In a Refinery29 article that took the fashion world by storm on Tuesday, a former photoshopper for Victoria’s Secret (who, for the sake of privacy, is simply referred to as “Sarah” throughout the piece) spilled the beans on the ever-notorious retouching practices of the world’s most renowned lingerie manufacturer, after deciding that she no longer wanted involvement in the propagation of unrealistic body images and their unfortunate effects on society.
Of course, we were never strangers to the fact that the models whom we see on billboards, magazine covers, and shop windows are oftentimes edited for aesthetic purposes, nor could we deny that in many cases, doing so is expected and perfectly within reason. Just as we select filters for an Instagram picture to heighten the vibrancy of the image, so too can a photoshopper be helpful in maximizing a photo’s aesthetic potential. The problem, however, lies not in the tiny edits highlighting the beauty that already exists in a photo, but in the drastic, misleading alterations of a person in order to sell an unattainable ideal.
“You always start out just learning how to adjust things, just for photography in general,” Sarah told Refinery29, “And just for it to print out properly, you would have to retouch it so that you could see the photo clearly, and it would be bright enough, and all those things…That is really what retouching is essentially about, and should be about.” However, this gradually devolved into a new mentality. “You can manipulate the background, so why not manipulate the body? And then this thing just spiraled out of control,” Sarah explains.
It’s no “Victoria’s Secret” that the company is notorious for its shameless promotion of physical perfection, but what many of us don’t realize is the amount of effort that goes into the painstaking process of conjuring these idealistic images of women’s bodies. Sarah goes on to explain how every aspect of a model’s physique that a viewer takes for granted is carefully manipulated to the point where the “model” we see in an advertisement is an entity with little resemblance to the actual model herself. “They put a push-up bra under the bathing suit. And we retouch out the bra...they even did it with strapless stuff. When you're wearing a strapless bikini, in no way, shape or form [can] you have cleavage. It’s physically impossible with the way gravity works,” Sarah describes of the tricks employed to accentuate cleavage. Furthermore, when this was completed, “Sarah was often asked to make breasts rounder, higher, perfectly symmetrical, and of course, larger.” And in the event that alterations of a model’s body still fail to be up to par, her body parts can even be replaced by the body parts of another model, like a real-life, objectifiable Mr. Potato Head. Among all of these edits is the constant curving up of models with straight figures, and the slimming down of models who do have curves. No one is immune from the judgment and scrutiny of companies and consumers alike.
While one of the tacit messages relayed by all of these efforts to alter and beautify is that a “normal,” unaltered body is not worthy of display, perhaps the scarier message presented here is that perfection really does sell, and that when we go to a shopping mall and look inside store windows, perfection is what we expect, and perhaps even what we want, to see. Sarah explains that Victoria’s Secret has made attempts to be inclusive of different body types, but desisted when doing so proved not to sell. “One time, during a swim season, they had these two girls come in that had abs and thick thighs and busts. They were really toned and their skin was amazing. They were still obviously models. But they were a different look. But they didn’t sell anything and so they stopped using those girls.”
In the midst of the very successful AerieReal campaign and the well-known Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, it seems that the only factor that separated the Victoria’s Secret efforts from more successful ones is the explicitness of the “body positive” message. When we hear a message about body positivity/appreciation, sales are strong and consumers react with zealous approval. However, when nothing is said and a model with a more “normal” body type is simply presented to the consumer, at least in the case of Victoria’s Secret, sales do not reflect positively. As Kelsey Miller of Refinery29 puts it, “We’re used to seeing very specific bodies made even more homogenous with digital fixing — and when we see something different, we notice. Most of the time, when it comes to purchasing habits, that’s a bad thing.” And if this is the case, then perhaps we are caught in a vicious cycle where it isn’t entirely the manufacturers of this image who are doing women a great disservice, but also the consumers who reward such a mentality with their continued financial support.
Though Victoria’s Secret is among the most well-known companies who employ these practices, it is certainly not the only one. Misleading representations of female beauty are ubiquitous, and their unwavering support can only be changed when people become more aware of and vocal against it.
