Gigi Hadid clearly didn’t intend to do blackface – but the criticism of her Vogue Italia photoshoot is still important

Black it up, black it in, let me begin – Gigi’s all right but there is a culture of all white

Gigi Hadid's hair and skin were obviously darkened for the photoshoot (Vogue Italia)

Italian Vogue slapped so much bronzer on its cover-girl Gigi Hadid that the (blonde, blue-eyed) model has apologised for her “blackface”. She says she has no control over such shoots or how her image is altered after she leaves the studio and goes home to regrout her bathroom tiles (which is what I imagine top models do after work. You simply can’t be a supermodel if your bathroom tiles are grotty).

I had a look at the image and it doesn’t look like her at all. They’ve blackened her hair and darkened her skin and, as is the current fashion, back-combed her eyebrows. Yes, I can see why people are annoyed. It is Italian Vogue, though, and it looks like they’ve taken this fair-skinned, woman of American and Palestinian heritage, and tried to make her look more Michael Corleone.

Interestingly, no one has complained about the gentleman behind Hadid in the photo, who seems to have been painted gold. I imagine C3PO is busy preparing a vlog post on the cultural appropriation of droids.

The 23-year-old is one of the busiest models on the planet right now. I imagine she just turns up to each engagement, does her job and buzzes off to the next thing which, let’s be realistic, probably isn’t home improvements (more’s the pity). I’m no supermodel, but I do know what it’s like to rush from job to job with barely time to breathe, honouring engagements put in your diary by your management team.

In the past, I have naively made the assumption that the organisations I am booked for would always be morally palatable. But I’ve had to back away from some things.

I once pulled out of a TV job because they wanted me to wear a belly-dancing outfit and wriggle out of an Ali Baba basket because, you know, I was born in Tehran and that’s what Persians do when we’re not weaving them flying carpets (I am being sarcastic. It is not what Persians do. It’s what Arabians do.)

But it’s not always clear what’s going on beneath the surface of a job and occasionally you find yourself becoming a part of something you did not choose to be.

An undercover reporter exposed last year the horrific reality about the Presidents Club. When it hit the news, the way it was described rang a bell with me. I looked in my 2010 diary and sure enough, one week looked something like this:

Monday: Top Secret Comedy Club

Tuesday: Hertford Theatre

Wednesday: Benefit, firefighters’ union

Thursday: THE PRESIDENTS CLUB!!!

Yes indeed. I was once “the turn” at that sleazy, ghastly festival of the exploitation of young women.

Obviously, back it had yet to be revealed that girls had to sign a confidentiality contract before their shifts there. To me it was just another corporate gig. These gigs tend to be quite tough, but they fund my labours of love. This one, though, is one I’d have swerved had I known what was behind the “charity fundraising” smokescreen. A donation to a relevant charity assuaged my guilt.

I imagine when Hadid turned up to her Italian Vogue shoot on the day, no one said, “Gigi, babe, what we’re gonna do today is take a lovely picture of you then we are going to colour it in. You’ll get to look a bit like one of the black models we hardly ever book.”

We all make mistakes. We live and learn and all those other clichés we pull out when we inadvertently collude with something we find morally bankrupt.

I understand that in her whirlwind of commitments, Gigi Hadid does not stop to examine the outcome of all the photoshoots she does, and her apology was sensible and heartfelt.

“There are real issues regarding representation in fashion – it’s our responsibility to acknowledge these issues”, she wrote, “and work towards a more diverse industry.” That surely hits the nail on the head of the nerve this picture really strikes: that people of colour simply are not given the same opportunities to shine in their field because, dammit, skin hue is still such a bloody issue.

“People don’t buy the magazines if there’s a black girl on the cover!” editors whine. Well, change that, you silly sausage. We have black families in TV adverts now and as far as I know, no one’s gone bankrupt.

White is still seen as “normal”, while darker skins are labelled “exotic” and saved for when it’s “People Of Colour Day” or something. And of course it’s not just the fashion industry – it’s across the board, where people who are not white are overlooked because, subconsciously, producers, editors, publishers, commissioners see non-white as “niche” or “novelty”: “One or two people of colour will do and as long as we have those, we’ll carry on booking the ‘normal’ ones.”

Whenever I think of issues like this, I’m reminded of a joke by the brilliant Stephen K Amos, a black comedian of Nigerian descent, who said at one of his shows, “I love doing live comedy, but my real goal is to get my own TV show. But as we know, the BBC has a diversity policy, and apparently I have to wait for Lenny Henry to die.”