Stars Sans Fards
French Elle is kind of outside my usual beat, but this post from Miriam at Feministing piqued my interest. Jennifer Romolini at Shine reports with a “Yay!” that:
The April issue of French Elle features eight female European celebrities–including Eva Herzigova, Monica Bellucci, Sophie Marceau, and Charlotte Rampling–all without makeup and, perhaps even more revealing, all entirely without Photoshopping or retouching of any kind.
Miriam says “I think this is great, particularly in an era when the only time you see celebrities without makeup is from terrible paparazzi shots.”
In some ways, I think this might actually be a step back. A lot of people have done a lot of work over the years to get people to understand that images you see on magazine covers are not images of actual human beings. They’re complicated collaborations between photographers, hairstylists, makeup people, and digital image-retouchers that use real people as an important element of source material. The results have an extremely vivid hyperreal quality to them that we intuitively respond to as if we’re just looking at pictures of people, but we can come to understand what’s really happening and that nobody ought to beat themselves up over not looking like a computer-retouched image.
The “stars sans fards” initiative seems, especially when you consider the meaning of the French idiom, to be a deliberate effort to re-inject the artifice into the conversation under guise of rejecting it. Obviously, artifice hasn’t, in fact, been done away with here. The lighting, the attire, etc. is all being professionally done; vast quantities of film is being shot and only the very best images selected; and the “stars” being presented “sans fards” are extreme outliers in the genetic lottery. All of which is no worse than conventional magazine cover art, but it’s not really any better. And just at a time when public awareness of the fakeness of magazine covers is growing, we get a new artifice presented as unadorned reality.
51 Responses to “Stars Sans Fards”
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April 15th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I am skeptical that the work done on getting people to not associate magazine covers with real people has had a non-trivial impact. I would think that a major magazine pointing out that stars do look a lot worse without makeup and photoshop (even if it is still great relative to the population) could only help their cause.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I would think that a major magazine pointing out that stars do look a lot worse without makeup and photoshop (even if it is still great relative to the population) could only help their cause.
“A lot worse”? Really? Did you notice the cover? She hardly looks worse at all.
In fact, I’d say that Matthew is exactly right on, here. She actually looks hotter than a normal magazine cover here when you add in the context.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
On the Internet no one knows if you’re a dog, but I’m pretty sure that this post proves Yglesias is not really a woman.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
In fact, I think Matthew is pretty much on the mark here other than his implicit assumption that it is somehow bad to have hot women on magazine covers.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Al, enough with those sexist thoughts. How dare you consider a woman “hot”. PIG!
April 15th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Very true, Matt. I’m not accustomed to seeing your flare for post-modern critique. You should apply it to politics sometimes as well.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I had the same thought as Matt–if magazines are to be blamed for portrating unrealistic images of beautiful people, then these images are about 95% as blameworthy without the spin, and maybe 200% as blameworthy with the spin.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
“but we can come to understand what’s really happening and that nobody ought to beat themselves up over not looking like a computer-retouched image.”
Gotta disagree with you there. Lots of teen girls (and boys) do beat themselves up because they cannot achieve the appearance of the images that appear in advertisements, lifestyle and fashion magazines.
Readers might be aware, intellectually, that many of the celebrity/models images are computer-enhanced, it is nearly impossible for a non-professional to know what changes have been made to the image.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
The focus tends to be on female stars without makeup, but a lot of male stars look pretty grim and ordinary without their makeup and lighting. We were at a gathering not too long ago, and my wife jabbed me to quietly alert me to a Hollywood Star in our midst. I simply couldn’t see who she was talking about. (I never did. I think she may have been hallucinating. Or I may be too old.)
April 15th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
In fact, I think Matthew is pretty much on the mark here other than his implicit assumption that it is somehow bad to have hot women on magazine covers.
I’m tempted to agree. But I don’t think, pace Yglesias, that people have internalized the understanding that most covers are intersections of all manner of technique. The underlying problem is that being hyper-attractive pays big dividends. Putting absurdly good-looking women on the covers, even sans makeup, pays lip service to the problem while actually feeding it.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
It’s a bummer that absurdly ugly women are not featured on major magazine covers.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
socialism = nobody is allowed to be pretty?
we must all be equally average in appearance?
is this liberal self-parody? hope so
April 15th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Here are my illiterate, typo-prone two cents!
