This story is from Sunday magazine
Latifa Daud is a Fiji-Gujarati Muslim born and raised in Auckland, who lives with muscular dystrophy. She works as a consultant for All is for All, a creative agency that works with brands and businesses to help them become truly inclusive and accessible for disabled people.
She talks to Tyson Beckett, and is photographed by Becki Moss.
LATIFA:
To me beauty is really about values and what you value in your life and the world. If you have beautiful values then that will translate into the decisions you make in your life.
I value community, looking after one another, being ethical, looking after the planet and bringing people on journeys with you, lifting each other up. These are the things that influence the decisions I make in terms of work and purchasing.
Everywhere you look the definition of beauty is different. Being South Asian and living with a disability I hardly ever saw that represented in places where beauty is often seen. I never really saw myself in something the whole world would consider as that [beautiful].
In terms of South Asian beauty standards, it's still very colonised. The things that are valued are being fair-skinned, tall and skinny. Messages seen in industries such as Bollywood are still very much promoting skin lightening creams and things like that.
You still see it seeping into some narratives but there really is a big push in the South Asian diaspora to really challenge that because that image that I describe [tall, skinny and fair-skinned], very few people in the subcontinent look like that but its 400-500 years of conditioning. We're at the point in history where we are decolonising that conversation.
It's really about re-framing your own conversation in your own head and how you decide to look at yourself and how you really reframe that conversation for yourself and the people around you.
When I started university I started to read more and started to understand the politics of identity and that's when the penny dropped. "Oh my gosh this is what I think about myself, that's not OK".
That was a few years ago now and I still find myself trying to unlearn some of that. I think it's a long game but it was about being intentional about the information I was consuming and what's the messaging in that. Being responsible about values. What are my values and how does that shape the material that I consume and how does it influence how I see myself?
It's also about representation. When was the last time you saw a person in a wheelchair in a fashion campaign? It's a historical narrative still being played out where disabled people are not being seen in these spaces, not seen as a perfect body because society doesn't tell us that a person in a wheelchair is that.
I grew up never seeing someone in a wheelchair even on TV or on a billboard or singing. Disability was always a sympathy thing or charity and so why would someone in a wheelchair see themselves as beautiful if they've never seen anyone who looks like them in a space where "beautiful" people are?
That's where I used to sit, it's about unpacking where does that come from? The people who give that message - what are their values? If their values don't align with yours then why do you care what they think, what they have to say or what they see in you.
