Campaigns with painted models, artisans placed as props on stage… is Indian fashion tone-deaf?
Fashion brands use provocative campaigns to stand out, but they often fail and end up seeming deliberately obtuse or insensitive to the reality of life in India
A month ago, luxury womenswear brand AMPM launched a social media campaign for its autumn-winter collection, Hum. It featured models, painted head-to-toe in charcoal, against hand-painted backdrops meant to evoke a rural setting. A snippet on Instagram shows a model’s face being covered with charcoal paint, just like the canvases.
The campaign didn’t make much noise on social media till earlier this week when an international content creator shared it. This was followed by several reshares and likes. No one thought there was anything wrong with painting the bodies of humans “charcoal"—similar to “blackface", which originated in 19th-century US when white performers darkened their faces with shoe polish or charcoal in racist depictions of African Americans.
The idea behind the AMPM campaign was “celebration of togetherness…. Humans, animals, nature… everything moves as one. That idea of ‘we’ sits at the heart of the campaign," Priyanka Modi, AMPM co-founder and creative director, said in an emailed response to Lounge. “To express this visually, we used a charcoal tone across the campaign. This was an intentional artistic choice, not meant to change or highlight any particular identity. Instead, it allowed everything the models, the forms, the objects to exist in the same visual space without hierarchy or contrast. The charcoal palette helped shift the focus from skin tone to shape, movement, and unity. By removing distinction, the eye moves to the emotion, the gesture, the unity. That quiet harmony is what the campaign Hum stands for."
In the same email, Pranoy Sarkar, the campaign’s art director and photographer, clarified: ““Hum, which means ‘we’ in Hindi, was created as a visual metaphor for unity, where the boundaries that separate humans, animals, birds and nature slowly fade into one shared charcoal tonality. The monochrome treatment is an artistic device, not a racial one, and linking it to blackface misunderstands both the history of blackface and the intent of this work. Blackface was a caricatural performance rooted in the American minstrel tradition, while Hum is made with Indian women in an Indian context to dissolve difference, not exaggerate it. Grey was the only colour that could logically unify humans, animals, birds and nature without turning the world into something absurd or fantastical; if I had used pink trees or blue cats, the entire idea of harmony would have collapsed into gimmick. The neutrality of grey allows everything to exist in one believable, shared space…."
In all that planning of the aesthetics, the brand missed one important detail—the discrimination associated with skin colour and appearance. In a country like India where racism runs deep across caste, religion and skin colour, using one tone—charcoal, which is often employed as a less harsh version of black even though it is on the dark grey colour spectrum—as an “artistic device" to “dissolve difference" is offensive.
What makes the campaign’s social posts more clueless are the fair-skinned models shown in the carousel, along with the images of the “painted" women. Why didn’t they just chose models with a darker skin tone in the first place? As a CNN article put it in 2019, “Any colored-face you wear that isn’t yours is racist." Plus, the idea that there is a monolithic construct called “Indian women" is similar to saying feminism is a one size fits all theory that will solve the problem of all women.
Similar examples abound—unnamed artisans working by the side of the runway as models walk in a designer’s creations; lush photo campaigns that place fine fabrics and couture beside images of the “inspiration", poor people whose traditional clothing and jewellery are used. A few weeks ago, a brand, known for its Banarasi saris, released a campaign shot in Thailand for a collection inspired by “Oriental design", a term politically incorrect for its associations with colonialism and the stereotypes it invokes. In one of the videos, the Indian model speaks while her Thai counterpart poses quietly, like a prop. And, let’s not even get into the complicated issue of weavers’ livelihoods being threatened by fake silk imports from China.
To truly make fashion a “celebration of togetherness", the industry needs to consider inclusion in the real sense and not just create air-brushed campaigns of a world without hierarchy. Fashion needs diverse bodies and identities. That will make for a provocative campaign, not flattening the reality of differences using one colour, black, white or charcoal.
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