Influence of the fashion industry and photography - Research, articles and discussion
The fashion industry can affect the consumers today in both positive and negative ways, highlighting the negative is significant as the impact it can have can become unhealthy for the consumer. Body image is a main topic when discussing the influences of the fashion industry, as young women aspire to be like those presented on the pages of a high end fashion magazine; the fashion industry and the impact it has is viewed as a highly controversial topic. With fashion advertising being the primary focus of
many magazines, women in particular are targeted as the consumer, and certain
magazines can become a lifestyle obsession, which can result negative
influences as well as the positive. The ongoing debate of the influence women’s
magazines can have on the consumer will always raise awareness of body image
and the effect it has on the women of the audience. A common criticism of these
magazines is that they make the female consumer feel bad about themselves.
Some believe that women’s magazines suggest that all consumers must do
their best to ensure they can achieve the glamour and elegance that is
advertised in todays fashion world, higher end publications boast a more
extreme and desirable way of life, which is most definitely not accessible for
the majority of the consumers.
The consumers are likely to view their own bodies in comparison to the
images that the media generate, as they view these ‘ideal women’ that the
magazines are displaying, opposed opinions are often argued; regardless of what
critics and the audience think about these models, the main factor is the
popularity, these beautiful women will sell the magazines as it what the
consumer expects and wants to see, women magazine speak the language of popular
feminism.
Researching into specific articles and writings that highlight significance of the negative impact that the fashion industry can have;
Article 1
The fashion industry has a significant impact on the female consumers in the industry, many argue that they have negative effects.
Article by: Brandie Koskie
Taken from: http://theconversation.tv/beauty/what-role-does-the-fashion-industry-play-in-womens-health-and-self-image/
What role does the fashion industry play in womens health and self image?
For years we’ve watched food industry segments like soda and fast food get slammed for their roles in the obesity epidemic. Soda has taken the biggest hit, as seen by New York City’s regulation attempts, and the finger-wagging and shaming of fast food brands like McDonald’s never ceases. Researchers predict 42 percent of us will be obese by 2030, so of course we’re all looking for someone to blame.
The same thing seems to be happening where body image and eating disorders are concerned. The fashion industry is being held accountable, wholly or in part, for the .6 percent of adults who will develop anorexia, one percent who will develop bulimia, and 2.8 percent who will develop a binge eating disorder, according to the National Institutes of Health. Last year, Glamour Magazine published a survey in which they found 97 percent of women “will be cruel to their bodies today,” proving just how low our own body images are.
But is it fair to paint the entirety of the fashion industry as the villain, just as we’ve put the Quarter Pounder on citizen’s arrest for obesity?
“It isn’t as simplistic as that,” said Debra Bourne, one of the brilliant co-founders of All Walks Beyond the Catwalk. A varying number of circumstances have created the fashion industry we know today, and the direct or indirect repercussions. Primarily, she points a finger at the lack of regulation surrounding digital retouching.
“There’s more regulation around advertising a refrigerator than a woman’s body,” she pointed out. Consider this thought from Debra for a moment: “It feels like there’s more regulation on the marketing of a fridge than over a woman’s body. You couldn’t get away with selling some fancy Mercedes by retouching the headlights or streaming down the wheels, but you can do that to a woman’s body.”
So that’s where part of the self-loathing mind-set we’ve adopted stems from. It’s not that some women are thinner than the rest of us, although in 2009 Italy placed the first ban on too-thin models, the problem is that we’re allowing marketers and advertisers to run wild with their interpretation of how the female form should look. There is almost always a discrepancy between the reality and the fairy tale created by Photoshop and photography masters and the woman standing in a department store.
“Fashion photography was designed to be fantasy,” said Debra. “It’s not about reality, it’s not meant to be a portrait.” She says if you’re looking to see yourself looking back, you’re bound to be disappointed, because those images are “purely pieces of fantasy.” But anyone who’s ever been a young girl with access to her mom’s heels and pearls knows how easily we can skew the lines between reality and fantasy.
Debra recalled how the fashion industry used to be encapsulated, very exclusive. The photographs taken on a catwalk were only seen by a select few, and those working in the industry “knew how to interpret what [they] were seeing.” But fast-forward 20 years and see how the catwalk of today is consumer facing. These images go directly from the runway to the consumers’ eyes, and we’re bombarded by thousands of these types of images every day. It’s no wonder that we struggle to make peace with the sights of those models and the face, hips or breasts that we see staring back at ourselves.
The other issue, Debra says, is that fashion designers aren’t being properly taught. She explained that most designers are trained on mannequins, which rarely exceeding a size 8 or 10 while the average woman is now a size 14. Unlike hair stylists who train on real human heads of hair, Debra explained that designers are left with an objectified relationship with a non-human.
“They’re out of touch,” she said, speaking of the students who don’t know any better. That’s one of the things that All Walks is moving swiftly to correct, as education is one of the cornerstones of this organization’s work. Working with the graduates of the fashion industry in the UK, they coined the term “emotionally considerate design.” The goal is to help these designers engage with the idea that their work will end up on real human bodies.
And when it does, the women buying these wares should try to change their mindset. Debra reminded that fashion is a powerful communicator, and if we allow it, it can actually be a “fantastic tool for fun, self-expression, and self-empowerment.” There’s not much that’s healthy about aspiring to be something we aren’t, or even something that we can’t be. As we learned with the recent Zoe Saldana situation, some people are tiny, some people aren’t, some of us have control over that, and some of us don’t. And not to make it as simple as that, but sometimes it really comes down to brass tacks that are that simplistic. But when we embrace who we are, take hold of that shape, size, personality, or spirit, and allow the clothes to showcase that, rather than try to define it, we will feel a sense of liberation. We will truly feel like ourselves.
All Walks Beyond the Catwalk was created in 2009 out of the shared passion amongst the founders to improve body image. “A conversation needed to happen within the fashion industry…because of an unachievable ideal,” said Debra. Along with Caryn Franklin and Erin O’Connor, their organization set out to help women feel empowered by fashion, not rejected, and they work closely and directly with the fashion industry to help make important changes than can benefit everyone from the consumer to the designer.
This article states that we as consumers allow the marketers and advertisers to interpret how they desire how the ideal form of a female should look, through the help of photographers and photoshop - this is an example of a negative insight into the fashion industry and how they communicate.
The article explains how it is unhealthy to aspire to be like what we see in a magazine, and the industry don't do the consumers any favours as we read these magazines and believe that this is how we are meant to look.
Article 2
Fashion designers impact on modern society
Article by: Itana Lalovic
Taken from: http://wsimag.com/fashion/6387-fashion-designers-impact-on-modern-society
A well known fact, which we never should underestimate, is a great influence of fashion industry on modern world as well as our perception of reality, value and quality.
Famous and established designers use their positions in fashion industry to promote and impose certain conceptions constructed through discourses that are shaped in the fashion world through various channels. These conceptions mostly regard to identity questions, sexuality, distribution of power and formation of various social and cultural discourses.
In the last couple of years fashion industry entered the faze where androgens principle became pretty important. This time concepts overcame mixing male and female garments, female collections inspired by masculine principle as well as femininity in male designer’s collections. Step beyond is made by Jean-Paul Gaultier, when he expressed his fascination for androgyny through his creative work. He used fashion shows, advertising campaigns and certain kind of public speech and behavior to promote certain discourses and identities.
In fall-winter 2011/2012 Gaultier’s fashion show, androgynous model Andrej Pejic participated in both shows both as male and female. At the male show inspired by ultimate symbol of masculinity and machismo - James Bond, Pejic wore man’s suit, and in the second appearance he presented more feminine Bond, dressed in coat and high heals with golden accessory. At the female fashion show, Pejic was ‘honored’ to wear the most important piece - wedding dress. In this case Gaultier consciously plays with the fluidity of male and female principles and identities. Although this fluidity stems out of transformation of male and female social roles seen in the last couple of decades, Gaultier significantly exceeds social part of the problem and use it to play with sexual identity. Another message he sends is the annulment of the feminine attributes of the body, what stems out of his decision that male should present a wedding dress- the ultimative female garment.
Source of confusion that follows relation between transvestitism, androgyny and homosexuality is related to the construction of gender and sexual attractiveness. If a person is androgynous or transvestite this does not imply person’s homosexual identity. However, it is far from easy to make a distinction and boundaries are ever so thin. Cultural effect of using transvestitism and androgyny in the way Gaultier does manifests in a destabilization of binary oppositions such as male-female, gay-strait, sex-gender.
The other Gaultier’s campaign regarding this theme is intriguing visual advertisement for his brand, where he presented Andrej Pejic and model Karolina Kurkova kissing. Both models are dressed alike, have similar haircut, differentiating gender identities can’t be identified, what gives the impression advertisment is about two women. In this case, explicit homosexual message is evident. Gaultuer went on with his campaign, promoting it through public speech. One of the statements he gave to the world's media about Pejic was: ‘’I love him! He is my wife! Everyone can see his beauty. He can be a man, but not a straight man, only gay man, woman…It is a modern boy/girl of today. Like a future!’’
Jean Paul Gaultier’s ways to blur lines of gender identities and produce something innovative and new, what is essential in fashion world, are evident. Meanwhile, in this way, he consciously promotes alternative sexual identities. The biggest problem regarding this theme is the huge influence fashion industry and media campaigns have on young people and teenagers. It can be very negative because of manipulation and imposition of taste and attitude of powerful people in media and fashion industry. They create certain discourse that becomes the rule that is followed, and can affect young people’s choices, future, identity and relation to others and themselves. That is why it is so important always to requestion and critically observe everything what fashion industry and global media impose to us.
This article explains that the people that run the fashion industry, the designers themselves, use their high positions to promote certain conceptions to the consumers, negative or positive; creating so called rules that young people follow.
Article 3
Negative effects of fashion on people
Article by: Volkan Çağlayan
Taken from: http://freecompositions.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/negative-effects-of-fashion-on-people.html
According to some women who are fond of today’s widespread fashion, fashion is to “pave the way to happiness”, actually, also men are integral parts of extracting new fashion. So, existence of world-wide fashion distinctively provides throughout the world and it shapes our decisions, likes, or even tastes and the concept of what is beautiful and what is futile although pleasures should be approached relatively. However, while a large proportion of benefits that stem from a great deal of marketing of attractive and colorful commodities appeals to 21st clothing industries, millions of people who bow to the current fashion pleasure can be sublety and adversely influenced by various determinant factors.
