When Sandra Baker was called to pick up her 9-year-old autistic son, Chris, from his Mercer County, Kentucky school, she was stunned by what she found: She says that Chris’s teacher had stuffed him in a bag and left him in the…
H&M is taking Photoshop to a whole ‘nother level
If H&M wanted to give consumers a virtual template for putting clothes on, why create one identical and unrealistically proportioned model? Wouldn’t it have been a better idea to make (or, I don’t know, hire) a group of models with diverse body shapes and sizes to give girls a real idea of how their clothes will fit?
One argument in favor of the virtually created models seems to be that they are no different than store mannequins and “it’s not that big of a deal.” Except for the fact that they are completely different from store mannequins. Store mannequins are plastic, often headless and don’t resemble real human people. No one is going to confuse the body of a mannequin with a living person.
These pictures are different, and that difference is insidious. The bodies of these models look like real, airbrushed women, which means the implicit message is that real women and girls can and should strive to look like them. Few girls are going to aspire to look like a store mannequin. Plenty of girls and women want to be models, and draw inspiration from pictures of models found in magazines and online. The virtual nature of these bodies is disguised, making them seem more attainable, even though they’re not.
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