ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses ‘the look’ of racialized fascination as it dissects Black women’s and men’s skins. The discussion seeks to decolonize fashion in terms of racialized skin aesthetics and affects within a racialized present by first looking at fashions and racisms before moving to ‘the look’ and the racialization of modelling as global aesthetic labour in which Black skins are negatively racialized through a fascination with difference, even as they are cannibalized and avidly consumed. Racialized skin fascination continues to carry colonial misogynoir (Bailey and Trudy, 2018) and anti-Blackness because darker skin is still negatively valued by the colonial gaze. The discussion segues to fashion as a racialized present through looking at the Black male body in urban fashion as an antidote to its previous relative absence in haute couture.
