It's generally a bad idea to physically mimic a race or ethnicity that is not your own.
This is obvious every time a magazine paints another white model with dark brown face paint and the media cries "blackface" and gets all in a tizzy. Whether you think it is right or wrong, it is undoubtedly a bad PR move.
But Anna Dello Russo is not someone who cares what people think of her. So she went ahead and styled Crystal Renn for Vogue Nippon (that's Japanese Vogue) as Asian by stretching out her eyes and taping them back with scotch tape.
It is not known who told ADR, Vogue Nippon's editor-at-large, that this was a good idea.
The decision to make Renn over with more Asian-looking eyes is curious given that nothing else about that shoot is Asian-themed (as opposed to, say, a heavy-handed Chinese editorial complete with panda bears).
Are the eyes just a cheeky addition? Are they meant to cater to the Vogue Nippon audience? It's not exactly clear why they were necessary -- then again, it's also not clear that there's anything wrong with a little cosmetic eye-stretching.
Watch the behind-the-scenes video below and go to Dello Russo's blog to see the pictures -- do the eyes strike you as problematic?
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