Vogue Renamed The Afro A 'Cloud Bob' And Black Women Aren't Having It
Vogue's 'cloud bob' controversy highlights cultural appropriation, the power of prestige media, and the need for diverse voices.
Black News 
Vogue has played in our face once again by dubbing a clear afro a “cloud bob.” The publication recently released a list of summer haircuts under the “cloud bob” moniker that featured an image of Tracee Ellis Ross rocking her signature fro.
Threads, X, and TikTok lit up with people furious that the platform was renaming an iconic symbol of Black beauty. The list dropped the style shortly after and was republished as a list of 16 styles. Guess the “cloud bob” wasn’t that really essential this season after all, considering the backlash it brought.
Not only did they attempt to label the style with a new name, but they also credited a celebrity stylist named Tom Smith with defining the look.
Smith issued a statement distancing himself from the controversy on Instagram following the onslaught of hate.
The criticism might have changed the final version of one story, but it didn’t erase the term or the implication that the style was defined by Smith from the platform altogether.
Appropriating The Afro
The publication released a beauty story instructing their readers on how to wear a cloud bob in September of 2025. Images of afros accompanied the story. One was a perfectly symmetrical Afro. The word afro does not appear in the story. Its well-documented legacy does not appear in the story. The impact of Tracee’s mom, the legendary Diana Ross, rocking an afro, as a glamour girl, does not appear in the story.
Instead the “cloud bob” is explained like it is something new.
Afros don’t need to be redefined at all. They are cemented in our visual identity the way french rolls, rope twists, microbraids, and top knots are. There is no need to invent what exists. You can refer to it or reimagine it, but you can not create the concrete from scratch. It’s already there, whether you decide it’s important to look at it during that season or not.
Angela Basset, Colin Kaepernick, Jenifer Lewis, Tabitha Brown, Yaya DaCosta, Solange Knowles and more have rocked afros, not “cloud bobs.” They are apart of Black culture, and that it is important.
Anna, and her bob, might be claiming to take a backseat from running the publication, but that hasn’t stopped the colonial energy from thriving. Not every style piece has to be a drawn-out history lesson, but there is a gray area in between wholeheartedly embracing a legacy and completely ignoring its contributions. A sentence or two could set the record straight in these situations.
Bigger Than Brief Backlash
This isn’t the first time the brand was forced to apologize for cultural appropriation and tone deaf campaigns. There was the time the fro-inspired images of Kendall Jenner that they claimed to represent the Gibson girl in 2018. They decentered plus-size bodies from a video they produced inspired by Hair Spray. People have called them out about culturally insensitive photoshoots for years. This isn’t a blip. It’s built in.
There’s pressure on all beauty writers to identify emerging trends. It doesn’t excuse the insensitivity of this magnitude. You can acknowledge a trend without appropriating the tradition that birthed it. Language matters. It is used to dismiss and erase people.
This can be done unintentionally, making the need for care with words even more important at a place like Vogue.
Related: Vogue’s ‘Hairspray’ Video Starring Gigi Hadid Missed The Plus-Size Plot
The Burden Of Prestige
Certain cultural institutions become the defining voice of our society, and that’s why we have to hold them accountable. It’s easy to dismiss things like this as rage bait, but these terms linger and overshadow other voices.
People trust Vogue; they believe in Vogue. What they say will be what most people accept as truth. This is particularly dangerous in a world where AI summaries have replaced people doing actual research. LLMs are scraping information from places that they consider authorities and presenting that to impressionable people as the definitive truth. That truth won’t include us if people continue to replace our beauty staples with titles that they consider more palatable for them.
This is why who is telling the story matters just as much when you’re talking about edge control and bundles as when you’re talking about voter disenfranchisement and reproductive justice. Living history grows from our scalps, just as it is recorded in newspapers and textbooks.
If the “cloud bob” falls in the algorithm of a Vogue reader, believe me, it makes a sound.
Moving Backwards
Teen Vogue being gutted makes this misstep feel even ickier. There may still be hardworking, culturally competent people in that building, but you wouldn’t know it by the insensitive content that they are churning out. The guardrails they worked so hard to ease up as a culture are being slammed to bits.
It’s open season on Black women, once again.
The absence of voices that reflect us leads to the rebranding of bonnets and flexirods by those not conditioned to see our experiences. This is how magazines can get away with calling cornrows “boxer braids.” It’s how the slick back buns and hoop earrings that have been spotted on the streets of the Bronx and Spanish Harlem forever get rebranded as Midwestern coded signs of the “clean beauty aesthetic.”
Repetition of misinformation makes erasure simpler for those who can’t be bothered to remember that their point of view is not the only one that exists. You don’t have to worry about appropriation if your customized search agent assures you that there was never anything there for you to appropriate from.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 plot might have strayed away from the book to point out the small progress being made in Vogue and the few other glossies left, but if the “cloud bob” is any indication, it’s not enough to let up.
Because it looks like if it’s left up to them our history will be written, one microtrend at a time.
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