Allure magazine has featured Soo Joo Park, Fei Fei Sun, and Fernanda Ly on its June 2018 issue themed on hair. The covers are significant because they represent only the third time in the magazine’s 28-year history it’s featured an Asian model on the cover. Lucy Liu was on a cover in 2000 and Olivia Munn, who’s part Chinese, was featured in 2014.
Editor-in-chief Michelle Lee commented on the placement on Twitter, where she explained the was deeply meaningful to her. Lee wrote, “We’ve made a real effort to celebrate diversity on all platforms of Allure in the past two years. But, my God, only two covers? Especially as an Asian woman, this is sad and frankly embarrassing. I’d love to see us as a society move beyond tokenism and not just view diversity as a box that has to be checked off.
“Stop it with the token POC, ok? Growing up in a not-diverse-at-all town, I dealt with racist bullies and, as a result, didn’t view ‘asianness’ or ‘otherness’ as beautiful for many years. It’s one of the reasons that representation is so important to me today. Asian and Asian-American heritage is really heavily underrepresented in the industry, and I want to push for inclusion. We’re the fastest-growing minority in the country, but you hardly ever see one of us on the cover of a major American publication….”
Check out the gorgeous covers below and find interviews with the Park, Sun and Ly on allure.com.
