Skinny Kate, or Busty Mad Maiden?
10/08/2010

There were rumblings in the press again this week about airbrushed photos of fashion models leading teenage girls down the road to anorexia. The latest salvo comes from Girlguiding UK, who say retouched images should be labelled to help tackle the “damaging and unrealistic pressures on young women”.

I can’t help feeling that this is one of those issues in which we strain the gnat whilst elsewhere we happily gulp down the camel. I mean, if we’re really so concerned about teenagers looking to Kate Moss and her ilk as role models, shouldn’t we also be sticking warning labels on celebrities like Lady Gaga? You know, something like: “Vain and insane – imitating this creature could damage your mental health, not to mention your wardrobe”.

Fortunately for the Girl Guides, there seems to have been a bit of a media backlash against skinny models with the arrival of the busty female stars of Madmen, the retro 60s TV series, who are under orders not to work out and stay curvy. Are they role models we should endorse?  Or is it only a matter of time before someone slaps a label on them warning young girls about the dangers of botoxing and incipient obesity?

As to airbrushing, there is the wider question of the ethics of retouching anything at all.  There have been abuses. Stalin famously airbrushed Trotsky out of history, or at least the Party’s photo archives. More recently, the cigar of Isabard Kingdom Brunel was airbrushed out of a famous photo of him besides the SS Great Britain on the grounds that it offered ‘an inappropriate role model for young people’.

But where do you draw the line?  Are we allowed to remove fruit blemishes from still life shots? Or strip in sunny skies on travel photography that was taken on a dull day? And what about the whole business of CGI – the faking of entire landscapes? Is this not a gross deception?

Well, in an age when most youngsters spend half their life in virtually reality, playing computer games and the like, I think we agonise a bit too much over what is true to life and what isn’t.  And as to the retouching of supermodels, everyone knows they’re fantasy figures.

Don’t they?