Following the announcement of Leena Nair’s (no relation) appointment as CEO of Chanel last month, media and fans were quick to laud the announcement as a step forward in diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts by global brands given she would be one of the industry’s only women of colour in the exclusive ranks of leadership.
However, Ms Nair’s appointment as the first Indian woman to lead a Western luxury brand is a long overdue opportunity to reflect on the fact that D&I developments – even ones as seemingly significant as this – are still a means to camouflage the main issue at hand: that the global fashion industry still largely adheres to White Western prescriptions about beauty, aesthetic, and lifestyle, thereby reinforcing Western cultural superiority, which in turn furthers its economic dominance.
D&I has become a buzzword in the fashion industry in recent years and more so after the surge of wokeness triggered by the events of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. Western firms are eager to showcase diversity to capitalise on the movement, and they are successful since many fashion consumers (both Western and non-Western) are oblivious to these motives and perceive D&I as a cause for celebration.
For example, Chanel is a brand most known for popularizing the ‘little black dress’, a garment that is seen as a fashion staple today. Yet its origins are nothing to celebrate: a uniform meant to hold women of colour in place to replace traditional and ethnic clothes, both in the West and across colonies. The appointment of a non-White CEO will not change that nor the more important issue, which is Chanel’s abiding philosophical primacy of promoting Western design and fashion sensibilities across the non-Western world.
As a global company, Chanel clearly has the right to influence markets across the world as it sees fit, but we should not be swayed by D&I developments that have been meticulously selected to fit into a politically acceptable framework that cannot be challenged. At the same time we should also confront the inconvenient truth that the promotion of D&I in the fashion industry enables Western-owned firms to blend fashion and culture in ways that many non-Whites do not notice, helping sustain a business strategy of flooding non-Western markets with cheaply produced Western fashion while also extending White and Western culture to every corner of the world, thereby maintaining and perpetuating the aura of superiority around White people and their culture – this has been termed the ‘colonization of the mind’ and creates cultural subservience.
