With a shiny new role as Chanel ambassadress (and campaign model), Willow Smith joins an all-star female lineup of muses including Kristen Stewart, Elle Fanning, Keira Knightley, and Lily-Rose Depp. All five young women have more than a few things in common, including being young, talented, and exceptionally beautiful. But as a young, talented, exceptionally beautiful black girl, Smith’s new muse status is singularly exciting. The 15-year-old musician isn’t just advancing the case for diverse casting in a historically white industry, but affirming the confidence of girls with a type of beauty that is too often ignored by mainstream media.
“It’s not every day that a 15-year-old black girl with dreads gets elected to be the Chanel ambassador,” Smith told The Telegraph from backstage at Chanel’s Haute Couture show in Paris yesterday. Speaking of her dream of diversifying beauty standards, she continued, “I know a lot of girls that look like me feel that they’re not beautiful and feel like they don’t have a place in the media or a place in the world. I want them to know that’s not true, and if you’re confident and you love yourself then everything you see, your perception, will start to change and you’ll see things differently. I want to show those girls that might not think they’re beautiful but they are.”
It can’t all be on one 15-year-old to expand the beauty perceptions of an entire industry/nation. Luckily, Willow isn’t fighting the good fight alone, with Rihanna recently making history as the first black woman to front a Dior campaign. We can’t wait to see which brand will take the next long-overdue step forward.
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Text Hannah Ongley