To begin with, addiction towards fashion can bring out unpleasant social rejection resulting from fashionable discrimination which derives from both personal choices and strongly economic factors. People who are afflicted with low-economic-statues can easily be a part of this interesting discrimination and also so-called social exclusion while people who are called trend-setters afford novice, attractive, qualified, fashionable, and mostly expensive clothes. On this subject, needs for clothing is exceeding, rather than fulfilling, its aims and dramatically lead to mutually exclusive social-gaps that depends on appereances of people. Moreover, in terms of psychological aspect, people who are slaves of repeated nature of fashion can easily be lured by the attractiveness of colorful and effective clothes that leads to competing for today’s fashion in order to being confirmed by the society. As a result, following recent trends suprisingly gives rise to social discrimination and even a tendency to conformity.
Secondly, people who are keen on exaggerated fashion can be at the risk of creating a negative self-image. In order to look fit and attractive, people especially young girls have a disposition to becoming slim and when they show off, they can easily develop eating disorders that originate from the desire of being admired and accepted. In other words, people in particular teenagers, who get carried away with recent trends, can suffer from anorexia and bulimia so desire for being appreciated by others cannot go further than a dream.
When we recapitulate the main facets, it may be concluded that appearing in novel fashion styles and novel approaches towards fashion actually affect people’s behaviour, psychological well-being and adversely their budgets. Presumably, 21st clothing industry addiction can force people to put the pleasure of novice and attractive fashion.
This highlights that the fashion industry has addictive effective on society, discussing how fashion can be blamed for social discrimination.
This article relates me to the effects on fashion appearance and social behaviour, not necessarily the negative effects the industry takes on women and their body image.
The article mentions how economy plays a part in the negative effects that the fashion industry has.
Controversies in the fashion industry Article 1 Taken from: The guardian
One of the most controversial aspects of fashion magazines, and the fashion industry, is models. Specifically, how young they are and how thin they are. It's a topic that continues to create endless debate, in the press and in the community. As the editor of Australian Vogue, my opinion was constantly sought on these issues, and the images we produced in the magazine were closely scrutinised. It's a precarious subject, and there are many unpleasant truths beneath the surface that are not discussed or acknowledged publicly.
When I first began dealing with models in the late 1980s we were generally drawing from a pool of local girls, who were naturally willowy and slim, had glowing skin, shiny hair and loads of energy. They ate lunch, sparingly for sure, but they ate. They were not skin and bones. I don't think anyone believes that a model can eat anything she wants, not exercise and still stay a flawless size 8 (except when they are very young), so whatever regime these girls were following was keeping them healthy.
But I began to recognise the signs that other models were using different methods to stay svelte. I was dressing a model from the US on a beauty shoot, and I noticed scars and scabs on her knees. When I queried her about them she said, nonchalantly: "Oh yes. Because I'm always so hungry, I faint a lot." She thought it was normal to pass out every day, sometimes more than once.
On another shoot I was chatting to one of the top Australian models during lunch. She had just moved to Paris and was sharing a small apartment with another model. I asked her how that was working out. "I get a lot of time by myself actually," she said, picking at her salad. "My flatmate is a 'fit model', so she's in hospital on a drip a lot of the time." A fit model is one who is used in the top designer ateliers, or workrooms, and is the body around which the clothes are designed. That the ideal body shape used as a starting point for a collection should be a female on the brink of hospitalisation from starvation is frightening.
The longer I worked with models, the more the food deprivation became obvious. Cigarettes and Diet Coke were dietary staples. Sometimes you would see the tell-tale signs of anorexia, where a girl develops a light fuzz on her face and arms as her body struggles to stay warm. I have never, in all my career, heard a model say "I'm hot", not even if you wrapped her in fur and put her in the middle of the desert.
Society is understandably concerned about the issues surrounding body image and eating disorders, and the dangerous and unrealistic messages being sent to young women via fashion journals. When it comes to who should be blamed for the portrayal of overly thin models, magazine editors are in the direct line of fire, but it is more complex than that. The "fit" model begins the fashion process: designer outfits are created around a live, in-house skeleton. Few designers have a curvy or petite fit model. These collections are then sent to the runway, worn by tall, pin-thin models because that's the way the designer wants to see the clothes fall. There will also be casting directors and stylists involved who have a vision of the type of woman they envisage wearing these clothes. For some bizarre reason, it seems they prefer her to be young, coltish, 6ft tall and built like a prepubescent boy.
It is too simplistic to blame misogynistic men, although in some cases I believe that criticism is deserved. There are a few male fashion designers I would like to personally strangle. But there are many female fashion editors who perpetuate the stereotype, women who often have a major eating disorder of their own. They get so caught up in the hype of how brilliant clothes look on a size 4, they cannot see the inherent danger in the message. It cannot be denied that visually, clothes fall better on a slimmer frame, but there is slim, and then there is scary skinny.
Despite protestations by women who recognise the danger of portraying any one body type as "perfect", the situation is not improving. If you look back at the heady days of the supermodels in the late 80s and early 90s, beauties such as Cindy Crawford, Eva Herzigová and Claudia Schiffer look positively curvaceous compared to the sylphs of today. There was a period in the last three years when some of the girls on the runways were so young and thin, and the shoes they were modelling so high, it actually seemed barbaric. I would watch the ready-to-wear shows on the edge of my seat, apprehensive and anxious. I'm not comfortable witnessing teen waifs almost on the point of collapse.
After the shows, the collection is made available for the press to use for their shoots. These are the samples we all work with and they are obviously the size of the model who wore them on the runway. Thus, a stylist must cast a model who will fit into these tiny sizes. And they have become smaller since the early 90s. We've had couture dresses arrive from Europe that are so minuscule they resemble christening robes. There are no bigger samples available, and the designer probably has no interest in seeing their clothes on larger women. Many high fashion labels are aghast at the idea of producing a size 14, and they certainly wouldn't want to see it displayed in the pages of the glossies.
As a Vogue editor I was of the opinion that we didn't necessarily need to feature size 14-plus models in every issue. It is a fashion magazine; we are showcasing the clothes. I am of the belief that an intelligent reader understands that a model is chosen because she carries clothes well. Some fashion suits a curvier girl, some doesn't. I see no problem with presenting a healthy, toned, Australian size 10 [UK 8-10]. But as sample sizes from the runway shows became smaller, 10 was no longer an option and the girls were dieting drastically to stay in the game.
It is the ultimate vicious cycle. A model who puts on a few kilos can't get into a sample size on a casting and gets reprimanded by her agency. She begins to diet, loses the weight, and is praised by all for how good she looks. But instead of staying at that weight, and trying to maintain it through a sensible diet and exercise, she thinks losing more will make her even more desirable. And no one tells her to stop.
Girls who can't diet their breasts away will have surgical reductions. They then enter into dangerous patterns of behaviour that the industry – shockingly – begins to accept as par for the course. We had a term for this spiral in the office. When a model who was getting good work in Australia starved herself down two sizes in order to be cast in the overseas shows – the first step to an international career – we would say in the office that she'd become "Paris thin". This dubious achievement was generally accompanied by mood swings, extreme fatigue, binge eating and sometimes bouts of self-harming. All in the quest to fit into a Balenciaga sample.
Not every model has an eating disorder, but I would suggest that every model is not eating as much as she would like to. In 1995 I cast a lovely Russian model for a studio shoot in Paris, and I noticed that by mid-afternoon she hadn't eaten a thing (we always catered). Her energy was fading, so I suggested we stop so she could have a snack. She shook her head and replied: "No, no. It is my job not to eat." It was one of the only sentences she knew how to say in English.
A few years later we booked another Russian girl, who was also starving herself, on a trip to Marrakech. When the team went out to dinner at night she ordered nothing, but then hunger would get the better of her and she would pick small pieces of food off other people's plates. I've seen it happen on many trips. The models somehow rationalise that if they didn't order anything, then they didn't really take in the calories. They can tell their booker at the agency before they sleep that they only had a salad. By the end of the trip, she didn't have the energy to even sit up; she could barely open her eyes. We actually had her lie down next to a fountain to get the last shot.
In 2004, a fashion season in which the girls were expected to be particularly bone-thin, I was having lunch in New York with a top agent who confidentially expressed her concern to me, as she did not want to be the one to expose the conspiracy. "It's getting very serious," she said. She lowered her tone and glanced around to see if anyone at the nearby tables could hear. "The top casting directors are demanding that they be thinner and thinner. I've got four girls in hospital. And a couple of the others have resorted to eating tissues. Apparently they swell up and fill your stomach."
I was horrified to hear what the industry was covering up and I felt complicit. We were all complicit. But in my experience it is practically impossible to get a photographer or a fashion editor – male or female – to acknowledge the repercussions of using very thin girls. They don't want to. For them, it's all about the drama of the photograph. They convince themselves that the girls are just genetically blessed, or have achieved it through energetic bouts of yoga and eating goji berries.
I was at the baggage carousel with a fashion editor collecting our luggage after a trip and I noticed a woman standing nearby. She was the most painfully thin person I had ever seen, and my heart went out to her. I pointed her out to the editor who scrutinised the poor woman and said: "I know it sounds terrible, but I think she looks really great." The industry is rife with this level of body dysmorphia from mature women.
In my early years at the magazine there was no minimum age limit on models, and there were occasions that girls under the age of 16 were used. Under my editorship, the fashion office found a new favourite model – Katie Braatvedt, a 15-year-old from New Zealand. We had her under contract: the idea being that Vogue grooms and protects the girls at the beginning of their careers. But in April 2007 I ran a cover of Katie wearing an Alex Perry gown standing in a treehouse, and received a storm of protest, from readers and the media, accusing us of sexualising children. I lamely debated the point, claiming that the photographs were meant to be innocent and charming, but in the end I had to agree wholeheartedly with the readers. I felt foolish even trying to justify it. I immediately instigated a policy that we would not employ models under the age of 16. Internationally Vogue has since launched a project called Health Initiative, instigated by the US Vogue editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, which bans the use of models under 16 and pledges that they will not use models they know to be suffering from eating disorders. The first part you can police. The second is disingenuous nonsense, because unless you are monitoring their diet 24/7, you just can't be sure.