The Moral Panicker must disagree with Yglesias. The Moral Panicker acknowledges that fixating on authenticity and rejecting artifice is not particularly useful for a civilized person, but he also believes that there is a hierarchy of artifice. For a woman not to add all kinds of makeup to improve her physical appearance while still using clothes and jewelry to complement them, while being photographed with sophisticated lighting and so forth to record that appearance “as it actually was” “from a certain point of view” without using photo-editing to create an image that actually did not exist in the real world (Yes, yes, relativistic understanding of the sense of sight and the facts of light, but I’m still right) strikes a nice balance between nature and technology.
As far as females (in this case) or males worrying “Oh la la , je me deteste parce que je ne suis pas comme Sophie Marceau in ce photo qui est absolument naturel” (Franglish forever!!) that is a problem, but moving away from too much of a reliance on technology with respect to the human self (technologies which do have powerful and appropriate uses) is a good thing.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Ike,
I think a robust version of capitalism implies Elle can put whomever they choose, presented however they choose, on their covers, and then Matt can complain about the likely effects however he chooses on his blog.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I can be an advocate for something without that something currently being in place
April 15th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Well, I think it is better. Much better! The use of photoshopping in particular is an aesthetic disgrace to fashion and beauty.
Use of lighting and beautiful models and so forth are not nearly “fake” to the same degree as photoshopping. Photoshopping involves manipulating the photographic image, changing it in ways that do not reflect the what was actually taken. Choosing beautiful models, changing the lighting, and putting them in nice clothes involves changing the subject, not the image.
I would postulate that our minds are much, much better adapted for recognizing the former type of fakery than the latter.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I would postulate that our minds are much, much better adapted for recognizing the former type of fakery than the latter.
I doubt it. Artists have been studying how to manipulate and deceive the evolved characteristics of human perception since long before there was even photography.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
A few thoughts come to mind immediately. First, I disagree completely that people can so easily dismiss magazine pictorials as fake and feel fine about themselves. It’s somewhat like the feeling you have when your mom tells you your handsome. You still want to look like something else; it doesn’t matter. As long as we continue to promote an extremely fake aesthic, people will try to align themselves with that aesthetic and feel badly about any failure to do so. So enough with the photo-editing. It’s a cop-out to say, well they still aren’t going to be as beautiful. There’s not as beautiful and then their’s not even close. Women with no flesh, lines, or dimbles, no matter their posture, do not exist.
And maybe more saliently, I think this no make-up thing is probably really just keying in on changing views on what is attractive. Real is sexy again. Just as metro-sexual is not. See beards.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
I myself always preferred to see Sophie Marceau “sans vêtements” myself
April 15th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Al and the reanimated Dwight Eisenhower read too much into Yglesias’ post, but in general they touch on something vaguely present in this post and more clearly stated elsewhere: the idea that standards with respect to personal attractiveness are unfair or sexist (at least when from heterosexual males). Now the balance between Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” in which people where masks to look equal, and physchological terrorism of people for not conforming completely to standards of beauty is to make it clear to people that they can have their own worth even if they do not look like more attractive people. If our people hypothetically intimidated by pictures in magazines don’t, for lack of a more fitting cliche, get the picture through this message (a message which seems pretty strongly entrenched in liberal American culture) then that’s too bad but they really don’t need to expect changing pictures in magazines to change their unhappiness.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I doubt it. Artists have been studying how to manipulate and deceive the evolved characteristics of human perception since long before there was even photography.
Photography has been around for 150 years. Photoshopping for about 10. Most people have taken pictures with cameras or have had their pictures taken. They understand how the resulting image can change depending on pose, angle, light, etc. By comparison, very few people have any experience with photoshopping.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
DTM -
Yeah; I think in our everyday lives people are notionally familiar with the phenomenon that maybe some people photograph better than others and even so often fail to notice what’s going on. (To pick a political figure, several people have remarked how Hillary Clinton, when speaking, has an animated face and a demeanor that, presuming you’re not intrinsically hostile to her, can be quite engaging; when photographed in the act of speech, she’s invariably caught in the middle of a facial movement that looks, at best, goofy.) But I don’t think most people have experience with professional level photography (and photographic cherry picking) beyond the level of the family portrait done by the guys at the mall.
