How Women Look

Unhealthy body images abound. There are women in magazines vs. women in real life. On one hand, the women in magazines are often extremely thin or unnaturally proportioned (more on that in a moment). On the other hand, women in real life are often overweight.

I'm sure that many of you have seen this video from the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It's always worth a look:



Have you also been following the flap over professional model Phillipa Hamilton? She says she was fired by Ralph Lauren for being too fat ("You no longer fit into our clothes") despite the fact that she says her weight has not fluctuated over the 8 years of her employment.

Maybe that's not so wrong in the fashion industry. And she hasn't sued her former employer for wrongful termination. The way the situation became public was when Ralph Lauren released an advertisement featuring Hamilton in which she was photoshopped to humanly impossible proportions. Her head was bigger than her pelvis.



I've heard graphic artists defend this sort of photoshopping by talking about the difference between art and reality. But when it comes to marketing images, it seems obvious to me that the line is less fluid. If you want to create interesting conceptual art depicting humanoid creatures and display it on the wall of a gallery, have at it, man. But if you want to sell actual clothes to actual women and the picture proports to a photograph of a woman wearing the clothes, well it should probably do so!

In the process of manufacturing images from photographs and blurring the line between art and marketing, the artist is shaping what we as a society see as attractive.

Shouldn't a marketing campaign show the product itself in its most flattering light, rather than creating a product that does not - and can not - exist? Does that not come dangerously close to the idea of false marketing? In fashion, make great clothes and show them on tall skinny models, we get that. But to take those tall, skinny models and digitally alter them still further? This crosses a line, in my opinion.

For the record, this is how Ralph Lauren photoshopped Phillipa Hamilton.  And this is how she looks in another photo.  (Google her or watch the video below for more.)

Hamilton is 5'10" tall and 120 pounds, which gives her a BMI of 17.2 - officially underweight. "Healthy" starts at a BMI of 18.5. (In order to hit the bottom of a healthy BMI range, Hamilton would have to gain nine pounds.)

There are problems with BMI as a tool for determining if one is overweight or obese in part because it doesn't take muscle mass or frame size into consideration. My husband and I often joke that if he achieved what our Wii Fit suggests as a healthy weight for him, he'd no longer be capable of performing all the exercises it offers.

Similarly, when I am at what is - for me - a very healthy, strong, fit, attractive weight, my BMI is on the cusp between "healthy" and "overweight." Yet at that weight I am by no stretch of the imagination "fat" and if I were to lose additional weight, much of it would be muscle!

"In the developed world anorexia nervosa is the third most common chronic condition of adolescence."

Yet the vast majority of "health" coverage in the media related to children and weight is about obesity. And the media reports themselves are fueled by advertisements promoting unhealthily thin women and girls.

So what is fair? Surely, companies should be allowed to use create artwork to sell their products. My suggestion is that when photos are edited beyond the retouching of blemishes, there should be a disclaimer on the image itself.

And we consumers need to be more conscientious about voting against these practices with our dollars.