Beauty and the Fashion Beast
If you want to know why you don’t look like a model — besides the fact very few of us win that genetics lottery — you will want to know this secret: Most models don’t even look like models.
Need proof? It’s here courtesy of two wonderful online campaigns that shockingly demonstrate that beauty images we see in most media campaigns are not just smoke and mirrors, but actually impossible-to-meet standards, even for the gorgeous models and actresses we see in them.
The first called Retouch — www.demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/retouch/ — is part of Sweden’s Ministry of Health and Social Affairs’ brilliant “Girl Power” campaign.
Retouch shows us a pretty 14-year-old model on a magazine cover — and what she would look like after an art director was through “cleaning” up the picture by making her teeth whiter, lips fuller, nose narrower, cheek creases less noticeable, eyes brighter and less baggy and jaw line more “feminine.”
But the biggest shocks are what they digitally do to her breasts and waist! (Can you say big as a house, small as a mouse?)
What makes the campaign extremely effective is its interactive quality: Click to see the before and after of any of the retouched body parts. Then click: “Why are we doing this campaign?” to see a take-no-prisoners collage of media images denigrating women.
Message received!
The second campaign, Dove soap’s now famous Real Beauty campaign –www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca — takes it one step further, demonstrating in a quick flick the makeup and hair tricks used in a fashion shoot, followed by digital changes made on the computer– including lengthening the model’s neck and repositioning her eyebrows!
As one man commented: “I wouldn’t recognize her if she was standing underneath her own billboard.”
British actress Kate Winslet, in fact, may not have recognized her own body when it appeared — airbrushed to make her look thinner! — on the cover of the U.K. edition of GQ magazine; embarrassing, actually, since in the magazine article she’s lambasting the beauty industry’s obsession with thin!
It’s not like this issue is new — but this time perhaps the industry has gone too far.
Dead models will do that.
First, in August an underweight model collapsed on the runway from heart failure, then in November another died of anorexia.
For once, the fashion world — or part of it — reacted: Spain and Italy both announced they would set minimum weight requirements for “catwalk” models, though Paris refused to follow suit.
Still, you’d think that might have been a wake-up call for Canadian designers — how much can it help sales, after all, if models collapse while wearing your clothes?
But there, prominent in the “style” section of a national newspaper was a photo of a model wearing Canadian designer Pink Tartan’s clothes, who was so emaciated I — a seasoned former women’s magazine editor — was shocked, while another reader complained in a letter: She’s “so anorexic looking she screams: ‘Hospitalize me!’”
And hospitalize is exactly what happens to girls caught up in the media-driven image of beauty as “skinny-deep.”
According to material on Canada’s Media Awareness Network site, “one out of every four college-aged women uses unhealthy methods of weight control — including fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative abuse and self-induced vomiting.”
The network also notes Canadian girls as young as nine are dieting and the American magazine, Teen, reported in 2003 “that 35 per cent of girls six to 12 years old have been on at least one diet, and that 50 to 70 per cent of normal weight girls believe they are overweight.”
And the pressure is increasing. “Examining the changing Sports Illustrated bathing suit issues, for instance, highlights the move to ever more extreme thinness pretty graphically,” notes Carleton University women’s studies instructor Susan Whitney.
Drop dead beauty, apparently. As the kids say: Gag me with a spoon.
But not before you hear the final irony: Apparently it’s not how thin we are that makes us sexy, but the chemistry, connection and openness we have with our partners, notes Alex McKay of the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada.
And if you want to know what does get cited as sexy, it’s “confidence,” he says — something in short supply when the media tell us “we must fit an impossible ideal.”
So thanks to Dove and the Swedes for trying to rebuild our self-confidence. I feel sexier already.
