Vogue Italia and Hoop Earrings

Vogue Italia and Hoop Earrings

Havana Barbie’s thought on the arts
2011-08-23

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey

I have always loved to wear hoop earrings. In fact, they are my earrings of choice. Big and silver, that’s how I like them. Imagine my surprise and shock when I saw earrings I have always called hoop earrings called “Slave Earrings” by Italian Vogue. Really? Slave earrings? Vogue wants to link an ornamental accessory, a mark of indulgent aestheticism to a historically denigrated body that did not have the choice or power to choose how to look, let alone what to do? Even more appalling was the text (which has since been removed so as “not to offend” and are now called “ethnic earrings” … sigh):
 
“Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops. If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.”
 
I want to focus on the phrase “the decorative traditions of the women of colour.” Woman of colour is a charged label, especially when connected to the legacy of slavery, miscegenation, and sexual peccadilloes not just in the US South, but in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean as well. Historically, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century woman of colour meant creole, métisse, passe-blanc, mulatta, or mulattresse, i.e., the mixed race woman who was black… but not quite. With her many names and pigments, the woman of colour and “her decorative traditions” in the southern United States is often problematically romanticized through the stories of the quadroon balls of New Orleans where wealthy white men attended in search of sexual relationships. These women of colour negotiated liaisons called plaçage which were economically beneficial for themselves and their extended, often matrilineal family. Many of these women of colour were free and some even owned slaves…

Read the entire article here.

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