Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous

[shanti]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/fashion/28ETHN.html

ACH week, Leo Jimenez, a 25-year-old New Yorker, sifts through a mound of invitations, pulling out the handful that seem most promising. On back-to-back nights earlier this month, he dropped in to Lotus on West 14th Street for the unveiling of a new fashion line, and turned up at the opening of Crobar, a dance club in Chelsea, mingling with stars like Rosie Perez, long-stemmed models and middle-aged roués trussed in dinner jackets. Wherever he goes, Mr. Jimenez himself is an object of fascination. "You get the buttonhole," he said. "You get the table, you get the attention."

Mr. Jimenez, a model, has appeared in ads for Levi's, DKNY and Aldo, but he is anything but a conventional pretty face. His steeply raked cheekbones, dreadlocks and jet-colored eyes, suggest a background that might be Mongolian, American Indian or Chinese. In fact he is Colombian by birth, a product of that country's mixed racial heritage, and he fits right in with the melting-pot aesthetic of the downtown scene. It is also a look that is reflected in the latest youth marketing trend: using faces that are ethnically ambiguous.

Ad campaigns for Louis Vuitton, YSL Beauty and H&M stores have all purposely highlighted models with racially indeterminate features. Or consider the careers of movie stars like Vin Diesel, Lisa Bonet and Jessica Alba, whose popularity with young audiences seems due in part to the tease over whether they are black, white, Hispanic, American Indian or some combination.

"Today what's ethnically neutral, diverse or ambiguous has tremendous appeal," said Ron Berger, the chief executive of Euro RSCG MVBMS Partners in New York, an advertising agency and trend research company whose clients include Polaroid and Yahoo. "Both in the mainstream and at the high end of the marketplace, what is perceived as good, desirable, successful is often a face whose heritage is hard to pin down."

Ambiguity is chic, especially among the under-25 members of Generation Y, the most racially diverse population in the nation's history. Teen People's current issue, devoted to beauty, features makeovers of girls whose backgrounds are identified on full-page head shots as "Puerto Rican and Italian-American" and "Finnish-German-Irish- and Scotch-American."

*snip*

i thought i would throw this out here for conversation, as the mother of a biracial 13 yr old son...

[DuctapeFatwa]

1. Try singing that to the tune of "Simply Irresistible"

There, It's stuck in your head. Your day's shot.

;)

[vi5]

2. I guess there are two sides to it from my perspective...

First, by way of disclaimer I am as white and as male as they come so this is definitely an outsiders perspective.

The Good: Any kind of ethnic diversity on display and in marketing is a positive at least in some ways. The more variety there is out there the better and all colors, races, shapes, and sizes being represented is a good thing especially for the multitude of mixed race younger people out there.

The Bad: In some ways it is the advertising and marketing world having it both ways. It is a way to get credit for diversity, particularly of the ethnic variety, but without actually going all the way, and in some ways presenting a more ambiguous face rather than a face of more pronounced color or ethnicity.

[Karenina]

3. Astute!

Are you in marketing? Just as an aside, decades ago when my oldest was a camera-hamming toddler he did a shoot for Kodak. They got some stellar footage of him but rejected it because his race was ambiguous.