Snogging priests, dying AIDS victims, copulating horses. A bloodied newborn baby, still attached to its umbilical cord. ‘HIV positive’ tattooed on buttocks. Death row inmates. The clothing of a Bosnian war victim. Three human hearts with the words ‘white’, ‘black’, and ‘yellow’ as captions. A white woman, black woman and an East Asian baby wrapped up together in a blanket. All these images were masterminded by Oliviero Toscani for Benetton, where he was the art director from 1982 to 2000. In 1990, on the same premise of multiculturalism, diversity and postcoloniality, Toscani founded the famous Colors - with the tagline, ‘a magazine about the rest of the world’.

For some people, ‘diversity’ is a very empty term - distancing ourselves from the unbearable heaviness of conflict - and they would mostly say that the famous United Colors of Benetton ads would be a perfect reflection of this escapist, diverse mentality. What do you think about this argument?

That criticism is ultra-banal. Everything is diverse. Nature is diverse. Nature doesn’t make [any] two things the same. There is nothing wrong with trying to stress that.
I think people’s argument is that an image of children of different colours hugging each other serves to iron away our significant differences.

Those people don’t know history. You dont know what we went through to eliminate slavery. And there is still the fact that black people are not treated as equals to white people. Diversity is not only a question of black and white of course. There is diversity of gender. There is diversity of other things. Diversity is disturbing, it has to be disturbing. People have to be disturbed first to accept diversity.