Fashion Models Will Kill You – The French Say “NO” to Airbrushing

Leave it to the French to create “equality for all” ! 50 French politicians recently set up legislation that would put a “health warning” on all photos of women that have been airbrushed or digitally enhanced.

I think this is really stupid…I don’t want my magazines telling me that the advertisement of the hot dood or chick I’m looking at has been enhanced. Um, like, duh.

In many ways this legislation is super important, because it’s meant to put a stop to women’s beauty issues and to end serious health hazards like anorexia and dangerous plastic surgery. It also suggests the like “danger” of beauty. You know, because health warnings only go on things that will kill you, give you cancer, etc. Apparently, so will fashion models.

But come on – lighten up, it’s just fashion!

Models, male and female, are not meant to be or look like “real” people. Have you ever seen a model without makeup, in their “you-and-me” state? Sheesh! Some of them are definitely toe up from the flo up. Why doesn’t anybody understand that? A Model is not a real person; s/he is a transformation, an image, an idea. Really smart people like Henry Sayre, Susan Sontag, and Craig Owens have all emphasized that photography is always a performance – like, staged and stuff. High fashion photography is just as set up. In a really beautiful book I just read by Wendy Steiner, she talks about how the model is the link between the real person and the artistic creation. Models are forever in a state of becoming something else.

Before you bitch me out or whatever, I’m not saying that plastic surgery is good – I would never botox. I just want to know why it matters whether or not we know models are airbrushed. Of course they are, cause they’re not real. Nobody ever sued Harry Potter because it was fake.