I have a friend who’s trying to make it as an actress. She’s a pretty young woman, and she looks like a pretty young woman in casual photos, but the professional photos she uses as headshots are just on another level. She looks recognizably like herself, which doesn’t always happen, but everything is weirdly heightened. Actually, it’s the difference between “she looks like the pretty girl next door” and “she looks like the actress who plays the pretty girl next door on a teen drama”. And even though intellectually I knew that professional photos and makeup and lighting made a huge difference, I didn’t really *get* it until I saw them done for a person I’d already known, in person, for several years.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
The “stars sans fards” initiative seems, especially when you consider the meaning of the French idiom, to be a deliberate effort to re-inject the artifice into the conversation under guise of rejecting it… All of which is no worse than conventional magazine cover art, but it’s not really any better.
I don’t know, this seems more like contrarianism for its own sake than anything else. Like you say, there’s still a professional touch in clothes and lighting and stuff, but in the cover pictures at least those influences seem as minimized as possible. And sure, the genetic lottery left these women better looking than most, but the difference between these pictures and their usual presentation looks blindingly obvious to me. Sans fards, they are still beautiful women but lack all the glamour we usually see. They’re pale. Their hairstyles are the sort that a woman could do for herself (Belluci’s and Marceau’s, at least), even though the locks of hair might have been put in their exact specific places by the photographer. Their clothes are monochromatic and simple; they reveal curves, but no more than what you’d often see on the street and probably less.
This “Elle” feature looks like, at worst, a sincere attempt to get celebrities as close to unretouched as possible given that professionals are involved at all, but to you it’s “not really any better” because professionals were still involved. It seems like you’re making the perfect the enemy of the good here.
If nothing else, Matt, Al agrees with you. It’s not that he’s always wrong, but I’m just saying, consider the odds.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Not entirely true. I’ve just gotten into digital photography, and after a few rounds of taking photos on streets that are well lit with sodium-vapor lights, there is a certain amount of image manipulation that needs to be done to make the photo match what the scene looked like. Don’t forget that the brain does a fair amount of massaging the information that it gets from the retina.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
In fact, I think Matthew is pretty much on the mark here other than his implicit assumption that it is somehow bad to have hot women on magazine covers.
Yeah, could someone explain this to me like I was 12 please.
What’s wrong with hot women (photoshopped or otherwise) on magazine covers?
April 15th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Willie, the party line on this one is that the constant barrage of pictures (and doctored pictures) of women on the far right-hand side of the bell-curve destroys self-esteem and creates an unattainable ideal of female beauty, which is ultimately disatisfying for both sexes.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
<iWhat’s wrong with hot women (photoshopped or otherwise) on magazine covers?
I don’t have any objection to hot women on magazine covers. I do object to photoshopping – for aesthetic rather than moral reasons. Compare Playboy photos from the 70s with those of today – there is no comparison. The women today all have the same fake look. It’s the equivalent of Kraft macaroni & cheese.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Some quaintly retrograde aesthetics on this thread!
April 15th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Add my vote to the idea that most people don’t realize how much effort goes into the artifice of a magazine cover model… and I’d wager that the kids assume they’re seeing street-ready reality.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
blah is right on regarding aesthetics. Take it one step further to adult videos. I’ve heard homemade videos are much more entertaining than commerical ones with plastic robot women. I’ve heard.
But this just keys into my other point. The only reason you’re seeing this is not because these women are brave trailblazers, ready to devalue their images in the search for truth. It’s because people are swinging back in taste towards the “real” woman. See Halle Berry in Monsters Ball for beginning of end of Pamela Anderson.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Most people have taken pictures with cameras or have had their pictures taken. They understand how the resulting image can change depending on pose, angle, light, etc. By comparison, very few people have any experience with photoshopping.