Discussing models and how the models presented to society can have negative impact for their 'size zero' appearance.
The article explains how society is concerned about the issues surrounding body image and the dangerous messages that are being communicated to via fashion journals and glossy magazines
This article strongly informs the reader of the negative effects the fashion industry has, explaining how models are used as an ideal role model, when in fact the models face severe health issues and its not as glamorous as it is made out to be.
Influential fashion photography
It makes us think what actually is the most influential element, could it be the fashion photography itself, or how the industry communicates the lavish, and elegant way of life to its consumers. On the topic of models and how they promote unhealthy body image, some photography can appear controversial and not suitable for the public.
Controversy
Article taken from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/fashion/should-fashion-be-politically-correct.html?_r=0
Should Fashion Be Politically Correct?
First there was heroin chic. Then there was poverty chic. And now comes … migrant chic? It sounds too distasteful to contemplate. Yet last week in Paris both Valentino and Junya Watanabe produced clearly African-influenced collections at a time when immigration from that continent as well as the neighboring Middle East has become the subject of controversy and existential self-questioning throughout Europe. Mr. Watanabe even held his show in the Museum of Immigration History in Paris. Around the same time, Norbert Baksa, a photographer, posted pictures on Instagram of a shoot he had done featuring a model wearing luxury brands against the background of a Hungarian refugee camp. All three fashion moments featured beautiful clothing. And all three came in for different kinds of criticism. Both Valentino and Watanabe were castigated for not using enough models of color, and the former was also taken to task for the naïveté of its show notes. Mr. Baksa sparked an even angrier response, accused of glamorizing and exploiting a global trauma. We tend to toss around the words “fashion statement” the way we toss them on a T-shirt, but how much of a statement can fashion actually make? Increasingly, such efforts — or indeed, anything that seems to touch on a political or social issue — seem to end badly, exciting a flurry of outrage on social media (some of it legitimate, some less so) that itself becomes a story. But what is the alternative: not to engage at all?As images are shared over various platforms, decontextualized and without explanation but reaching ever more consumers with ever more diverse personal politics, this has becomes a pressing question for the industry, morally and commercially. The risk of giving offense, and of motivations being misconstrued, is high. According to a conversation I had with the Valentino designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli before their show, they were trying to challenge their own notion of beauty with beauty from other cultures, to better understand both themselves and the world around them. Fair enough, though it probably would have been better if they hadn’t fallen into the knee-jerk trap of cornrowing their models’ hair. The problem, said Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W, is that “images are encoded in one place for one purpose and decoded in an entirely different place, with different tools.” But while it is easy to castigate fashion for being tone-deaf, and climb on a politically correct high horse, it is possible that in the end the cause we may hurt is our own. “Fashion isn’t really about clothes,” Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue, told me a few years ago when I interviewed her for the Financial Times. “It’s about life.” She was explaining her decision to publish an all-black-model issue in 2008, one featuring a photo shoot on a oil-strewn beach (after the BP disaster) in 2010, another dealing with domestic violence in 2014, and the outcries that followed. “We can’t always be writing about flowers and lace and aquamarine,” she said. There is a long tradition in the industry of creating beautiful images of expensive finery by situating it in poverty-stricken areas. Recently Marie Claire and W showcased fashion shoots in Havana, the former in its September issue, with a model in Prada, Balmain and Givenchy posed against the backdrop of gritty street life. American Vogue took Kate Moss to Vietnam to photograph her in evening gowns in rice paddies in 1996. Designers have likewise been using sartorial semiology as a transformative variable in collections, including Jean Paul Gaultier’s 1993 Hasidic show, Hussein Chalayan’s 1997 chador collection and John Galliano’s “homeless” Dior couture in 2000. Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett have always overtly used their work to express their convictions. Was this a frivolous response to serious problems: cultural appropriation of the worst kind? Or was it an industry’s legitimate effort to deal with real-world problems in the context of its own skill sets? Possibly a bit of both. But each time, there was protest. And each time, the clothes moved the needle of understanding a little bit. Often the best fashion is about transgression. It challenges convention. At its most basic level, that’s how we got women in pants and in miniskirts, all of which horrified plenty of viewers back in the day. It is uncomfortable. Think of Rick Owens’s human backpacks. It takes risks. Otherwise, as Mr. Tonchi said, “like any art form, it becomes propaganda.” Otherwise it risks irrelevance. Otherwise it’s just clothes. The point of fashion is to reflect the world around it, a world often filled with ugliness and disharmony. Ask any museum curator why costume belongs in the institution, and the answer is that it is historical record: It reflects society at a given moment in time. Indeed, according to Ms. Sozzani, fashion has the ability, and the responsibility, to use its role to highlight the issues; to force them into the public conversation. In this view, not acknowledging the income disparity that is today’s reality (to take one example) is even more bizarre than using a glossy magazine as a conduit to discussion. If a magazine editorial can drive that point home in a unspoken way, why not? Fashion is often labeled escapism and, the theory goes, should provide that service to those who want to dream of gorgeousness rather than prejudice. In refusing to play that role, designers and photographers are often seen as overstepping their bounds. The assumption is that fashion can’t understand, or doesn’t understand, the implications of what it is doing. This is exacerbated when we receive images without attached explanation. Because then it is up to us to decide whether to give the protagonist the benefit of the doubt, or to assume the worst. It’s possible that some designers are after a cheap shock and not a deeper comment. But it’s also worth examining our own rush to judgment and what lies at its core. This is not to absolve designers and stylists and photographers (and critics) from culpability for their choices. All of us have to be aware of the new global reality in which we operate. Stakeholders need to be considered. Everybody needs to be held accountable for their own mistakes. But one of the benefits of a for-profit industry is that it can be.
History of fashion photography
Idea: Fashion being a form of expression, has developed over the years, allowing certain fashion campaigns and photography to become iconic over a period of time. Photographers and the way they choose to display a model capture the aesthetic of the designer, which adds depth to the brand. With this in mind, I think it would be useful to capture and document the transition of fashion photography, and how the styling has changed throughout the years, perhaps becoming more controversial and offensive. A 'timeline' as such will allow me to communicate this transition of fashion photography and show how we choose to view it in present time as opposed to many years ago. Source: http://www.highsnobiety.com/2015/09/23/fashion-photography-history/
Nowadays we take it for granted that fashion photography is an art form as creative and varied as any other, but it wasn’t always this way. Over the past 100 years the medium has worked hard to establish itself as a valid and legitimate form of expression, so read on for a thorough history lesson in the movements that defined a genre. As with all great advertising, some of the most recognizable fashion campaigns in history have become every bit as iconic as the brands they were first designed to sell. Somehow, these great examples manage to capture the spirit, voice and aesthetic of a designer so perfectly that they add a whole new level of context to their brand. Whether it’s the model chosen, the styling of their outfit, the set design of the shoot or the photographer themselves, great campaigns transcend the actual clothing and help tell a story all of their own. Timeline taken from the same source:
1910 – 1934: Edward Steichen and the Condé Nast years
To many, Edward Steichen is the founding father of modern fashion photography. After a supposed dare by a close friend, Steichen undertook the task of promoting fashion as fine art via the medium of photography. To do this, he took a series of photographs of the gowns created by renowned French fashion designer Paul Poiret, which were subsequently published in the April 1911 issue of Art et Décoration magazine.
Widely considered the very first modern fashion photographs, they conveyed the aesthetics, movement and details of the clothes as central to their approach. His style centred heavily on the model, in typical portraiture style, but used lighting and carefully planned studio setups to focus on the clothes and give them a lavish and elegant look that was indicative of the time.
Another crucial factor in widening the appeal of modern fashion photography came in 1909, when the successful publisher Condé Nast purchased American lifestyle magazine Vogue. In doing so, he created the world’s premier fashion publication — one that gave photographers such as Steichen, Cecil Beaton and Horst P. Horst a platform to showcase their work to a huge new audience. In 1913 he followed that up with the launch of Vanity Fair, and together the two titles spent decades fighting Harper’s Bazaar to become the top fashion magazine in America.
What Steichen and Vogue gave to modern photography were the blueprints for almost all fashion advertising that was to come in the years after. Steichen formed his own unique visual vocabulary throughout the ’20s and ’30s, distilling classic renaissance imagery with cubism and futurism to create something that was fresh and exciting. His use of models, lighting and experimental studio techniques were completely revolutionary and, for many years, his contemporaries had no other choice but to follow his path. His importance cannot be exaggerated; Steichen changed the face of fashion photography, and his innovations are still being used to this day.
1934 – 1944: The revival of Harper’s Bazaar and The Design Laboratory
For many years, Harper’s Bazaar lacked the edge it needed to compete with the Condé Nast publications. The magazine’s fortunes changed in 1934, however, with the appointment of Russian photographer Alexey Brodovitch to the role of artistic director. With him in place, Harper’s Bazaar started down a new path that would change the landscape of fashion photography forever. He implemented radical layout concepts, used typography in bold new ways and had a vivid approach to imagery. It was his mix of elegance and innovation that transformed the fortunes of Harper’s Bazaar, securing its long-term future.
However, Brodovitch’s influence was more resonant than simply the pages of the magazine. In 1933 he started a course at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art called the “Design Laboratory,” where he taught the full spectrum of modern graphic design principles. In attendance were young photographers such as Irving Penn, Eve Arnold and Richard Avedon. It would be these students that would go on to shape fashion photography on an almost continual basis for decades to come, all helping extend Brodovitch’s legacy long into the future.
1944 – 1960: Avedon and The Great Outdoors
One of Brodovitch’s early students at the Design Laboratory was Richard Avedon, who started his career in 1944 as an advertising photographer. Avedon quickly found a fan in Brodovitch, who spotted his talent and sent him to Paris in 1946 to cover the latest collections from the premier fashion houses. Young and full of energy, the images Avedon captured for Harper’s Bazaar represented a new direction for fashion photography.
Avedon’s style was all about one thing: movement. He replaced the static, lifeless poses of the Steichen era with photographs full of verve and vitality. He shunned the studio, preferring to work outdoors or on location. Capturing lively street scenes and bustling parties, his models were photographed in the moment, showcasing their natural femininity; the flowing clothes seemed somehow to be an elegant extension of their own bodies.
