There’s more to New York Fashion Week than the runway shows.
Journalist Noor Tagouri and ELLE.com Style Director Nikki Ogunnaike took a break from their New York Fashion Week Sunday schedules to have a conversation on diversity and inclusivity. Part of a series of panels called NYFW: The Talks held each day during NYFW at its main hub, Spring Studios, this conversation drew on both Tagouri and Ogunnaike’s work as minority women in the media.
One of Tagouri’s focuses as a journalist is on the misrepresentation of people in marginalized communities and how the media tells their stories. On being a better storyteller and overall ally, Tagouri advised the audience to ask themselves, “How is the way that I cover this going to impact this person or the community?”
Twenty-five-year-old Tagouri spoke from experience after being misrepresented and misidentified as Pakistani actress Noor Bukhari in American Vogue’s February 2019 issue.
Journalist Noor Tagouri and Style Director of ELLE.com, Nikki Ogunnaike at their panel, The Talks: In Conversation with Noor Tagouri and Nikki Ogunnaike
“So, the Vogue thing happened. It was not surprising to me. The way that I can explain that it wasn’t surprising to you is that two weeks before and the day before I saw it, we had sent over an email and we said, “Hey, we just want to check on the final copy,” because we know that this is expected.”
The negligence with the Vogue incident showed how the media uses misrepresentation and misidentification so that “if fits their narrative,” Tagouri said.
“We all hold implicit bias in ourselves, right? Nobody’s perfect. I’m not perfect, but when it comes to people who are at the margins of our communities, sometimes it is so deeply penetrated into our culture that everybody is one, painted with one brush and two, it’s just like “We put you in this magazine or we featured you. You should be happy with that.””
“That is a very, very, very, very familiar thing if you are a minority in this country. You are always seen as “We let you in. You’re the one person in the room who looks like this. Hey, you should be happy.””
At the end of the panel, Tagouri posed just one question to the audience, “When are we going to have that honest conversation of what it actually means to bring people up who have constantly been oppressed in this community?”
