Vogue, May 2012Have you picked up the May 2012 copy of Vogue, yet? Well, you should! Per usual, the magazine reps high quality content and photography, and gives you the dirty deets on next season’s style so that you can be ahead of the game. None of that, while useful and entertaining, is unexpected. But there is one thing in May’s Vogue that you will want to see, frame, take to your stylist and say, “DO THIS!” — Vogue’s entire fashion spread featuring big, beautiful textured hair!
Joan Smalls, the Puerto Rican model who has been turning heads since Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in NYC, has her textured curls blown out, big afro style for a fashion spread that ISN’T EVEN ABOUT HAIR.
Read More: Joan Smalls Delivers Big Natural Hair
This is important for a lot of reasons. Usually, when we see textured hair being featured in magazines (if we see it at all”>, it’s because the article is focusing on the hair. Whether the textured hair is being featured to talk about how beautiful textured hair is or about how it is the next trend, or if the textured hair is being called frizzy and ugly — it’s rare to see textured hair in a major magazine that is not the focus of the article.
As we all learned too quickly this past Fashion Week, straight hair is often used on models during runway shows and in magazine spreads because the designers want the focus to be on the clothes, not the hair. Our very own textured hair experts, from the Creative Director at Ouidad Santa Monica to Anthony Dickey in NYC, told us that because you don’t have to notice straight hair, you can focus more on the clothes, which is what the designers want. “OK, OK, fine,” we all seemed to grumble.
It is almost as though we are seeing, for maybe the first time in a major media publication, what life would have been like if our big curls were just part of who we were and – gasp – as though fashion was just something we used to express ourselves, not the other way around.
Of course, then we sat down with celebrity stylist Robert Vetica, who styles starlettes’ hair for major covers like Vogue, Harper’s Bizarre and Elle, and asked him, “Where are the curls?” he quickly responded, “I don’t know!” According to him, Salma Hayek is the only celebrity willing to let her natural hair down and out on covers and in spreads. Others, he said, are “just not brave enough.”
If you were to take a solid troll through our articles this past year, you would see a resounding trend: when it comes to fashion, textured hair is just too AWESOME to be ignored, so designers don’t like it. I mean, you can’t argue with awesome, right?
Wrong. Vogue has just stepped up to the plate and delivered what us on #teamnatural would call a home run. Their spread featuring Joan Smalls and her big hair is all about…shorts! Yep, that’s right. The spread is about short hemlines and while Smalls’ hair often take precedence in the spread, it is never mentioned.
It’s almost as though we are seeing, for the first time in a major media publication, what life would have been like if straight hair had never been fashionable, if textured hair had always been the go-to, if our big curls were just part of who we were and (gasp”> as though fashion was just something we used to express ourselves, not the other way around.
The spread is fierce, it’s inspirational and, to follow in Vogue’s footsteps and comment on what is new in the spread, the shorts are HAUTE. Buy the magazine, curlies. You’ll be showing this piece of history to your grandkids one day.
Spill: what do you think of the spread?
