On Saturday morning, while having my credit card swiped at the check-out in a regularly visited petrol/gas station, I had noticed the newspapers were carefully set out as always. However, walking past the display, not all of the paper names were immediately visible.

Ah, but as I caught a glimpse of the bottom of this one’s front page, I just knew which paper had to have produced it — and checking the web later, I had my suspicions confirmed:

Thus The Independent once again bravely journalistically points out the speck in another’s eye; and not only was its timing in doing so impeccable, but also its sense of the truly newsworthy. For considering that the last time there was Belgrade-opposed independence from within the wreckage of former Yugoslavia (in the early 1990s) there was war in eastern Europe, the Independent obviously considered “racism in fashion” of more vital front page worthiness when compared to, for instance (as of Saturday), Kosovo’s incipient unilateral declaration of independence. The Indy, however, finally got around today to asking:

The Big Question: Why are so many countries opposed to Kosovo gaining its independence?

Speaking only for myself: Eh, darned if I know. Although, then again, maybe some actually do remember 1991-92, and are a bit nervous?

War is hardly as important, certainly, as another issue that wasn’t even on the radar in 1991-92. Inexcusably, though, in this “fashion report” the Indy doesn’t even choose to address “fashion’s” culpability on the more, shall we say, earthshaking issue — due to its producing clothing using power generated from “greenhouse gas” sources, transporting those clothes mostly from distant source factories to urban markets often thousands of miles away, and conducting runway shows all over the world — of its jet-setting contributions to “climate change”.

That omission is particularly glaring. And galling. For remember, the Indy is also the same paper which has led the way in regularly thundering (no pun intended) about that subject, while simultaneously and disgracefully also dispatching travel reporters all over the world — …According to our own pundits – The Independent’s foreign correspondents, whose own “worst airports” are listed on these pages – the hazards can include anything from AK-47s and organised criminals to the famously rude officials at US immigration… — and accepting advertising not just from “climate change” machine renters rental car companies, but also from planet-destroying airlines.

Nor does the paper seems much interested in, instead of money, accepting bartered, organically produced grain in exchange for its “news” product — product that also presented readers with a separate magazine supplement the very same day which included this pensive “news” photo:

Yes, do as I say, and certainly not as I . . . put on the cover of my “Saturday Magazine”. Why, when there are a myriad of British actresses — white and black — from whom to choose, did the Indy decide to place a demographically unrepresentative American on that magazine cover? Because she might help sell more copies of the paper?

Apparently, though, “fashion” is supposed to do what the Indy definitely won’t: rock the foundations upon which its hard currency income rests — because, as the Indy revealingly (pun intended) informs us, an agent seeking work for black models has claimed that getting work for black models is more difficult than it is for white models.

Bear in mind, there is no reason to disbelieve many in “fashion” might well be bigots. Prejudice is, after all, seemingly a human shortcoming almost impossible to extinguish. Yet one can’t help but suspect also that the overriding concern for “fashion” is, just as it is for the Indy (and is most of the time for all the rest of us), the dirty money.

Perhaps then it really could be said that the general tenor of “fashion’s” seeming preference for the women constituting most of the living mannequins strolling global runways hawking its output has less to do with “racism” than with that industry’s actual customer base?:

Speaking as London Fashion Week drew to a close, Carole White, co-founder of Premier Model Management, which supplies models to top fashion brands, admitted that finding work for black clients was significantly harder than for the white models, because both magazines and fashion designers were reluctant to employ them.

“Sadly we are in the business where you stock your shelves with what sells,” she said…

Which that “insider” . . . inside readily admits. Yes, it’s an industry in which salaries must be paid. Just like newspapers.

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That seems too much for the Indy, though. In this latest demonstration of its own bemusing editorial concoction of perpetual condescension towards Indy-decreed unenlightened provincialisms (although almost always only those the paper identifies as being “of the West”), coupled with its tiresome subjective myopias, the paper naturally focuses on “ethnic exclusion” here through the decidedly unchallenging prism that narrowly directs the onlooker to gaze only at its most predictable Western construct. That is then merely reinforced as the piece brings in still more of that “predictable”:

…Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who helped write a series of documentaries three years ago on the changing faces of beauty, said it was a misconception that black models were less versatile. He said: “The idea that black models can only be put in exotica or urban clothing is 15 to 20 years out of date. But if you look at four of the world’s most famous black models – Campbell, Tyra Banks, Wek and Noemie Lenoir – they come from four countries, their looks are all different and they are all physically dissimilar. There’s more diversity in those four than there are in all the models of Britain, Italy and Scandinavia put together.”

