When David Jones replaced model Miranda Kerr with model Jessica Gomes as the face of the department store less than a week ago, I punched the air on behalf of my former teenage self.
And then when I spotted the latest edition of Fairfax’s The (Sydney) Magazine with Gomes, plus models Samantha Harris and Shanina Shaik on the cover I couldn’t stop smiling.
These two incidents in the past week have caused me to reflect on how far we’ve come as a nation. Gomes, the new face of David Jones is half Singaporean-Chinese, half Portuguese. Harris is half Aboriginal, half German-Scandinavian and Shaik is half Pakistani-Saudi, half Australian-Lithuanian.
When I was a teenager some 30+ years ago, the visual cues for the definition of beauty came from Dolly magazine and the models in advertising campaigns for the department stores and fashion brands. Those models were what we aspired to look like back then. They were almost exclusively from white Anglo-Saxon backgrounds. Most of them had blonde hair and blue eyes.
In the school playground the translation was pretty simple. My blonde-haired girlfriends were the ones the boys lined up for so we thought we knew what we had to look like if we wanted a boyfriend. As adult women we can look back and say that girls and young women shouldn’t define themselves by their looks but the fact is it happens. Even the girls most likely to be High Court judges will be troubled by what they see in the mirror at some stage.
More than 30 years ago there were hardly any other teenagers at my working class state school with Asian backgrounds, none with African or indigenous heritage and certainly no one that looked even vaguely like me being presented as a thing of beauty on the cover of magazines or in fashion advertising campaigns. And so I permed and bleached my hair relentlessly, as insecure teenage girls do in an effort to look like someone they can never be. (FYI: your hair is the one thing you can easily change if you want to look like someone else.)
Within four editions of taking on the editorship of Dolly magazine five years later, I slipped in a cover of a young Eurasian model. She was part Indonesian and had fair skin so her look was quite ambiguous I thought. I’d been advised against it but I wanted to try it. The cover bombed. Now allowing for the fact that it may have been due instead to dud cover lines or a less than ideal cover image of this young model, I did have to admit that maybe the information I had been given about black and Asian models not selling was true. It was probably too early. Not enough teenage girls back then wanted to look like my Eurasian model. I was clearly an island. The magazine editor’s job is to give the readers what they want, not what I wanted them to want.
So imagine my delight in seeing three young women of mixed race on the cover of a magazine in 2013. It doesn’t matter that it’s 30 years after I began to bury my insecurities. What matters is that it has happened at all. The millenial generation has benefited from the immigration that started exploding when I was a child. As with my Italian mother and Chinese father who met in Sydney almost 50 years ago and have since produced three children and seven grandchildren, many of those migrants partnered outside of their cultural backgrounds and are responsible for the melting pot that characterizes many of the schools in our major capital cities. So ‘mixed race’ now forms part of the norm rather then the exception that it was three decades ago.
I was reminded that I wasn’t alone in feeling alone as a teenager when I met my now friend Sunday Life columnist Jacqueline Pascarl in a coffee shop in North Sydney about 15 years ago. Jacqueline spotted me and rushed over enthusiastically. The first thing she said to me was, “I have wanted to meet you because you look like me”. Jacqueline’s background is French Chinese.
I knew who she was because the story of the kidnapping of her children by their Malaysian Prince father had been major news for many years before. She told me she was keen to meet me because I was one of the only women with even a semi public profile at the time who looked like her. My profile was limited to the editor’s letter at the front of a magazine but it provided her with someone to identify with. I understood that immediately as I had spent my youth searching for role models who looked like me too.
Providing multi-cultural faces as physical role models for young women is not about swapping one kind of beauty with another. The reason it’s important is that it demonstrates that there isn’t a single Australian look. Our multi-cultural country now contains many different faces, all of which are beautiful. Its important for reasons of inclusion. So a big tick to David Jones for choosing a mixed race model to follow in the footsteps of Miranda Kerr and Megan Gale as its new face.