This set a new course for fashion photography and, throughout the ’50s, Avedon’s style was much imitated. Motion and spontaneity were hallmarks of this new direction. He inspired photographers such as Henry Clarke to use the city’s streets as a backdrop for his images. In the great outdoors, a new sense of life could be breathed into photographs, with the beauty of the models and the clothes they wore directly mirrored in the dynamism of the overall composition.
1960 – 1970: The divide
Avedon’s move to shoot his models in the moment was a real turning point for fashion photography. Those such as David Bailey used this style extensively to capture the new and exciting times of swinging London in the ’60s. Bailey’s photography for British Vogue built on Avedon’s ideas, but gave them an even more youthful feel, while his carefree approach linked model, setting and lifestyle like never before. Prolific photographers of the present day, like Mario Testino, owe a lot to work like this.
But there were some, such as fellow Brodovitch student Irving Penn, who continued to stick to the traditions of the studio. His famous cover for the April 1950 edition of Vogue featured model Jean Patchett in contrasting black and white. With tone and angle set in opposition, the result is dramatic, yet tranquil and this image in particular sums up his approach to fashion photography. Although his style was starting to fall out of favour during the ’60s, Penn changed the face of fashion photography in subtle but far-reaching ways for many years to come.
1970 – 1980: Return to the studio and the rise of sexual controversy
(SIGNIFICANT TURNING POINT IN FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY)
Capturing movement outside the confines of the studio had been the modus operandi of many photographers throughout the ’50s and ’60s. But, by the start of the 70s, a resurgence in studio work was well underway. Taking cues from photographers such as Steichen, Beaton and Penn, this new movement was defined by its use of female nudity, overt sexuality and surrealism.
Once again, Richard Avedon was riding the crest of this new wave. Having signed a deal to move from Harper’s Bazaar to Vogue in 1966, he decided to return to the studio for much of his fashion photography work. Referencing the glamour and freedom of the previous two decades, his shoots for Versace throughout the ’70s and ’80s were inventive and exciting. His trademark use of movement was still present, as was his celebration of vitality and confident female sexuality.
Somewhat contrasting Avedon there was Guy Bourdin, a Parisian who relied on sexual imagery to tell a different story. While his critics say that Bourdin reduced the female body to its most erotic parts, often promoting violent and misogynistic views, his supporters argue that he created his own unique brand of surreal mysticism. His advertising work in the late ’70s (including shoots for luxury footwear brands Charles Jourdan and Roland Pierre) often portrayed woman as weak and controlled — a strict counterpoint to works by contemporaries like Helmut Newton and Avedon. However his imagery is undeniably captivating, and the use of bright colour, staged surrealism and sex has influenced the work of modern fashion photographers like Terry Richardson.
1980 – 2000: The age of rampant commercialism
The ’80s were the start of a brave new frontier for fashion photography. Commercialism, a force that had laid somewhat dormant for much of the previous 60 years, suddenly reared its head. Fashion was starting to have a broader appeal as Europe and America’s burgeoning middle class took more of an interest in what they wore. They had more money to spend, and savvy fashion labels like Calvin Klein, Levi’s and Ralph Lauren were only too happy to take it.
A standout campaign from 1981 featuring a 15-year-old Brooke Shields personified this perfectly. Shot by the omnipresent Richard Avedon, the ad for Calvin Klein jeans saw Shields proudly declare that nothing came between her and her Calvins. It was a line that came straight out of an ad man’s notepad, but it caught the public’s attention. Almost overnight it made Calvin Klein jeans a highly desired product.
One man completely at home in the studio, and finding a new demand for his work, was Irving Penn. Throughout the late ’80s he teamed up with Japanese designer Issey Miyake for a compelling and ground-breaking set of adverting campaigns. Taking influence from Steichen’s simplistic approach and blending in his own subtle surreal tones, Penn took Miyake’s futuristic designs and exaggerated them with large, embellished silhouettes, using the pattern of the fabric and the contortion of the human body to showcase Miyake’s creations in a whole new light.
Penn was extrapolating Steichen’s blueprints, pushing the relationship between product, model and photographer further than anyone had done before. He had stayed true to the studio, even when his peers were shunning it. He had used this time wisely and was advanced in his use of lighting and considerate in the sparseness of his shots. This approach has since inspired a whole new generation of fashion photographers to look beyond the normal and push the boundaries of what can be achieved, conceptually, in the studio.
The ’90s produced a slew of classic ads. From the strong female role models portrayed by Donna Karen, to the American dream represented by Ralph Lauren, the ’90s were seen by many as the golden age of the ad campaign. Alongside sex, labels used supermodels to focus their campaigns around, finding an obvious link between their natural beauty and aspirational products.
Once again, Calvin Klein was at the forefront of this new movement, and turned up the heat in a particularly famous campaign from 1992. Featuring Mark Wahlberg paired with a fresh-faced Kate Moss, the unassuming black-and-white shoot by Bruce Weber captured the essence of this new direction. The simple image of them both, topless, sporting clearly branded underwear was all that was needed to get the message across. And it worked. Calvin Klein saw a huge uplift in sales, turning them into a globally recognised brand.
2000s: Hypersexuality
As mankind has thoroughly established over the decades, sex sells. But, while people like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin had used imagery for its sex appeal extensively in the ’70s, the 2000s ushered in a new age of hyper sexuality that was designed as much to shock as it was to sell clothes.
One man not afraid of using flesh to push his products was Tom Ford. The iconic campaign for his first fragrance, For Men, was shot by Terry Richardson in 2007 and blended Ford’s penchant of sexual imagery with Richardson’s stark and instantly identifiable flashbulb aesthetic. Bourdin was clearly a huge influence on this work; the highly manipulated studio shots, use of colour and slightly sinister portrayal of female sexuality are all present. Strategic placement of the perfume bottle leaves little to the imagination, and the campaign caused a lot of controversy, as well as a lot of exposure, for Ford.
Another campaign from the Tom Ford stable was released in 2003 whilst the designer was working for Gucci. Stylised and simplistic, this ad, shot by Mario Testino, garnered a lot of attention as it featured a female model with the Gucci “G” shaved into her pubic hair. Less about the clothing and more about the preening, it was a bold move for Ford, but one that once again proved the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Although not averse to using sexual imagery in his advertising, Marc Jacobs strode a different path in the 2000s alongside longtime collaborator Juergen Teller. Teller’s distinctive photography style played a huge part in Jacobs’ promotional campaigns and differed hugely from the glamorous, highly stylised shoots of his contemporaries.
One standout example from 2003 featured Hollywood actress Winona Ryder. Having recently been arrested for shoplifting from the Saks department store in Beverly Hills, Ryder arrived in court wearing a Marc Jacobs dress. Spotting an opportunity, Jacobs hired her, and the now infamous ensuing photoshoot encapsulates his irreverent take on design with a devil may care attitude.
Celebrity endorsements and the celebration of wealth
Since Mark Wahlberg first posed for Calvin Klein back in 1992, big brands have been acutely aware of the attention a celebrity can bring to their campaigns. Strong females are a particular favourite, with fashion houses holding their rebellious and provocative spirit in high regard. Miley Cyrus for Marc Jacobs (much to the disapproval of Juergen Teller, who allegedly refused to work with the star), Lady Gaga for Versace and Lindsay Lohan for Miu Miu have all followed in the footsteps of Winona Ryder.
Current campaigns have also an increasing return to the nostalgia-tinged glamour of choreographed black-and-white shots. Hedi Slimane has repeatedly channelled ’70s era Helmut Newton for a large number of his campaigns for Saint Laurent, while Julia Roberts for Givenchy, Madonna for Versace and Mila Kunis for Miss Dior have all featured a similar monotone theme.
Perhaps the most dramatic shift in modern fashion photography, however, is the way in which campaigns are now being consumed. Between 2006 and 2013, the amount of pages dedicated per year to advertising in Vogue fell by 16%. In an age of Instagram and blogs, it’s clear fashion marketers have adopted a new strategy — one that includes a tacit acceptance that images may not ever make it anywhere near a glossy A4 magazine page, and may only ever be consumed on a scrolling social media feed. Content today is created in order to be shared, liked and retweeted. For many brands, lookbooks are the new ad campaigns — cheaper to produce, easier to consume and better suited for distribution across digital mediums.
Once the gatekeepers of the industry, today fashion magazines have been usurped by the internet. For some, this move is democratising, removing the elitism that the fashion industry old guard have long been accused of fostering. But, to many, it is the gentle dumbing down of a once proud art form that, thanks to the work of people like Steichen, Avedon, Newton and Penn, has long held great cultural and historical significance.
Credit: Charlie Haywood for Highsnobiety.com
Further articles discussing issues related to fashion marketing Article 1 source: https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/how-the-fashion-industry-affects-the-bodies-of-young-women
"I hate myself every time I do it, but I just can't stop. I wish that I could." After every meal, Fiona makes herself sick. It's embarrassing to go to restaurants with her, because in between courses she'll excuse herself and disappear to the toilet for a long time. At home, she'll empty the contents of the fridge then spend the rest of the evening in the bathroom. You'd never know about her private hell just by looking at her though; she's a pretty girl, with a good figure although she sometimes says she'd like to lose a bit of weight. But her body is suffering; her teeth are starting to decay due to the stomach acid she vomits up, her knuckles are calloused because she puts her fingers down her throat to make herself sick, her skin is broken out because she doesn't let herself absorb the vitamins in her food and she sometimes coughs up blood because constant vomiting has damaged her stomach lining.
Unlike AIDS, say, or cancer, where drug companies stand to make money by developing a cure, there is little commercial gain or public acclaim to be had in understanding eating disorders.
Fiona is bulimic: like her, an estimated 3.5 million women in Britain suffer from some form of disordered eating. This is a statistic considerably more shocking than that of AIDS/AIDS-Related Condition, but public awareness of eating problems is still low. After all, don't all women diet? Don't women like to diet? Surely women have to diet? Obviously women have a tendency to fat. Women are so self-absorbed. No-one is much disturbed by statistics that show thousands of women dying each year from self-imposed body abuse. It took Princess Di's admission that she was a sufferer to make the British media realise that the problem even existed. Unlike AIDS, say, or cancer, where drug companies stand to make money by developing a cure, there is little commercial gain or public acclaim to be had in understanding eating disorders. They are not conditions which can be treated with medication, they are not 'glamorous' and they rarely find their way into the pages of the press. But they exist, nonetheless, and cause countless women untold misery.
