Off With Their Heads!
But we know this. These models make up the itsy bitsy 1% that I’d speculate deep down most women envy more than those Wall Street fat cats. The problem is that now even this fractal of women is not perfect enough for the fashion industry.
Enter H&M.
H&M is a clothing retailer that targets a younger demographic through providing in-style clothes at affordable prices. (Blah blah blah…they’re a trendy chain that even the barista and I can afford.) What have put this relatively nondescript retailer in the public eye recently are the company’s new “models.”
H&M has taken Photoshop in fashion to a whole new and despicable low by chopping off the heads of their models and superimposing them on dolls wearing the store’s merchandise. That is to say, the images of the women used on the website are actually chop suey Frankensteins of part-doll, part-human portions.
Awesome.
As if little girls everywhere didn’t have low enough self-esteem. As if seeing the images of beautiful women with hips as high as your (slight) double-chin wasn’t already enough to make women kick their body image deep down into the pits of awful, somewhere near pleated pants, “From Justin to Kelly” and raisins.
Now the championed ideal of beauty is no longer something that very few of us are, but rather, something that none of us are. According to H&M, there are no women perfect enough to wear their clothing. Which is sort of an odd implication for a clothing retailer to make.
I thought clothing was made for us pear-shaped, puckered, imperfect women. More to the point, I thought we were the ones who bought them.
Show us a real woman whose clothes celebrate her curves; clothes that highlight the body that can carry a baby and climb the corporate ladder. Show our children and our society the real women that take your clothes off their hangers and make them fashion.