Medrawt already covered this better than I could. I’ll just add that my guess–and admittedly it is purely a guess–is that the advent of the point-and-shoot camera (introduced in the late 70s I believe) has, if anything, lowered our collective sense of what is typically possible with professional photography.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I don’t think the real issue is objection to pretty women on magazine covers…it is objection to the media creating an extremely narrow definition of what “pretty” is. Look at Glamour’s treatment of cover girl America Ferrera, for instance. She’s beautiful, but they Photoshopped her into the narrow definition of beautiful they’re selling. And guess what? The reason they’re selling it is that most people will try as hard as they can and never get there. Women will buy pills, creams, books, magazines, powders, undergarments, clothes, exercise equipment, diet shakes, etc. only if they consistently have a reason to do so. If the arbiters of cultural definitions of beauty expanded their definition of the term, they’d lose their advertisers, as well as their purpose in existence.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
@Andrew:
I can confirm what you have heard.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Well, it’s obviously ‘less makeup’ rather than ‘no makeup’.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Well, I’ve seen some stars in person over the years, and I don’t know how much makeup was applied at WonderCon, but I can assert that Summer Glau, Shirley Manson (at 42), Yvonne Strahovski, Moon Bloodgood and Bryce Dallas Howard look pretty damn fine in person (although Summer does have slightly more bags under her eyes than you see on Terminator),
Actually discerning Photoshopping isn’t too hard. Basically if you don’t see any skin imperfections, it’s been Photoshopped. The extreme of that is taking out Angelina Jolie’s forehead mole which is bizarre.
What’s even worse is that magazines like Maxim actually replace the ENTIRE SKIN of the celebrity with some sort of fake filter which makes them look completely computer-generated. That’s just bizarre. When the magazines started doing that, I was like, “WTF? You’re RUINING the woman!” We want to see a real female there, not an anime model.
April 15th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
This is very similar to when…some magazine did an issue made up entirely of normal-sized women rather than Size 0’s. The magazine gets good PR for being so progressive and challenging the standard of beauty etc. etc., and then the other eleven months of the year the unstarved women are back in the shadows and nothing is different. It’s tokenism, basically.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
April 15th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Well the cosmetics companies are surely coming out with new products that “make you look ’sans fards’” any day now.
And waist-high jeans will no doubt follow.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Gotta disagree with you here — in fact just today (before hearing about this story) I was thinking that it’d be radical for a magazine to pledge to not use any photoshopping (aside from color correction).
I was thinking about this because this weekend I was talking with women in my family and they had earlier been repulsed by a strange billboard ad in which a girl had strange tube legs that didn’t get wider near her hips, even though her legs were bent forward. I explained that they literally change body shapes in these photoshop works, it’s not just blemish removal. Even the most beautiful girls have precise amounts of volume shaved off of them (sometimes maybe just 1/8 inch). Because audiences are sensitive to those minute details regarding thinness, and apparently more so than they are sensitive to deformities that result in the more ambitious edits.
What you seem to propose, Matthew, is that we all agree that anything on a magazine cover should be considered absolute fiction. This seems pretty odd to me.
P.S. – Just a general comment not specifically about this entry: SPELLCHECK YOUR SHIT, MAN.
April 16th, 2009 at 2:44 am
well it seems to me, that regardless of how its presented or what pretensions are there to accompany the images/videos, or not, the problem is this – the range of what is considered ‘hot’ is simply too narrow. the current norm of this is far too restrictive, and really, is just nonsensical, since there is overt demand from nearly every quarter, to expand the idea of what is or can be attractive, as opposed to contracting it.
changing cultural norms won’t have much to do with photoshopping or not, once that problem is ’solved’. if you have the full range of models representing humanity, it will just simply become about what you want to do with the shot overall, rather than trying to achieve a pre-conceived idea of what starlet X with body type $ should look like, no matter what has to be done to achieve it.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Never underestimate what a great photographer can do with lighting and filters. Check out the landscapes of Galen Rowell sometime.
http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/images/042002/mount_humphreys.jpg
You or I could photograph that scene 1000 times and never come up with that balance or saturation.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:56 am
At the risk of unintentionally offending several different constituencies…
I’ve always felt that the emphasis fashion shows and major magazines place on dousing women in makeup, and airbrushing them until they acquire the plastic sheen of Barbie dolls, is closely correlated to the unusually high proportion of gay men in the fashion industry.
Anyone who is attracted to actually-existing women, it seems to me, would prefer images like this one: simple photographs of unenhanced, natural women who happen to be extremely hot.
