Vogue‘s latest cover girl is Girls actor/creator/writer/essentially one-woman-show-er (although we do love us a bit of Shoshanna), Lena Dunham.
This is what she looked like on the cover:
And this is how she looked inside:
These are nice pictures. But they are also photoshopped pictures. Because that’s how Vogue rolls.
Lena Dunham is a celebrity who has always taken pride in being ‘real’. Her show depicts ‘real’ sex scenes, follows the mundane plot lines that typify the lives of ‘real’ twenty-somethings, and Lena acts as an advocate for ‘real’ bodies being shown on screen. It is within this context that US feminist website Jezebel offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who could provide them with the ‘real’ – i.e. unretouched – pictures from Dunham’s photoshoot.
When their bounty was first announced, Lena responded by saying that all people who wanted to see her unretouched needed to do was watch her show:
@emilynussbaum 10k? Give it to charity then just order HBO.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) January 17, 2014
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Jezebel's own readership tore them to shreds over this. It seems petty and spiteful and mean. I really dislike the way all of the so-called feminists shred any attempt by fashion magazines to use the "real women" we keep demanding. Seriously, if every attempt to use a woman who doesn't fit into the normal scope is met with a crazy, nit picking backlash of "Melissa's coat (that she picked herself) is unacceptable!", and so on and so forth; then magazines will just stop doing it. They get far less criticism for just continuing to use models and actresses who are skinny and conventionally beautiful.
The fact is, ALL fashion magazines use photoshop. We KNOW this. What Jezebel has done here is just crazy.
They picked on Lena because
(a) they wanted to call her out for being a hypocrite, and
(b) because they thought that her photos would be insanely photoshopped and that the difference would be huge so that they could smugly sit back and passive-aggressively body-and-image-bash Lena under the guise of feminism.
Instead what they got showed that the photoshop work done on Lena was actually pretty minimal in the grand scheme of photoshopping these days. Most of it is lighting fixes. Pulling her dress up higher is hardly a big deal. They slimmed her slightly (seriously, not much at all) and gave her better posture. We've all seen much worse done to models.
I think she explained herself pretty well in the statement that she released (not shown in your article).
At the end of the day this was a petty, mean-girl thing for Jez to do and they received a collective bitch-slap from their readership for doing so. Well deserved i think!
The only thing I found remotely interesting about the before and after shots was the fact that it drew attention to how dreadful a photographer Annie Leibovitz is and how much work the editing team had to do to make the pictures usable in a glossy magazine! To deserve a reputation as great as Leibovitz has her photos should be able to stand on their own without editing to show that she understands the basic principles of photography. I'm not saying editing shouldn't happen, but anything that requires so much change to the lighting and composition etc is clearly not a well taken picture in the first place!