I’m generally very relaxed with magazines stories and what they’re trying to sell us. After years of drooling over the pages of this and that magazine, I’ve come to the only natural conclusion I could, in the era of the Almighty Internet: I’m not buying fashion magazines ever again.
With a few exceptions (like Mario Testino’s special edition of Vogue Spain of which you’ll soon see wall art hanging around my home office). Something doesn’t click between me and those glossy fashion magazines. And today I’ll give you one of the reasons why. Far from being the first time we’re tackling this topic, the amount of retouching on the photographs we see in fashion magazines creates unreal projections of reality. Lara Stone’s Vogue Australia April 2016 (also) by Mario Testino.
Not long ago, I’ve seen – as many of you – pictures of Lara Stone on the beach, next to a male model (David Genat). Behind the lenses was Mario Testino, trying to capture a sunny pictorial by the sea. Which he did, eventually, with a little help from the retouching team. Not for the sun-part, though.
Lara Stone, who, besides being a heavily sought-after model, is also mother to a 2 year-old boy (with ex-husband, British Comedian David Walliams). Normally, I would all but comment around the body of a new mother, however, I feel it is my duty to report on this truth-altering situation.
The pressure to thin out a woman’s body for fashion purposes is a disease wide spread by the media. Our society’s incessant obsession over thin bodies, pouty lips and perfectly shaped bodies with porcelain skin and perfect lives will consume our happy cells. Be warned: Vogue Australia is showing you an ideal shape of Lara Stone’s body! Her new mother waistline is considerably wider. Her body doesn’t seem to have passed through all the grueling training routines pushing mothers in the image business to get their avant-baby body back in one month.
See also: How media is manipulating us into thinking we’re style-less and power-less!
And that should be perfectly ok, right? Nah, not by Vogue standards! Vogue is selling beauty standards. And by beauty standards, women should hide when their bodies start showing signs of pregnancies or post-pregnancies. Their beauty is about perfection: perfect body, perfect skin, perfectly coiffed hair, perfectly applied makeup, perfectly chosen clothes, perfectly cleaned houses, perfectly happy families.
Do you know what fashion is to you?
So when Vogue is showing you that happy equals perfection, what are you to do? Jog away your frustration? Diet away your fears, food-binge your imperfections and medicate your less-than-perfect self, right? In which case, my dear fellow fashionistas (who still have your feet firm on the ground), I’d rather buy coloring books and children books. At least there, happy is all about colored crayons and glitter. Goodbye nip&tuck, farewell photoshop!
at right, the glamorous photo as published in Vogue which is slightly different from the reality we see at left (even the swimsuit was modified, let alone Lara’s physical features!)
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