Vice President-elect Kamala Harris recently made her debut on the Vogue cover, just days ahead of Inauguration Day at the White House. However, the magazine has been facing a lot of flak for “whitewashing” the future VP, who is the first African American woman to be elected in the post.
In one of the two pictures of the cover shoot for the magazine’s February issue, Harris is dressed in a black blazer, color-coordinated pants, white top, and her signature footwear- Converse sneakers, which she often wore during her campaign trail. She is posing in front of an apple green and salmon pink background, giving a nod to the colours of her sorority at Howard University, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
The second picture shows the 56-year-old in a powder blue suit in front of a gold backdrop. While Vogue released both the pictures as digital magazine covers to “respond to the seriousness of this moment in history and the role she has to play leading our country forward,” only the image of a sneaker-clad Harris will make it to the print edition.
The pictures have not gone down well with netizens for a number of different reasons. A Twitter user questioned, “Kamala Harris is about as light-skinned as women of colour come and Vogue still f****ed up her lighting. WT* is this washed-out mess of a cover?,” while another commented: “The picture itself isn’t terrible as a picture. It’s just far, far below the standards of Vogue. They didn’t put thought into it.”
Incidentally, Harris’s team has also said that this was not what was agreed upon by both sides prior to the photoshoot. Harris, who is set to be the first female, Black and Asian-American Vice President of the US, has yet to comment on the controversy.
Meanwhile, the magazine said in a statement that it went with the more informal image of Harris for the cover because the photo captured her “authentic, approachable nature, which we feel is one of the hallmarks of the Biden-Harris administration.”
Both images were taken by Tyler Mitchell, who became the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue in 2018, which featured Beyoncé.
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