Okay so, with all of the controversy surrounding natural hair in the workplace and schools and in general, it didn’t long for the Internet to speak out over a photo of at least one school child pictured in H&M’s new kids campaign.
A long IG post by IG user vernonfrancois, writes in part:
“My heart breaks imagining yet another girl from my community sitting in front of a mirror being ignored by the team around her, left to her own devices because someone didn’t know how to handle her texture.”
But, H&M has since responded, noting that they usually shoot their child models after a full day of school and wanted the kid models to look like kids. Their statement says, “If you look at the imagery online, it’s clear that none of the child models, including the various Black kids with different textured hair, had their hair styled for this shoot.”
🤦🏽♀️I get it but I also did a little digging & saw that EVERY CHILD featured in that campaign “Kids will be Kids”, hair was “A MESS”🤧!We have to start reading before we jump to conclusions&stop believing the first thing we see posted about a situation on the internet! #HMKids #HM pic.twitter.com/bK8GuJrTWq
— Elisha (@Elisha3Williams) September 20, 2019
One Twitter user seemingly thought it was much ado about nothing in this post:
Why y’all keep singling out the one black girl from the H&M ad? ALL the kids’ hairstyles were messed up. How come the other children aren’t getting this backlash?
Hair texture got y’all twisting for excuses like pretzels. But anywho- pic.twitter.com/ksludbLayc— Tenille Clarke (@tenilleclarke1) September 20, 2019