Women's preoccupation with food is linked to the fetishising of the female form: throughout Western history, from the mythology of ancient civilisation to renaissance art to modern advertising, their bodies have been regarded as objects of beauty. Therefore, women are constantly engaged in trying to cope with the effects of culturally induced body insecurity. A woman's experience of her own body arises from how she believes it compares with the magnified images of women that surround her on billboards, on television, in films, magazines and newspapers. She is receptive to the messages proclaiming her body - the crucial commodity in her life - as deficient and in need of attention, further suffering from the daily assault of a diet and beauty industry financially dependent on creating further body insecurity. A consumer society in which women's bodies are used to sell products while being presented as the ultimate commodity creates all sorts of body image problems.
During the past decade, while women breached the power structure, eating disorders rose to levels never before recorded. Among women, feeling fat has long been a metaphor for feeling powerless: their newly achieved success in the public world contrasted sharply with the induced private confusion. Anorexia, literally self-imposed starvation, is perhaps the most dramatic outcome of culture's obsession with regulating body size; bulimia, eating normally (or bingeing) then getting rid of the food by vomiting, allows women to live apparently normal lives whilst in reality unable to cope with the demands of everyday eating. But worries about their body don't just affect those women who go on to develop eating disorders: in a 1984 survey by Glamour magazine, 33,000 American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to 15 pounds than achieve any other goal. More women have more money and influence and opportunity and legal recognition than they have ever had before; but, in "terms of how they actually feel about themselves, may in reality be worse off than their unliberated grandmother". "We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of fe4male beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement," writes Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth. "The ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable. Value is assigned to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard." Powerful industries - the $33-billion-a-year-worldwide diet industry, the $20-billion-a-year-worldwide cosmetics industry, the $300-million-a-year-worldwide cosmetic surgery industry - have grown from the money made out of the conscious and unconscious worries of women, and are in turn able, through their influence on mass culture, "to use, stimulate and reinforce these anxieties in a rising economic spiral."
Together with the media and fashion industry, the powerful diet food industry has artificially created a 'problem' which has resulted in the vast majority of women in Britain and other Western developed countries thinking that they need to diet.
Companies that produce slimming aids not only exploit women's insecurity but should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act, according to Mary Evans Young, a psychotherapist and the founder of Diet Breakers, a new anti-dieting campaign. Despite the fact that 90 per cent of women and girls will diet at some point in their lives, for the great majority of them - 90 per cent - the diets will not work. "Together with the media and fashion industry, the powerful diet food industry has artificially created a 'problem' which has resulted in the vast majority of women in Britain and other Western developed countries thinking that they need to diet," Young says. She founded the anti-dieting campaign last year after reading about the case of a 15-year old girl who committed suicide because she was a size 14, and after her work with women executives showed that they were spending more time worrying abut their diets and appearance than their career development. Since Diet Breakers launched, more than 4,000 women have written asking for help.
At any one time, half of British females are on a diet. Most of these women are not obese and only want to lose 10lbs or less. The dieting industry in this country alone is currently worth £850m; money-mad from such gimmicks as plastic pants purporting to increase fluid loss, skin patches that claim to speed up the metabolic rate and sniffing sachets which supposedly control chocolate consumption. More than £6 million is spent on low-calorie meals and drinks in the UK every week, yet, despite this boom in the sales of diet foods and slimming aids the nation as a whole is getting fatter: women in the developed Western world are becoming bigger and broader thanks to a better diet and the effects of the contraceptive pill; the average woman is a size 14 or over. But the problem is that many of those using the slimming industry are not overweight. A 1990 Office Of Population Censuses And Surveys study showed that 36 per cent of women in the UK are overweight to a degree that influences health. So do 85 per cent of women want to lose weight? "most women diet not for health but because they are threatened by media images which continue to imply that to be unhealthily slim is to be successful and attractive," says Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is A Feminist Issue and Hunger Strike, books covering women's troubled relationship with food.
In the last few years, there has been a noticeably rapid acceleration in the rate change of what are considered 'desirable' body shapes for women. Like hemlines lengthen or shorten seasonally, the current aesthetic of women's bodies has been transforming itself with fashion. Since the '60s, the ideal woman - as reflected in the mass media in all its forms - has been getting slimmer and slimmer and slimmer. But although back then many women might complain that their figures did not conform to the reigning ideal, today no woman - be in Linda Evangelista or Kate Moss - can rest secure in the knowledge that she has a good figure.
For the beauty aesthetic has just changed again - gone are silicon-perfect babes like Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington; in are unlikely beauties who don't measure up to their statistics or conform to their looks. A good thing? A move from unattainable glamour to individuality? Perhaps not. At least Cindy Crawford was a size that women could exercise to and could perhaps aspire to, but Kate Moss? No-one could diet to her pre-pubescent size. At least Cindy Crawford looked knowing, strong, sexual: Kate and her fellow waifs look helpless, vulnerable, innocent. Part of the fall of the supermodels came down to the fat that they had too much power - they let it be known they wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000. They might not have borne much resemblance to the majority of us, but at least they were a vague approximation of what women could appear like. Now they're dumped in favour of underdeveloped 18-year0-olds. Linda Evangelista has apparently lost a whole stone in an attempt to keep up - she knows her career is in trouble if she doesn't conform to the super-skinny look. So what hope for ordinary women?
Not much according to Julie Burchill in The Mail On Sunday; "The seeing off of the Supermodels is not some liberating step forwards towards women being accepted for what they are, but yet another variation on the same old song; men trading in older models - literally - for this year's model. For all their glitz, Cindy and co were very obviously women, with stomachs, breasts and hips, who cleverly made the best of what they had; you, too, for a price, might have approximated their look. But only anorexia will make you look like Kate Moss and her Designer Dosser friends." It's not just restricted to models: today no woman has the right body for more than a season or two - high fashion is reproduced at every economic level. However much the particulars of the beauty package may change from decade to decade - curves in or out, figures fragile or fit - they will always be well-defined and narrow and it will be woman's task to conform to them.
No matter how many 'feminist' features magazines may run, body fascism is reinforced by the advertisements, the fashion stories and the beauty pages.
Between 1965 and 1981 British women's magazine sales fell from 55.3 million to 40.4 million copies a year; their traditional hold loosened by the swinging '60s and the liberated '70s which meant that women no longer wanted to read about perfecting the art of domesticity. All that was left was the body, so magazines set about telling their readers how to perfect that. Articles on dieting in the popular press soared from 60 in the year of 1979 to 66 in the month of January 1980 alone. By 1984, 300 diet books were on the shelves. A lucrative transfer of guilt had taken place.
Women believe what their magazines tell them and are deeply affected by it because these magazines are all most women have as a window on their own mass sensibility. General culture takes a male point of view on what's newsworthy: while the football results may find their way onto the front page, 'women's issues' are buried deep inside. And no matter how many 'feminist' features magazines may run, body fascism is reinforced by the advertisements, the fashion stories and the beauty pages: "Learn To Love Your Thighs" announces Cosmopolitan's cover lines, while inside, the very same feature is illustrated by a picture of an impossibly slender size 10 model.
According to Manchester Metropolitan University's Dr Sarah Grogan, in surveys of students carried out by herself and a colleague, self-esteem and views of body image suffered after the participants were shown magazine pictures of models: suggesting that media portrayal of images can prolong anorexia and bulimia in women and may even be a cause of it. With these findings in mind, the Women's Environmental Network have recently launched a campaign criticising chocolate manufacturers for targeting women in their advertising despite the "primary" role of chocolate in eating disorders and the cycle of "insecurity and self-loathing" involved in constant dieting. Ads like those for Cadbury's Flake and Galaxy clearly link chocolate with sensuality and a slim and beautiful body image, yet what they are trying to sell is "the very thing that is forbidden, banned and dangerous and to be avoided at all costs if one is to be beautiful". Trying to persuade manufacturers to promote their products more honestly, WEN spokeswoman Cat Cox says it is "outrageous" that while eating disorders are increasing dramatically - there are 6,000 new cases of bulimia and anorexia each year in the UK, with one per cent of Western women affected - advertisers use increasingly skinny models to promote their products. In the last decade, the weight of models has fallen from 8 per cent to 23 per cent below the average woman (Naomi Campbell, all five foot 11 inches of her, is believed to weight no more than seven stones) yet they are held up as "icons of contemporary beauty".
And now it's no longer just women. Advertisers have realised in recent years that undermining sexual self-confidence works no matter which sex is targeted. Check Marky Mark in his Calvin Kleins: how do you stomach muscles shape up? How do your boyfriend's? Feel inferior? Yup, you're supposed to. According to Naomi Wolf, "Using images from male homosexual subculture, advertising has begun to portray the male body in a beauty myth of its own." Men are already being targeted by the diet food firms - Slimfast's latest TV campaign features a smug thirtysomething guy enthusing about how much his figure has improved since he discovered their products. Playing on the insecurities of men in such a fashion will only serve to duplicate the situation which women are experiencing: there is already a reported increase in the numbers of men suffering eating disorders, with ten per cent of bulimics men.
"Nowadays everyone has some sort of worry about how they look," comments Fiona. "I started off thinking that I could change my body and it would change the rest of my life. It doesn't happen. I can see that now, but it's too late to do anything about it." Perhaps it is time for us all, men and women, to say enough it enough.
Credits
Text Avril Mair From i-D No. 117, The Beauty Issue, June 93
When the Council of Fashion Designers of America re-released its health guidelines earlier this year, it called for increasing awareness about eating disorder symptoms and recommended a ban on models younger than 16 walking in fashion shows. The goal was industry-specific: To address what the council’s website calls the “overwhelming concern about whether some models are unhealthily thin.”
But as CFDA CEO Steven Kolb acknowledged, fashion’s influence is broader than that.
“As Diane [Von Furstenburg, CFDA president] and I wrote in our outreach letter to the industry ... ‘Fashion Week has become a powerful voice, which reaches millions of people across the globe and we should not underestimate the consequences of the messages that we send,’” Kolb said in an email to HuffPost.
According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, nearly 70 percent of girls in grades five through 12 said magazine images influence their ideals of a perfect body. In so-called “pro-anorexia” forums, posters write about watching fashion shows and combing magazines for “thinspiration.”