April 16th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Does this blog have any female readers? At all? I’m asking because 2) it looks like all commenters on this thread are (straight) men 2) most of them seem to be assuming that the cover photos of Elle and other magazines are produced with them in mind. Do you guys really read Elle and Cosmo? Do you really think that what you guys find “hot” or not “hot” has anything to do with what these magazines put on their covers and why?
April 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Do you guys really read Elle and Cosmo? Do you really think that what you guys find “hot” or not “hot” has anything to do with what these magazines put on their covers and why?
If it’s a choice — like at a Dr’s office — between Elle and Growing Old Gracefully, I’ll peek at the lingerie ads etc of a woman’s magazine. I’ve never begrudged a pretty woman her looks, and the distinction between women who are pretty-to-straight-men and pretty-to-gay-men seems to me to be entirely academic. Pretty is pretty. As someone whose looks are along the continuum between David Merrick and a red cabbage, I don’t care why they put pretty women on their covers. Our oldest literature is about putting a pretty woman on the cover.
April 16th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
“Do you really think that what you guys find “hot” or not “hot” has anything to do with what these magazines put on their covers and why?”
Um… for starters, my comment was not intended to be specifically about women’s magazines. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but many of the magazines that put airbrushed pictures of heavily made-up women on their covers are aimed at men.
But more importantly, take just a moment or two and think about what you just wrote. Do you seriously, seriously think that what magazines like Elle put on their covers has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with what men want to look at? You don’t think it’s just the tiniest possible that these magazines are aimed at selling products to women that women believe will make them more attractive to men?
I mean, the guy on the cover of GQ or Esquire is there because women want to look at guys like that, isn’t he?
April 16th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
But more importantly, take just a moment or two and think about what you just wrote. Do you seriously, seriously think that what magazines like Elle put on their covers has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with what men want to look at? You don’t think it’s just the tiniest possible that these magazines are aimed at selling products to women that women believe will make them more attractive to men?
I think he’s saying you have the causation in reverse.
Men don’t find these women attractive because they are on the cover of magazines. Rather, they are on the cover of magazines because they are the women the widest range of men find attractive.
In other words, replacing these women with zaftig models isn’t going to change straight mens’ beauty standards much at all.
April 16th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
“Men don’t find these women attractive because they are on the cover of magazines. Rather, they are on the cover of magazines because they are the women the widest range of men find attractive.”
But that isn’t the reverse of what I’m saying. I didn’t say anything at all about the size and shape of the models. And that also isn’t supported by what the commenter at #43 actually wrote… which implied that what men consider to be attractive doesn’t have “anything to do with what these magazines put on their covers.”
I’m saying that this particular Elle cover probably comes closer to representing what the widest range of straight men find attractive than the typical glossy airbrushed glamor shot does. I suspect this disconnect is related to the high prevalence of men and women in the glamor industry who are not actually attracted to women.
I’m sure that it’s also related to the desire of advertisers to sell beauty products and expensive clothing to women, a cause that is served by making women feel insecure about their natural looks. Putting Sophie Marceau on the cover with carefully-controlled lighting doesn’t really change that dynamic, which is what I take to be Matt’s point.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
“but we can come to understand what’s really happening and that nobody ought to beat themselves up over not looking like a computer-retouched image.”
That’s not the plan though, Mathew. The intent behind such pictures are exactly to make us feel lousy about ourselves. How else will we be compelled to buy the gazzillion products advertised to “enhance” our “imperfect” bodies?
April 16th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
hahahaha This is more depressing than anything. The fact that this is considered newsworthy or “courageous” in some way is laughable. What shitty society we live in
April 16th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Matthew,
The only reason that I know magazine images are not real people is because my father was a photo retoucher. I spent my childhood watching him make models bustier and skinnier and taller than they really were.
Most people who haven’t had that experience do not know that magazine pictures are not real
This is especially true for women, who go through constant mental torment (and even starve themselves or pay good money to get surgically mutilated) to look like those images.
So, I think that it’s good that, just this once, a fashion magazine showed models as they really are.
It might just stop some poor woman somewhere from cutting herself, or starving herself, or committing suicide because she’s not “perfect” like the models on the magazine covers are!
April 17th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
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