In defense of fashionistas

Here's an NYT article about a lady designer in the brand new country of South Sudan who is pitching fashion as something that might give her country a bit of an international image and something that locals can feel proud of. Who knows if that will work, but it's worth a try because the South Sudanese (such as the Nuer and the Dinka) tend to possess this spindly Avatar-style elegance as if their ancestors had been kidnapped by flying saucers thousands of years ago, and they've been evolving ever since on a lower gravity planet.

On Fashion Runway, South Sudan Takes Steps Toward a National Identity 

JUBA, South Sudan — Even by the standards of fashion models, the women teetering in their high heels on the dirt catwalk here were remarkably tall and slender. But judging by South Sudan’s many towering inhabitants, they were hardly out of the ordinary in the young nation’s capital.

Of the many articles I've ever read about the difficulties of southern Sudan, this is one of the few that mentions what the locals tend to look like: tall. This may have something to do with the fact that it was written from a fashion standpoint.

I always thought that it was a mistake for sympathetic journalists to skip over how distinctive looking southern Sudanese tend to be in the interests of not offending modern customs against Noticing. Without a visual hook for readers to hang the story upon, the long struggle of southern Sudanese to be free of the brown northern Sudanese just sounded like More Bad News Out of Africa.

Fashion folks aren't necessarily the most likable human beings in history, but they do feel themselves exempt from the taboo against seeing with their own two eyes.