I keep thinking about this article and came back today and re-read it for the second (or maybe third) time. I think it’s one of your best pieces for style AND content. I just wish the world were different and you never had a reason to write it.

Thank you for standing up for what’s right.

Thanks, Terra!

I’m asking this because a good majority of Home’s developers are male and white, and I know this because I’ve either met or spoken with a lot of them one on one over the years. I can say with significant confidence that in the case of Lockwood, we do a fair serious bit of research into what we bring to Home and its fashions, but not everyone or everything is 100% foolproof.

(BTW, if you really want to get your ideas noticed with regards to fashions for people of color, post sample images of your ideas to the monthly suggestions thread Tempest Fire posts on the forum: http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/PlayStation-Home/May-2014-Suggestions-Thread/td-p/43478944 This is where Lockwood got the idea to create Bollywood fashions. A great many people were posting and re-posting their desire to see these fashions realized.)

To be fair, the skin shades on Home aren’t truly accurate. No matter how hard I try to depict an Asian skin tone, no such color for it exists.

I’m all for racial equality. In fact, I still get different conversations when I get on as my darker-skinned avatar as pose to my lighter variant but both are depictions of me; I’m still the same regardless what color I am.

Thanks for your input!

Even makeup is pretty inaccessible (without coughing up a lot of money for Plus), since it’s calibrated for white girls and thus winds up being brighter than a black girl’s skin: put even a little bit on and you wind up looking like a clown, so you need a very careful touch on the slider.

There’s tons of ethnic clothing in Home! It’s just that almost all of it is American, Western European or Japanese; those are pretty much the only ethnicities represented.

Reading between the lines of complaints about “ethnic” things, and they’re basically either saying that they themselves are ethnically-neutral (which is a very ignorant/Privileged thing to say), or that only their own ethnicity matters (which is outright racist). And self-insulting too: it’d be like saying that men are genderless, or that English isn’t even a language. Go ahead and tell a guy that he’s “unmanly”, see how he likes it.

Sure, if you ask a white person, they’ll acknowledge that they’re white, but they normally don’t think of themselves in racial terms, they don’t claim a racial identity, because they don’t have to. Throw a black person in the mix and suddenly they have to think about race, and they don’t want to. (As though black people have that choice!)

But, take it as a challenge! Fashion for dark-skinned people works a little differently, which is an opportunity for designers. Deep, bold colors look great on black people, for example, or at least I think so.

(Now if only they’d have color-adjustable clothing in Home. Then nothing would ever be the wrong color!)