Nicki Minaj Talks About Cultural Appropriation At Philipp Plein's SS18 Show At NYFW
If you've ever been lucky enough to witness anything to do with Philipp Plein, you'll know that it's star-studded, and amazingly OTT, with shows at Fashion Week ending up more like concerts. This season's SS18 show in New York was no different, with the likes of 50 Cent, Paris Hilton, Iman Shumpert and Nicki Minaj decorating the show's front row. It got to around 1am when Nicki Minaj, who performed with Yo Gotti, decided it was time to - quite rightly - call out the fashion industry's obsession with cultural appropriation and the blood-boiling lack of representation.
Addressing the crowds of hundreds of show-goers, Minaj shouted: 'Where my white people at?!' This wasn't a direct hit at Plein though, rather an applause for the German designer for his racially diverse catwalk. Models included Adriana Lima, Irina Shayk, Cordell Broadus, Rich the Kid, 21 Savage, Metro Boomin, Swae Lee, and Teyana Taylor, and rapper Future provided the show's soundtrack.
Minaj took her time on the mic to thank Plein for both her invitation and his support for her and other Black artists, but not before telling the world like it is. 'A lot of times designers get rich off of our culture but you don't see a motherfucker who looks like [us] in the front row.' Despite her impromptu speech being slightly out of kilter for the usual Fashion Week conversation, she's totally right. Non-white castings are still a rarity within the fashion industry even though high-end designers still choose to appropriate elements of Black culture in order to make profit and 'claim' new trends.
It's not the first time Nicki Minaj has used her platform to speak up about the lack of diversity and inequality in the fashion and entertainment industries (just in case you need us to re-jog your memory: the VMAs, white feminism, a butt-hurt Taylor Swift), and this most certainly won't be her last, nor should it be. After all, if you took something that didn't belong to you, both you and the rest of society would know that you did wrong, so why should white designers profiting off of black culture be treated any differently?
