Reverse Retouching: Removing Scary Signs of Thinness

You know, you might think that if the people employed in the fashion industry were disturbed by the unhealthily thin models coming in for photo shoots, if they found the models' jutting bones and emaciated faces disturbing, they might, say hire bigger models, or encourage models not to be quite so thin.

But no! No one should question the nothing-tastes-as-good-as-skinny-feels mantra espoused by that goddess of heroin chic, Kate Moss. Instead, fashion magazines engage in "reverse retouching" — using Photoshop to make a model look curvier, bigger, "healthier," when she is actually frighteningly skinny.

The most ironic example as of late is with Healthy magazine, which recently Photoshopped 15-20 kilograms (nearly forty pounds!) onto model Kamilla Wladyka, whom Healthy editor Jane Druker called "unwell."

As in, dangerously thin? As in, anorexic? Might not the solution be to send Wladyka home and tell her to get help, to notify her agency so they can seek aid for her? Nope — instead Druker tried to find clothes that wouldn't show Wladyka's bones and then digitally added the necessary pounds to make her suitable for the cover of a magazine called Healthy.

Meanwhile Robin Derrick, the creative director of Vogue, recently confessed, "I spent the first ten years of my career making girls look thinner — and the last ten making them look larger." A former editor at Cosmo came out in the Daily Mail as a repentant reverse Photoshopper, conveniently blaming her needs for digital retouching on models who live on coffee and vodka and choose abusive boyfriends, therefore messing up photo shoots left and right with their bruises and their ruined skin and hair.

No longer editing at the magazine, she now apparently laments giving readers an unrealistic idea of thinness as a sort of winner-take-all game in which you can be as excessively skinny as society demands and still be gorgeous and healthy, too.

It's disturbing enough that already thin models are Photoshopped to look even thinner, but reverse retouching is illustrative of just how deep our social, cultural and psychological obsession with thinness goes. Very few fashion editors or designers would dare take the essential step of setting healthier body image standards, and working with models who aren't devastatingly thin or on the brink of being so. They'd rather preserve the deeply instilled adoration of thinness and work around the fact that it's unattractive and deadly with a few magic strokes on the keyboard.

Photo credit: TheeErin