Runway Reports:Whitey Still Rules The RunwaysAt The Couture

It's a pretty slow week in the retail world what with the summer and the holidays, but in Paris, it's Fall Haute Couture Week, hot on the heels of the menswear shows, so they are having a fashion bonanza over there.
In keeping with today's theme of Fashion and Political Issues, The Wall Street Journal is still talking about Vogue Italia's Black issue featuring only black models, and when Dsquared2  featured an almost entirely black cast led by Tyson Beckford at their Fall menswear show in Milan this month, many hoped that the Caten brothers who design the label would spark a trend that would lead to dramatically increased opportunities for models of color.
So much for wishful thinking.
Rumors that Lanvin would repeat Dsquared2's runway lineup at their men's show proved to be unfounded as they resented a boilerplate lineup of wispy, fully caucasian youths (which is a whole other issue to discuss). Vivienne Westwood, Yohji Yamamoto and several other designers shifted the model dialogue by casting older, heavier and, well... hairier models.
When Haute Couture took over on Monday, many must have been disappointed to see that Vogue Italia had little or no influence on the racial makeup of the runways. Dior, which uses the most models by showing 45 looks on 45 girls, used only one Asian model, Hye Park at #21, and a single black model, Chanel Iman at #29, who has been the industry's designated "black girl" for a few seasons now.
Armani used not a single black model, and only one Asian, Ai Tominaga. Chanel followed the same template using only Liu Wen. Lacroix wins the booby prize so far by choosing to use a completely caucasian cast. It took Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci to acknowledge the issue at all, choosing to open his show with (gasp!) a South Asian model, Indian born Lakshmi Menon, immediately followed by black models and Vogue Italia cover girls Jourdan Dunn and Sessilee Lopez. Of course nothing but white faces followed, but it's enough to make Tisci look like the hero of the moment. Perhaps, as a Italian, he was more receptive to a point made by a magazine from his homeland, or possibly, in a rare look back at his label's history, he may have noticed that, in his heyday, Hubert de Givenchy regularly filled his catwalks with black models for no other reason than that he liked them. The recently departed Yves Saint Laurent famously did exactly the same thing, making the current whitewashing of the runways seem like a particularly egregious backslide.
There are two major shows left, Jean Paul Gaultier, who is typically more likely to look for unusual models anyway, and Valentino, where Alessandra Facchinetti is showing her first Haute Couture collection.
The next major round of shows will be the Spring Collections starting in New York this September. Now that the critical eyes ofthe press have moved on to race from extreme thinness, it will be the industry's last chance to redeem itself on this issue, and we would hope that New York designers would naturally be somewhat more sensitive to this issue.
UPDATE 7/3:
VALENTINO: All white models
JEAN PAUL GAULTIER: Chanel Iman, Jourdan Dunn & Liu Wen

Race On The Runway (Wall Street Journal)
Haure Couture Shows on Style.com:
Christian Dior, Armani Privé, Chanel,  Givenchy, Valentino, Jean Paul Gaultier