To the naked eye it first looks strange, then it gets weirder the more time you spend staring at it. And then you ask yourself what were they thinking? Fashion designer Ralph Lauren recently apologized for retouching one of his models wearing his clothing. The model Filippa Hamilton, a size 4 to begin with said she was fired by the designer for being too fat. What they did to her photo was a little more than the usual nip and tuck retouchers do before many fashion photos appear in ads or in magazines. This time they went to ridiculous extremes. They made her body at the waist look freakishly small as well as her head.

Eating disorder advocates as well as moms with young teenage daughters are up in arms against companies selling their products this way and for good reason. Anorexia, bulimia, general low self-esteem and other eating and food disorders continue to be an enormous issue with young girls and teens and they are the ones really paying attention to what advertising is saying. What do these ads say to them? That looking skeletal, emaciated, and sickly is not only acceptable but that this is the only way they’ll look good in these clothes.

Another retouched Ralph Lauren ad has surfaced and this time with model Valentina Zelyaeva. And again the photo looks bizarre. It looks as if Valentina’s head is smaller than her pelvis. No comment by Lauren as yet, but is he doing this for publicity?

Tags: fashion models

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Fashion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.