Yet little hard data exists about whether or not the ubiquity of ultra-thin models causes people outside the industry to develop disordered eating or full-blown eating disorders.
“In general, when I’m working with patients, this concept of a ‘thin ideal’ does come up,” said Dr. Allegra Broft, a psychiatrist in the Eating Disorders Program at Columbia Psychiatry, who explained that eating disorders are very complicated in terms of their etiology.
“It’s reasonable to say that exposure could be a factor in the development of eating disorders,” she continued. “But has a causal link been established? No.”
The National Institute of Health estimates the lifetime prevalence of anorexia and bulimia is 0.6 percent of the U.S. adult population, but among 13- to 18-year-olds, it is 2.7 percent. There are numerous risk factors, including being female, age (eating disorders are most common in the teens and early 20s), family history and influence, as well as the presence of additional mental health issues.
According to HuffPost blogger Susan Albers, Psy.D., a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, exposure to thin models could also play a role.
“Although thin models are not the cause of eating disorders, they can be a trigger or a factor in maintaining an eating disorder,” she said. “In other words, if a woman has a predisposition for an eating disorder and spends a lot of time looking at fashion magazines, this can be one of the factors that triggers feeling bad about her body, which she then turns into eating disorder behavior, like excessive dieting.”
Much research has suggested a relationship between the two, though Dr. Anne E. Becker, a professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, said there has not been any single, definitive scientific study. Experts say her own research is among the most interesting on how media might influence body image and problems.
Becker’s work has concentrated on Fiji, where she found the arrival of the television corresponded with, among other things, an increase in disordered eating, including vomiting to lose or control weight. A follow-up study found that second-hand or peer exposure was particularly powerful, with friends discussing, copying and internalizing media images. Though Becker cautioned against extrapolating such results to the U.S., she said individuals here could be influenced by fashion in a similar way.
“With Fashion Week, and all of those thin models, and clothing that looks best on a size zero — what that does is set a standard of what is socially desirable and prestigious that is likely to have a powerful influence on social norms,” she said. “If one day we had a Fashion Week where there were size 16 models, I suspect that would be very influential, too.”
HuffPost blogger and plus-size model Leona Palmer said that day could be far off: Plus-size models rarely walk in fashion shows, she said, and she doesn’t anticipate that changing. (Both Ford and Wilhelmina, which operate plus-size divisions, declined to comment on booking trends.)
But the 30-year-old says she has worked steadily since she began modeling seven years ago, explaining there is “far more” work in catalogs. Palmer also cautioned that plus-size models are not necessarily any healthier in terms of their eating habits than their “straight-size” counterparts.
Yet the model said she does feel a sense of responsibility when it comes to influencing body image and issues on a broader scale, both in terms of young girls going through what she described as “average American girl food issues” like she did, as well as those who are at risk for more serious eating disorders.
“It’s why I did this,” Palmer said. “I was really ambivalent about it, but my mom said, ‘If you had been growing up and seen someone who looked like you in a magazine, it would have changed your life.’ And I thought, ‘You’re right. It would have, in terms of what I thought I needed to fit into in order to feel beautiful.’”
LONDON, United Kingdom — I hopped into a taxi the other morning and, as often happens with our famous London cabbies, the driver engaged me in a bit of friendly chit-chat. Invariably, this means talking about the bad weather, the traffic snarls, the origins of my accent — or, on occasion, my job.
"What line of work are you in?" he asked. I told him I worked in the fashion business and went back to busily checking my emails on my iPhone.
"Are you a designer?" he asked.
"Nope. When I said I work in the fashion business, I really mean the business of fashion," I responded, explaining that I had started this website and worked as a consultant and did some teaching and lecturing as well.
That's when the conversation took an unexpected turn.
"Can I ask you something?" he went on. "Why is it that you lot insist on putting clothes on models that are stick thin and 6 feet tall, when the average woman is curvy and only about 5 feet 6 inches tall?" Good question. As it turns out, he wasn't far off. According to some quick Wikipedia research, the average woman in the UK is about 5 feet 4 inches tall (in many other countries, she is even shorter).
"And, all those advertisements, with those skinny legs flying in the air. What woman wants to see those? I can understand that blokes might get off on seeing those legs, but why would women want to see them?"
"It's not much better for the guys," he added. "My son keeps going to these castings for Abercrombie & Fitch, where all those young men wander around in their underpants with their muscles all rippling. He's only five foot seven, so each time he goes, they turn him away. It's very upsetting," he said, explaining that his son is regularly cast in films and television, but can't seem to crack fashion's ideal male image.
All of a sudden, I felt like I had to defend the fashion industry and I couldn't. "I am really not quite sure why the industry insists on doing this," I said.
It wasn't the first time I had heard these kinds of complaints from someone from outside the fashion industry. My sister, a paediatric endocrinologist focused on childhood obesity, attended a fashion show with me in New York once. She absolutely loves fashion and loves shoes and bags, but she could barely look at the models because she found the whole thing so revolting. "None of these women are menstruating," she said to me frankly. "They all look so unhealthy."
Recalling this conversation with my sister and reflecting on my chat with the cabbie, I left the taxi feeling pensive. As beautiful as fashion imagery can be, the so-called 'dream' that the industry projects can lead to unhealthy behaviour. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8 percent less than the average woman. Today’s models weigh 23 percent less.
Would the industry ever be able to change and step outside these ideals? I wasn't sure.
Then, over the weekend something popped up in my Facebook feed that gave me a little hope. A friend from university, Nishi Aubin, a full-figured woman with a personality to match, posted something that caught my eye.
"Way to go H&M!" she wrote, along with a photo of two size 6 and size 10 mannequins, dressed in sexy lingerie. Apparently, H&M had introduced normal-sized (not 'plus-sized', as we might like to call them) mannequins in some of its stores in Sweden.
According to the Huffington Post, the photo went viral after a website called Women's Rights News posted the photo to their Facebook page, with the comment "Store mannequins in Sweden. They look like real women. The US should invest in some of these."
As it turns out, the image was not taken at H&M, but rather at another Swedish clothing chain called Åhléns. Regardless, the post received more than 60,000 likes, 18,000 shares and 3,000 comments, from people saying it was about time fashion reflected humanity as it really is. This overwhelming reaction seems to support the conclusions of a Cambridge University study that found women prefer brands whose advertising reflects their own identities.
Advertising, particularly for fashion and cosmetics, has a powerful effect on how we see ourselves and how we think we should look. Women’s magazines in particular have a tremendous influence on body image, with researchers reporting that teenage girls rely heavily on them for information on beauty and fashion [1], valuing their advice nearly as highly as that of their peers. [2]
In addition to the content, images of women’s – and, increasingly, men’s – bodies in magazines also send messages. There has been a progression towards thinner and thinner models in ads and magazines: twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8 per cent less than the average woman – but today’s models weigh 23 per cent less. [3]
Even these dangerously underweight models are often not seen as being thin enough by editors, who employ Photoshop and other image manipulation tools to create women who are literally “too thin to be true” – as well as to alter photos of celebrities so they meet this standard. Men in magazines are also frequently “photoshopped” to achieve the lean and muscular ideal. [4]
Why is there such pressure to make models increasingly thinner, to the point of erasing whole body parts? [5] Simply put, advertisers believe that thin models sell products. For almost a century, advertisers have appealed to – or contributed to – women’s insecurities in hopes of selling them the solution. [6] In fact, advertising is so strongly associated with creating insecurities that when women are shown images of products such as shoes, perfume or deodorant in the context of fictional ads, they are more likely to answer negatively to questions such as “How attractive do you find yourself?” or “How satisfied are you with your body?” than if they saw the same photos in a neutral context. [7]
While it’s well-established that seeing images of underweight women make normal or overweight women feel bad about themselves, [8] some recent research has found that that the conventional wisdom in the fashion and advertising worlds is wrong, and that consumers are less interested in buying products that make them feel insecure. (The same research, though, found that exposure to overweight models had a similar negative effect on women’s self-esteem.) [9]
In recent years there have been some efforts in the magazine industry to buck the trend. For several years the Quebec magazine Coup de Pouce has consistently included full-sized women in their fashion pages and Châtelaine has pledged not to touch up photos and not to include models younger than 25 years of age. Some clothing retailers have also committed to not using underweight models, most notably Canadian retailer Jacob. [10] Perhaps most remarkably, in 2009 the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, accused fashion designers of forcing magazines to hire underweight models by only providing “minuscule” outfits for photo shoots. Shulman even claimed to have ordered some of the resulting photos retouched so that the models would not look so thin.
There is resistance to change, both within and outside the industry: when the Australian magazine New Woman included a picture of a heavy-set model on its cover, it received a truckload of letters from grateful readers praising the move, but its advertisers complained and the magazine returned to featuring bone-thin models. [11] According to The Guardian, this response is not unusual: “the traditional reliance on so-called aspirational advertising has limited change, despite high-profile campaigns against perceived racism and the encouragement of unhealthy female physiques within modelling… While ‘real’ models have made their way into campaigns for a range of products in recent years, when it comes to the luxury sector the door remains shut.”
Since the advent of photography workflow on computers, digital manipulation has been a beast with two heads- helping some, and hurting others. Programs like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and iPhoto have become staples for many professional photographers, and most alter their photos without a second thought.
Digital Manipulation is not evil. Correcting photographs allows people to circumvent the problems that they might encounter while actually taking a picture. Too much light? Correct exposure. Awkward red eye? Red eye correction. Feeling artsy? Convert to black and white. Photo editing is a useful tool that allows photographers to guide an image closer to what they want, or the idea that they originally imagined.
However, Photoshop’s capabilities range far beyond simple light correction. The software allows components of an image to be completely remastered. (Enter interrupting Kanye meme) Entire portions of a photograph can be reconfigured or removed entirely, or new elements can be introduced, giving a false impression of what was actually captured by the camera’s lens: therein lies the problem.
The fashion industry is notorious for it’s heavy-handed use of digital manipulation software, and has fallen under criticism for introducing ‘false images’ into the mainstream and passing them off as real. Industry big-wigs are continually blamed for deliberately misleading consumers by creating false impressions with their products, and more severely, for perpetuating unhealthy body images by ‘slimming down’ their models and concealing their imperfections.
