Is diversity not normal?

M&S new campaign. Copyright: M&S

Everyone seemed to be in a real frenzy the other day when the news that TK Maxx had used real shoppers in their new campaign, featuring a lovely sixty two year old catering assistant and an octagenarian, presumably a pensioner.  On the same day Marks and Spencer released part two of the notable British women campaign, with very well known faces, and only one professional model, Alek Wek, styled to look the high fashion model that she is.

I sometimes write for the HuffingtonPost, so Poorna Bell, Lifestyle Editor of the UK edition emailed me to send a comment for her piece.
I copy it here, verbatim:
As a mature model and an active supporter of diversity in fashion and advertising, I am  happy to see that well known brands are realising that they need to have a wider range of models in their campaigns. I just wish this was not sensationalised!  I still cannot help thinking that much of it is rather tokenistic. The day when we will not feel we need to have articles saying “Oh look!  an older model…a black model…a ‘whatever’ model’  will mark a substantial shift in our attitudes. Diversity should be perceived as normal, rather than something to gawk at.  
I wrote that as soon as I got Poorna's email, it really was a gut reaction.

I then went to a most stimulating panel discussion at London College of Fashion, organised by Dr Carolyn Mair and with noted speakers, among whom James Partridge OBE, Founder and Chief Executive of Changing Faces, a UK charity that supports and represents people with facial disfigurement.
One of the things that transpired, during the discussion, endorsed by the two psychologists on the panel, Dr Mair and Dr Chris Pawson, was that if we get used to seeing something our brains will soon perceive it as normal. This applies to the way we react to people whose faces have been severely disfigured: the more we see them, the more we are able to see them as people rather than 'freaks'. In other words we will adjust to taking in their physical characteristics without constantly seeing them as abnormal.

Photographer: Karolina Amberville. Model: myself

Designer: Tomasz Kociuba

It really has, as a principle, a general application. If every time we see an ad featuring a non-conventional model - and I guess that in this day and age of constant photography everyone is a model of sort - we jump up and down and point our finger, it will have the opposite effect: rather than being regarded as normal we will still view it as exceptional. It follows that the very idea of diversity, apart from being trivialised, continues to be regarded as out-of-the-norm.
This is a topic that really requires greater delving into. Ideas of beauty keep on changing. Back in the 1950s or even 1960s a woman as tall as Alek Wek or L'Wren Scott, the American designer that recently passed away (and for whom Passing Lives asked me to write an obituary) would have been regarded as freakish rather than beautiful. In Alek Wek's case, for a long time, she was seen as an exotic African woman and it was her exoticism that was noted, as an extension of that attitude which Sosipatra discussed in her recent guest post.
As for using real people in advertising, this is a practice that has been going on for decades. Some 'real people' are just a category of models and actors who simply do not fit the criteria for catwalk and editorial modelling but are still professional. The label is bizarre because it kind of implies that fashion models are not real people. But, still, I can see that it is short hand for saying 'people who do not have a model look' whatever that maybe because, as we know, the model look does change. It takes time to change it, but it does change, as shown by Rick Owens choice of models for Paris Fashion week.
That's what campaigns like All Walks are striving to achieve.