My Nude is not your Nude #whatsyournude

I’m not one to play the race card and lament “woe is me” because of the color of my skin. Nowadays, everyone is marginalized for something or other – too tall, too short, blogging as a daddy instead of a mommy, what you eat/what you don’t eat, android vs iPhone, the list goes on so there is no point complaining. Our society is into labels and assigning people different rights and privileges based on these labels – I don’t get into that.

What I do get into is industry understanding what the market wants and responding. Its simple high school economics – supply and demand. Thanks to Tara Raines, a 31-year-old psychologist in Los Angeles, she has started a conversation around the need for bras that actually reflect everyone’s “nude”. She is rallying women of all shades to tell manufacturers of bras that we want everyone’s nude to be accounted for. If you do a Google image search for “skin color bra” or “nude color bra” you’ll see that all the images are of fair skinned women in pink, beige and cream colored undergarment – the left side of the rainbow in the above image (FYI, not a work safe search to perform).

In this market driven society, designers need to take notice of an entire group of women who are not having their purchasing requirements met. Especially women with huge purchasing power. I have never owned a nude color bra. Chances are your nude is not my nude.

Tara launched a campaign today at the start of Black History month. She is asking that we contact bra manufacturers and ask for more brown bras.

If you’d like to find out more head over to What’s Your Nude on Facebook and follow the conversation at #whatsyournude on Twitter. Let your favorite bra manufacturer know that the market is demanding more choices in colors. You don’t have to be of darker skin color to stand behind the movement, you just have to want to help your sisters out.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that bra makers include darker hues when manufacturing their collections. Women of color deserve to look and feel sexy, and a big part of that is looking like ourselves.

~ Tara Raines

Have you ever suffered a fashion injustice? Share your stories in the comments and let me know if you join up to the movement online.

Image courtesy of Stackoverflow.com