In the last two years alone, magazines and designers alike have come under fire for this particular offense. The most recent infraction has been the Crystal Renn controversy. Renn is currently the most sought after plus-sized model in the industry; she famously battled anorexia before taking control of her health and speaking out against the unhealthy expectations of models in fashion and the practices that perpetuated her bad choices.
Crystal Renn by Nicholas Routzen|Photo Courtesy Fashion Fame
Earlier this year, Renn posed for a Fashion for Passion spread in French Vogue shot by photographer Nicholas Routzen. When the photos were released, however, Renn appeared to be a slender size 2 instead of the voluptuous size 10 that she has become known for.
Renn herself has spoken out against the photographs, upset that she was so blatantly misrepresented. While she acknowledged that all photographers retouch, she felt that the images in question crossed the line. Routzen claims that Renn only looks slimmer because of the angle from which the picture was taken and that he did nothing but ‘shape’ her in post-production.
In this instance, the error seems obvious. Who would be so stupid as to photoshop a woman famous for her curves? But Renn is not the only model who has fallen prey to the Photoshop monster.
Photo Courtesy Best Week Ever
Madonna also faced the fire when unretouched photos of her Dolce and Gabbana campaign leaked online. The 52-year-old pop icon was apparently furious that the images showing her various imperfections were leaked, and is seeking damages against the person or persons responsible for the leak. In this case, some might say that the excessive photoshopping was necessary. But perhaps there is something to be gained from exposing the extent of work that goes into making fashion photographs ‘publishable’ in any major fashion magazine, and the increasing number of physical attributes that are deemed ‘unacceptable’.
Another major Photoshop controversy that rocked the fashion industry was the firing of model Fillipa Hamilton last year, after a severely photoshopped image of her in a Ralph Lauren campaign was widely published in Japan. The ‘photoshop fail’ was easily identifiable and sparked heavy debate about the overuse of digital manipulation software. Hamilton claims that she was fired for being too fat, but Ralph Lauren issued a statement saying that “their relationship [with Fillipa Hamilton] ended as a result of her inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us.”
Critics claimed that the statement (and firing) gave the impression that Hamilton was at fault for putting the company in the position of having to photoshop her body in the first place, and was setting a dangerous precedent and expectation for young girls.
Photo Courtesy Jezebel.com
Recently however, celebrities have become much more transparent about how much photoshopping their images undergo, and just how much work goes into making them look glamorous in magazines. Britney Spears allowed the unretouched photos from her Candie’s photoshoot to be released in order “to highlight the pressure exerted on women to look perfect.” The side by side pictures detailed all the changes that Brtiney’s body underwent and gives a clear perspective of how much work is done in the post production of fashion shoots.
Jessica Simpson and Kim Kardashian both posed sans makeup on the covers of Marie Claire and Life and Stylerespectively to help highlight the fact that celebrities are people too, and that no one rolls out of bed looking like the pictures usually seen in a magazine.
These days, as the general public becomes more aware of the heavy use of photoshop in magazines, they have simultaneously become less tolerant of blatant digital manipulation. Fashion magazines now have to be more aware of the images that they produce or face the backlash of public indignation.
Photoshopping, digital alteration, image manipulation, blah blah blah. Everyone talks about the fact that so many images of women are “perfected” with the help of technology, but we can’t just toss it aside as a non-issue everyone already knows about. Whether or not a person is aware of the possibility of image alterations, not everyone realizes exactly HOW MUCH these images are changed to fit some seriously un-human and unrealistic ideals that we view over and over. And not everyone understands that it isn’t just fashion magazine covers that feature drastically Photoshopped images. It’s TV. It’s video. It’s your favorite brand online. It’s everywhere.
While the vast majority of images of women are being digitally altered, so are our perceptions of normal, healthy, beautiful and attainable.
A before-and-after image from Britney Spears’ 2013 “Work B****” music video obtained by the Daily Mail, which shows the digital slim-down Britney’s body received via CGI.
One of the main strategies used to reinforce and normalize a distorted idea of “average” is media’s representation of women as extremely thin (meaning much thinner than the actual population or what is physically possible for the vast majority of women) – either by consistent use of models and actresses that are underweight or extremely thin, or by making the models and actresses fit their idea of ideal thinness and beauty through digital manipulation both on screen through computer-generated imagery (CGI — shown in the Britney Spears music video example) and in print media. Essentially, “the feminine ideal is tanned, healthy slenderness, with no unsightly bumps, bulges or cellulite, and bodily and facial perfection that results from hours of labor: exercise, makeup and hair care” (Coward, 1985) – and 30 years later, plastic surgery and Photoshop. This unrealistic form is consistently represented across almost all media forms, along with blemish-free, wrinkle-free, and even pore-free skin, thanks to the wonders of digital manipulation as an “industry standard” that is openly endorsed and defended by magazine editors and media makers the world over.
Though we hear about digital manipulation controversies all the time (check out our Photoshopping Phoniness Hall of Shame for tons of examples), media executives and producers continue to use it to an unbelievable extent and they violently defend it as a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Here are a couple interesting (and appalling) case studies from Seventeen and Self magazines to showcase this very issue:
The Feb. 2014 cover of Seventeen, featuring Troian Bellisario
The February 2014 cover of Seventeenfeatured “Pretty Little Liars” star Troian Bellisario, who opened up about her past problems with an eating disorder. The teen magazine decided to feature that as a teaser on the cover, right above a much larger headline for “Get an Insane Body — It’s hard, but you’ll look hot!” This juxtaposition of providing an outlet for a young actress to open up to young fans about a disorder that “ripped her life apart” next to a story promoting the thin ideals that drive many girls and women to such extremes in eating is appallingly irresponsible. Read more about our thoughts on Seventeenhere.
When superstar singer Kelly Clarkson was digitally slimmed down almost beyond recognition on Self’s September 2009 cover, people noticed. Her appearance on “Good Morning America” within just days of the cover shoot proved that her body did not look anything like the very thin one that appeared on the cover. In a shockingly ironic twist, the issue she appeared on was titled “The Body Confidence Issue” and featured an interview inside where she explained how comfortable she felt with her body:
“My happy weight changes,” Clarkson says in the September issue of SELF. “Sometimes I eat more; sometimes I play more. I’ll be different sizes all the time. When people talk about my weight, I’m like, ‘You seem to have a problem with it; I don’t. I’m fine!’ I’ve never felt uncomfortable on the red carpet or anything.”
Kelly Clarkson before and after Photoshop on Self magazine, Sept. 2009
Rather than apologizing for the seriously unethical and extreme Photoshopping snafu, Self editor Lucy Danzigertried to defend her magazine’s work to the death:
“Yes, of course we do post-production corrections on our images. Photoshopping is an industry standard,” she stated. “Kelly Clarkson exudes confidence, and is a great role model for women of all sizes and stages of their life. She works out and is strong and healthy, and our picture shows her confidence and beauty. She literally glows from within. That is the feeling we’d all want to have. We love this cover and we love Kelly Clarkson.”
Interestingly, Danziger wasn’t satisfied with that statement and felt inspired to take to her personal blog to further rationalize away the Photoshopping hack job:
“Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best…But in the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then I think this photo is the truest we have ever put out there on the newsstand.”
It’s hard to believe anyone’s “personal best” is a fake representation of herself. They’ll plaster “body confidence!” all over the magazine and quote Kelly talking about her own real body confidence, but they refuse to show us her actual body.
Target’s March 2014 Photoshop hack job to the JUNIOR’s swim line is unreal.
This is just one example that happened to generate enough media coverage that people were able to find out about the scary distortion of an active, 27-year-old superstar’s body in media. Unfortunately, this case study is pretty representative of thousands more that appear in magazines, on billboards, in advertisements, in stores and everywhere else you can think of every single day. At Beauty Redefined, we’ve termed this phenomenon “the normalization of abnormal.” Since we’ll see millions more images of women in media than we’ll ever see face-to-face, those images form a new standard for not just “beautiful,” but also “average” and “healthy” in our minds. When women compare themselves to a standard of beautiful, average and healthy that simply doesn’t exist in real life, the battle for healthy body image is already lost. Last year, the American Medical Association (AMA) announced they’ve adopted a policy against “false advertising:”
The AMA adopted a new policy to encourage advertising associations to work with public and private sector organizations concerned with child and adolescent health to develop guidelines for advertisements, especially those appearing in teen-oriented publications, that would discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.
Dr. McAneny of the AMA states, “We must stop exposing impressionable children and teenagers to advertisements portraying models with body types only attainable with the help of photo editing software.” And yet, in the last year, Photoshopping has reached an all-time high. It is inescapable.
From lost self-esteem, lost money and time spent fixing “flaws” and a well-documented preoccupation with losing weight (NEDA, 2010), the effects of these unreal ideals hurt everyone. We know that advertising – especially for fashion or beauty products – depends on two things: 1) girls and women believing their happiness, health, and ability to be loved is dependent on their appearance, and 2) girls and women believing can achieve physical ideals by using certain products or services. Do we really understand that ALL media (with very few exceptions) depends on advertising dollars to operate? Because of that, the editorial content or programming has to uphold those same ideals or else advertisers aren’t happy. Digitally slimming women’s bodies, adding or exaggerating a “thigh gap,” and removing signs of life like pores, gray hairs, and wrinkles aren’t just casual decisions based on aesthetic preferences of a few editors — they are profit-driven decisions to create false ideals for females to seek after in hopes of someday attaining. These hopes are largely driven by desire to be found attractive, loved, appear healthy, and ultimately, happy.
Same model, differing degrees of Photoshopping on REAL printed ads, Oct. 2009. Ralph Lauren responded: “After further investigation, we have learned that we are responsible for the poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman’s body. We have addressed the problem and going forward will take every precaution to ensure that the caliber of our artwork represents our brand appropriately.”
One telling example from the ‘90s (found in Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth”) explains how a prominent women’s magazine featured gray-haired models in a fashion spread (unheard of even today, right?). It was a success until one of their biggest advertisers, Clairol hair color company, pulled their entire campaign as a protest against the spread. The magazine, which depended on those advertising dollars, was forced to never again feature gray-haired women in a positive light. The same holds true for media today. Pay attention to what kind of companies are advertising in your favorite magazines or during your favorite TV shows. There’s a very good chance they are selling beauty products, weight loss products or other appearance-related services, which means the female characters featured positively (like in relationships or pursued by men, complimented, not the butt of jokes, etc.) will likely resemble the idealized women in the advertising.
