Billboards in New York
City’s Times Square
bombard passersby
with a broad range
of beauty ads. Dove’s
#ShowUs and Rihanna’s
Fenty advertising
campaigns reflect
efforts to attract a
more diverse audience
to beauty products—
and gain considerable
market share.
THE SUDANESE MODEL Alek Wek appeared on
the November 1997 cover of the U.S. edition
of Elle magazine, in a photograph by French
creative director Gilles Bensimon. It was, as
is so often the case in the beauty business, a
global production.
Wek, with her velvety ebony skin and mere
whisper of an Afro, was posed in front of a stark,
white screen. Her simple, white Giorgio Armani
blazer almost disappeared into the background.
Wek, however, was intensely present.
She was standing at an angle but looking
directly into the camera with a pleasant smile
spread across her face, which wasn’t so much
defined by planes and angles as by sweet, broad,
distinctly African curves. Wek represented
everything that a traditional cover girl was not.
More than 20 years after she was featured on
that Elle cover (see page 101), the definition of
beauty has continued to expand, making room
for women of color, obese women, women with
vitiligo, bald women, women with gray hair and
wrinkles. We are moving toward a culture of big-
tent beauty. One in which everyone is welcome.
Everyone is beautiful. Everyone’s idealized ver-
sion can be seen in the pages of magazines or on
the runways of Paris.
We have become more accepting because peo-
ple have demanded it, protested for it, and used
the bully pulpit of social media to shame beau-
ty’s gatekeepers into opening the doors wider.
Wek was a new vision of beauty—that virtue
forever attached to women. It has long been a
measure of their social value; it is also a tool to
T
Women: A Century of Change
A YEARLONG SERIES
96 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
