, Meghana Ramakrishnan, Vishaka Bhardwaj, Anjali Sivaraman, Aditi Joshi, Namita Sunil, Bhagyashree Purohit, Shobhita Dhulipala, Shruti Venkatesh, Anvi Kapadi, Roselyn Raj, Yvonne Monteiro, Varsha Ghanshani, Anugraha Natarajan, Jeanette Dsouza, Tanishtha Roy, Scarlet Raphael Achangadan, Sana Thampi, Anjali Lama, Alisha Batth, Sandra Nandeibam, Ilham Abbas Kapasi; Kavya Trehan; Haima Simoes; Diva Dhawan; Kubra Sait; Diksha Basu; Atiya Raykan; Priya Banerjee.

Thanks Vogue India; we see where’s your going with this. Out of a nuanced understanding of intersectionality comes sisterhood. ~ Anne