From media outlets like that go to great lengths to make unrealistic and unattainable beauty ideals look normal and within reach, to the diet and weight loss industry raking in an estimated $61 billion on Americans’ quest for thinness in 2010 (Marketdata Enterprises, 2009), those with financial interests at stake in our beliefs about women’s bodies are thriving unlike ever before. Simultaneously, women and families are losing. Losing self-esteem. Losing time and money spent on items, services and products meant to fix our never-ending list of “flaws.” Losing real understandings of healthy, average and attainable. Sometimes even losing weight they didn’t need to lose in dangerous ways in order to measure up (or down) to Photoshopped ideals we see every day as “normal.”
Former high fashion model, Crystal Renn, battled a deadly eating disorder for many years before deciding to switch to “plus size” modeling for health purposes. Photographer and Fashion for Passion founder Nicholas Routzen said that Crystal looked thinner because the photos were “…taken from a higher angle with a wider lens,” but that“I shaped her … I did nothing that I wouldn’t do to anyone. I’m paid to make women look beautiful.”
While representations of women’s bodies across the media spectrum have shrunk dramatically in the last three decades, rates of eating disorders have skyrocketed – tripling for college-age women from the late ‘80s to 1993 and rising since then to 4% suffering with bulimia (National Eating Disorder Association, 2010). Perhaps even more startling is the 119 percent increase in the number of children under age 12 hospitalized due to an eating disorder between 1999 and 2006, the vast majority of whom were girls (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2010). Though the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2000) reports that “no exact cause of eating disorders have yet been found,” they do admit that some characteristics have been shown to influence the development of the illnesses, which include low self-esteem, fear of becoming fat and being in an environment where weight and thinness were emphasized – all of which are shown to be related to media depictions of idealized bodies, which is all but inescapable. Scholars have proposed that eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia are due, in part, to an extreme commitment to attaining the cultural body ideal as portrayed in media.
Photoshopping has taken these unreal ideals to a scary new level. Henry Farid, a Dartmouth professor of computer science who specializes in digital forensics and photo manipulation, agrees. “The more and more we use this editing, the higher and higher the bar goes. They’re creating things that are physically impossible,” he told ABC News in August 2009. “We’re seeing really radical digital plastic surgery. It’s moving towards the Barbie doll model of what a woman should look like — big breasts, tiny waist, ridiculously long legs, elongated neck. All the body fat is removed, all the wrinkles are removed, the skin is smoothed out.”
What we see in media, and what we may be internalizing as normal or beautiful, is anything butnormal or beautiful. It’s fake. It’s a profit-driven idea of normal and beautiful that women will spend their lives trying to achieve and men will spend their lives trying to find. But until we all learn to recognize and reject these harmful messages about what it means to look like a woman, we all lose. And I don’t want to lose. Are you with us in taking back beauty for females everywhere?
Recognize that you are not just a body. Recognize that your body is not just an ornament or an object to be fixed and judged — it is an instrument to live and do and be. Reject messages that teach you otherwise. Cancel subscriptions, unfollow on social media, spend your money elsewhere, talk back to companies and speak up in your own circles of influence. Your reflection does not define your worth, and self-comparisons to unreal ideals get us absolutely nowhere. These ideals are unlikely to change anytime soon, so we have to change our perceptions of media and bodies with or without media.
Need more help developing body image resilience that can help you overcome your self-consciousness and be more powerful than ever before? Learn how to recognize harmful ideals, redefine beauty and health, and resist what holds you back from happiness, health, and real empowerment with the Beauty Redefined Body Image Program for girls and women 14+. It is an online, anonymous therapeutic tool that can change your life, designed by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, with PhDs in body image and media.
Looking through the array of bright magazine covers lining newsstands everywhere, Seventeenmagazine’s promises of finding 805 beauty and fashion ideas does not seem out of the ordinary. However, the August issue is also the launch of the magazine’s Body Peace Treaty, which pledges to reduce the amount of photoshopping in pictures and show “real girls as they really are.”
Seventeen’s editor, Ann Shoket, crafted an 8-point plan that promises that Seventeen will “never change girls’ body or face shape,” “feature real girls and models who are healthy,” and “celebrate every kind of beauty.”
This pledge was inspired by 14-year old Julie Bluhm, a reader who started an online petition asking the magazine to stop airbrushing its photos after hearing other girls in her ballet class complaining about being “too fat.” The petition received over 84,000 signatures, which not only got the attention of Seventeen, but a promise to do something about it as well.
So, could Seventeen’s treaty be the end to society’s unhealthy obsession with airbrushed photos and unobtainable standards of beauty?
Sadly, the answer is probably no. It is no secret that airbrushing and Photoshop are common features in any kind of published photo. There have even been instances of people using Photoshop to edit their own private photos before uploading them on social-networking site like Facebook. For the media-savvy generation, it is no secret that photoshopping is almost obligatory for any kind of photo shoot, but even with our knowledge of its use, that does not discount the negative effects it has on our society.Over 24 million people suffer from some form of an eating disorders, and the root of these problems are often linked to rampant advertising that portray skinny, overly-bronzed, hyper-sexualized women as the ideal woman. A study found that 3 minutes spent looking at a fashion magazine caused 70% of women to feel depressed, guilty, and shameful. It does not help that the average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day.
When Seventeen was first published in 1944, the average model was around 5’7” and 130 lbs and Marilyn Monroe was the woman of every man (and woman’s) dreams. Today, the average model is 5’11” and 115 lbs and the thin starlets like Blake Lively and Rooney Mara are epitome of beauty. With almost 70 years in the publishing industry, Seventeen has seen a lot of changes in what constitutes ‘beauty.” However, their body-peace pledge might be one that wee all need to take.
Adobe Photoshop has become one of the most iconic software programs of all time. From fashion photography and feature films, to web and 3D product design, almost every creative industry is touched by Photoshop.
Twenty five years after its initial release, the program has become so much a part of our cultural consciousness that ‘photoshopping’ is now a neologism for any type of image manipulation.
While many laud Photoshop for its ability to enhance images and make subjects look their best, others see it as blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, feeding society’s obsession with physical perfection.
But when the program was first created in 1987, it was intended for a much more modest purpose. Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, first developed Photoshop, then called Display, in order to make images clearer on his black-and-white Apple Macintosh Plus.
After collaborating with his brother, John Knoll, who worked for George Lucas’ visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, the two began adding features that made it possible to process digital image files.
Winston Hendrickson, vice-president of engineering for Adobe’s digital imaging products, said: “From the very beginning, there was a marriage between an artist, John, and an engineer, Thomas, and that’s really what’s fuelled and made the product what it is.
“It’s been true throughout time that artists have always been seeking a way to realise their imagination, and as technology has advanced and as capabilities have advanced, they have been able to chase that vision further.”
In the years since its initial release, Photoshop has been constantly evolving. Version 2.5, which launched in 1992, was the first to run on Microsoft Windows, and version 3, launched two years later, added ‘layers’, allowing users to stack different media on top of each other.
Subsequent versions added new features such as ‘healing brush’ and ‘content-aware fill’, which allowed users to blend different parts of a picture together seamlessly, and ‘vanishing point’ and ‘puppet warp’, that helped users define and manipulate 3D objects within 2D images.
In 2007, Adobe released Creative Suite 3, which included a broad set of image analysis features designed for customers working in medical science and engineering. The company was surprised to discover that these features had broader applications than it had imagined.
“People found ways to use these tools that we hadn’t necessarily intended. So one example is there’s an image analysis feature that allows you to take a set of layers and then only show the things that are constant between the pictures,” said Hendrickson.
“Photographers thought that was great. So you’re taking a picture of a public statue, and you’ve got tourists milling around, rather than trying to clear everybody out you take a series of images and, as long as everybody moved at some point, they all disappear.”
Today, Adobe has a growing focus on 3D imaging, and the ability to edit the texture, lighting and positioning of 3D objects using Photoshop.
For example, car manufacturers that create 3D models as part of their manufacturing processes can use compositing techniques to integrate these models with scenic landscapes and create virtual photographs for advertising purposes.
While 3D modelling used to be the preserve of high-end media companies, Photoshop now enables students and artists who have no knowledge of 3D meshes and modelling tools to incorporate 3D objects into their work.
Adobe is also keen to expand its mobile capabilities, amid growing popularity of photo editing apps like Instagram. The company recently launched Photoshop Mix, a mobile app which allows users to combine multiple photos and apply colour filters.
“On mobile you have a much more atomised set of capabilities – inherently mobile apps are expected to be more purposeful and focused, rather than being general purpose Swiss Army knives,” said Hendrickson.
But now that Photoshop’s image editing tools are so widely available, concerns have been raised about the impact this is having on society’s perception of reality, and also on our ability to maintain an accurate record of history.
Hendrickson acknowledged the concerns, but said that photo alteration was happening 100 years before Photoshop came along, and it is all a question of putting the alterations into context.
“I’ve seen people claim over the years that the camera didn’t capture what they saw – your eye has about double the light scale that the camera has, and a wider field of vision – so some of the alterations they do are to try and get back to what they actually saw,” he said
“At the beginning of that spectrum, it’s just fine and you can use that journalistically, but you start going too far with it and it’s no longer journalistic, it’s more artistic.
“There’s a fuzzy line that changes over time. I think the important thing in all that is disclosure, for it to be clear what was done. And when something gets represented implicitly or explicitly as being factual when it’s not, then that’s a distortion in context.”
Even these dangerously underweight models are often not seen as being thin enough by editors, who employ Photoshop and other image manipulation tools to create women who are literally “too thin to be true” – as well as to alter photos of celebrities so they meet this standard. Men in magazines are also frequently “photoshopped” to achieve the lean and muscular ideal. [4]
In recent years there have been some efforts in the magazine industry to buck the trend. For several years the Quebec magazine Coup de Pouce has consistently included full-sized women in their fashion pages and Châtelaine has pledged not to touch up photos and not to include models younger than 25 years of age. Some clothing retailers have also committed to not using underweight models, most notably Canadian retailer Jacob. [10] Perhaps most remarkably, in 2009 the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, accused fashion designers of forcing magazines to hire underweight models by only providing “minuscule” outfits for photo shoots. Shulman even claimed to have ordered some of the resulting photos retouched so that the models would not look so thin.
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