Class, say “Thank you, Gloria” for today’s post on th count of three. 1, 2….
She wrote in:
I know that you have discussed this type of thing before…but this goes beyond the Victoria’s secret “booty paint” type stuff. H&M has recently admitted that they use the same virtual body on most of the models on their website (as you can see from the pictures in the article). These bodies are “computer generated,” and H&M claims that they use these bodies because they can better display the clothing than real models could. They simply post a real model’s head on top of the body, alter the skin tone to match her face, and then draw on the clothing. Great, right?
SMH. Now photoshopped bodies aren’t good enough? We have to use entirely computer generated bodies to model clothing?
Let’s see what’s going on.
From Jezebel:
The bodies of most of the models H&M features on its website are computer-generated and “completely virtual,” the company has admitted. H&M designs a body that can better display clothes made for humans than humans can, then “dresses” it by drawing on its clothes, and digitally pastes on the heads of real women in post-production. For now — in the future, even models’ faces won’t be considered perfect enough for online fast fashion, and we’ll buy all of our clothing from cyborgs. (This news sort of explains this.) But man, isn’t looking at the four identical bodies with different heads so uncanny? Duly noted that H&M made one of the fake bodies black. You can’t say that the fictional, Photoshopped, mismatched-head future of catalog modeling isn’t racially diverse.
I feel like, at this point, they just need to hang the clothes up on hangers and take pictures of it with camera phones… y’know, the way sellers on ebay do it. That way, no one is disillusioned regarding what women actually look like. Sure, the clothes might not sell because women won’t be thinking “Hey, maybe if I buy that outfit I’ll look like THAT!” only to be sorely disappointed that they’re not a living computer-generated graphic, but hey! At least no one will be starving themselves or going on liquid diets to make it happen, right?
Right?