A Tale of Two Worlds: The Evolution of Representation in Magazines
I am posting, again! I wrote this piece in 2021, and never published it, but think its still relevant today. I also added a pay wall to this post simply because writing isn’t free.
Sarah Muhoza, an actress from Toronto, Canada, felt like Alice in Wonderland as a teenager when she filled her bedroom with posters she got from early 2000s magazines like Seventeen Magazine and Tiger Beat. The photos she hung in her room did not depict her reality as a Black woman.
"I just kind of made up my own mind about [the photos in the magazines], like it was a separate world," she says. It was like "Alice in Wonderland cause it was very much different from my reality and the [Black] women who surrounded me. The two did not match."
Muhoza still feels like she is Alice in Wonderland when she looks at photos in magazines today because of the lack of representation of Black women on the pages. "I think there still needs to be work done," she says. "I think when it comes to Black women, there's like a top five of people that they keep going back to, and there's so many, there's so many more out there."
Kerry Washington was the first Black woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2013, since Beyoncé in 2005, which made 100 covers between the two with no person of color. Since 2013, the number of people of color who appeared on 685 covers across 48 major magazines went from 17.4% in 2014 to 52.9% in 2021, according to The Fashion Spot. In a dramatic increase in 2021, 24% of the magazine covers featured plus-size models compared to 6% in 2016. Additionally, there has been a significant increase in transgender and non-binary models featured on the cover since 2016. In 2016, only 5% of people who made it to the cover were transgender and non-binary, while in 2021, that percentage increased to 13%. Consumers say even with these increases in representation; there is a need for improvement regarding who photos in magazines represent, with 95% of people under 25 years old reading magazines today, according to a report done by Mansi Media, Top Media Advertising, Burstein, Heitman.
