SPARK a Movement!

H&M is taking Photoshop to a whole ‘nother level

If H&M wanted to give consumers a virtual template for putting clothes on, why create one identical and unrealistically proportioned model? Wouldn’t it have been a better idea to make (or, I don’t know, hire) a group of models with diverse body shapes and sizes to give girls a real idea of how their clothes will fit?

One argument in favor of the virtually created models seems to be that they are no different than store mannequins and “it’s not that big of a deal.” Except for the fact that they are completely different from store mannequins. Store mannequins are plastic, often headless and don’t resemble real human people. No one is going to confuse the body of a mannequin with a living person.

These pictures are different, and that difference is insidious. The bodies of these models look like real, airbrushed women, which means the implicit message is that real women and girls can and should strive to look like them. Few girls are going to aspire to look like a store mannequin. Plenty of girls and women want to be models, and draw inspiration from pictures of models found in magazines and online. The virtual nature of these bodies is disguised, making them seem more attainable, even though they’re not.

Sign our petition demanding that H&M either end this practice or expand it to include customizable body types—a tool that they USED to have and that’s easily attainable through this technology. 

H&M puts real model heads on fake bodies. via 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 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. 

eta that literally no one will see: we’ve started a petition on Change.org asking H&M to either end this practice or expand it to include customizable body types—a tool they USED to have and that’s easily attainable through this technology.