Just when you thought the fashion industry could not get more out of touch with real human beings comes news that the model Ralph Lauren Photoshopped into a stick figure was fired for being too big. You know, because having a waist larger than your head is just too damn porky to sell overpriced clothes. Here is the fatty McFatterson model Filippa Hamilton herself, less than a year ago.
And here is how Ralph Lauren Photoshopped her into oblivion recently, a move they then apologized for publicly.
But, turns out the 23-year-old model, who has worked for the company since she was 15, was fired in April and her agent told that she “could not fit in the clothes anymore.” At 5’8, 120 pounds I would say most women would have problems fitting into Filippa’s clothes, but because they are too tiny not because she is too huge.
In a segment on the Today show last week, Filippa revealed her firing and spoke out against her insane Photoshopped self saying, “it is not a good example, when you see this picture every young woman will look at it and think it’s normal to look like that, and it’s not.” When a person is made to look more like Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas than she looks in real life, well, Houston – we have a problem.
So, how sincere can Ralph Lauren’s apology for what they called “poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman’s body” be? Their sincerity, it seems, extends only to being caught for the terrible retouching. Then there is the discovery by Photoshop Disasters last week of a second freakily Photoshopped ad by Ralph Lauren in a storefront in Australia. If they were really sorry, wouldn’t they have pulled this, too?
Her waist and her throat are almost the same size, people!
In an interview with Radaronline.com, National Organization for Women vice president Erin Matson said the image made her burst into tears. She continued:
What I would like to see is an open apology to her and also affirming ads to women of all shapes and sizes and a statement that these women are beautiful. Certainly apologies are due to her personally. But what I’m really concerned about here is the message that that has sent to millions ofpre-teens, daughters, mothers sister — women around the country and the world.
True enough.
As many of you commented earlier, the underlying problem with the Ralph Lauren ads is the fashion industry’s utter disconnect with reality. If a woman like Filippa, who is small by any standard, is too big than of course they’d Photoshop her image into an unrecognizable human scarecrow.
The message Ralph Lauren sends by both creating these ads in the first place and firing Filippa is painfully obvious: We hate real women. Good thing I was never partial to stupid polo ponies in the first place.