Janelle Oswald, a reporter at The Voice, aimed at the UK Afro-Caribbean community, was equally scathing. “Black people and models are very diverse,” she said. “Within the black community, we have a motto that says ‘out of many we are one’. I just came from London Fashion Week and I saw the Jamaican supermodel Nell Robinson – who has graced numerous magazine covers, done work for Victoria’s Secret and the Gavin Douglas show today. How much diversity do you want?”…

But then the paper inexplicably drifts — if you had managed to stragger through this far — to its finish with perhaps the most telling point in its entire article, yet one which was for some reason deemed worthy of a mention only in the very last line?:

…Ms White said her agency did make an effort to seek out more diverse modelling talent: “We actively scout for black models. We do find Indian and Pakistani models harder to recruit because often their parents don’t like them entering the business.”

The Independent curiously had zero to say anywhere else previously about provincial and obviously prejudiced Asian parents. Yet how dare they refuse narrowmindedly to see their teenaged daughters re-packaged and treated as an industry’s fodder? And why do they fail to see how their daughters could help salve some of that industry’s workforce guilt complexes?

Minor questions, those, apparently not worth addressing. More broadly, neither does The Independent ever touch upon “fashion” as an industry now catering (more than ever before) to a global market that reaches well beyond, say, Bluewater Mall in Kent. Which seems odd, for The Independent places great stock usually by that which is “non-British”; and many of “fashion’s” richest and most demanding customers are no longer in Britain or in (evil, evil) America.

Rather, many are found in the East and in the Gulf States. Even if a 17 year old black British sociologist model (who also believes a city that is 75% percent “white” actually isn’t) might not realize it, one only has to walk into a designer shop in, say, Moscow, Dubai or Hong Kong, or any major international airport for that matter, immediately to perceive that fact. Most customers in such places tend to be rather more interested in designer labels than in (provincial?) Western socio-preoccupations about “racial expression”; they fork out often utterly obscene sums to buy what they consider the brand, not the model’s “ethnic” haircut or darker skin hue. And that young woman’s employers desperately want those people — need them — to keep those purses open and buying their product . . . to pay her salary, and theirs.

Might it well therefore be said also that while there are always models for smallish, local business markets — there are certainly Asian and Arab models, and African models in Africa — most employed for the global brand market do seem to be blanded types of no obvious “race” other than “model-type”? And that that may be why “featureless” women (black included) are those most able easily to find global work? Notice, for example, the “global” — and black — model The Independent uses to illustrate its own piece.

Including a look (pun intended) into that business tendency might have helped make for a far more intriguing article. However, bringing such into the mix (again, pun intended) would obviously have been too wearing (once again, pun intended) for a Saturday. It is much easier-fitting (last time, pun intended) to fall back on Trevor Phillips quotes.

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Fortunately, where the liberal Indy fails us, thankfully the more doctrinaire left-wing Guardian/Observer duly steps . . . into it.

Britain may still be well over 90 percent white, and thus even 92 whites out of every 100 models doesn’t seem in itself evidence of rampant, bean-counting racial bias. But in its own published “investigation” a day later into this clearly pressing matter, buried within all the Guardian-speak-predictable, as if the paper were covering reporting on the need for greater “diversity” in urban police forces — …London’s ethnic minorities make up 29 per cent of an eight million-strong population. The largest ethnic group, accounting for around 800,000 people, is Afro-Caribbean… — and trying to keep the “debate” safely within the bounds of the trite — …the majority of black models who have made it to the top of their profession - Campbell, Tyra Banks, Iman - embody a westernised ideal of beauty… — is found this substantive, if grudging, observation:

…With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the opening up of the former Soviet states, the current vogue is for extremely skinny Eastern European models, with beanpole legs and anaemic faces. They reflect, perhaps, a new core client: the Russian oligarch’s wife, with nouveau money to burn on Sloane Street…

Meaning the industry gives its most numerous and high paying customers — as opposed to social observers — what they want? Most of those customers don’t seem (yet) to be shoppers primarily in, say, Brixton. Those, while they naturally buy designer also, and some of them may even spend a high-percentage of their income on such, are nowhere even approaching the buying power league of your average “oligarch wife”, or Milan shopping Qatari princess.

Indeed, as Eastern European women tennis players — “Where Did All Those Gorgeous Russians Come From?” in the words of Slate’s Anne Applebaum — from impoverished societies where life is still a terrible daily struggle, seem unlikely to lie awake nights mulling over the shortage of African-American and Afro-Caribbean women on the other side of the net, perhaps when “the Afro-Caribbean oligarch’s wife” becomes a Guardianite-cliché pouring millions into the fashion industry, the runway model composition globally might be altered a bit? A half-sensible assertion that?

[Shrug] Well, who knows? Unsurprisingly, neither The Indy or The Guardian ever manage to squeeze that mundane theory into any of their wasted verbiage. However, that’s probably understandable given that even before we get anywhere near that large an industry ethno-demographic shift . . .

. . . one suspects we may first see a quick procession of Kosovan models, which will no doubt socio-irritate both papers no end.