The
UK government is to put the fashion industry under pressure to stop
promoting unrealistic body images and clamp down on airbrushed photographs in
magazines and adverts.
Lynne Featherstone, the inequalities minister, who has long
campaigned against size-zero photoshoots, will convene a series of
discussions this autumn with the fashion industry, including magazine
editors and advertising executives, to discuss how to promote body
confidence among young people.
The first will focus on airbrushing, which Featherstone argues is
contributing to the dreadful pressure that young people, girls and
women come under to conform to completely unachievable body stereotypes.
She will push for a Kitemark or health warning on airbrushed
photographs, warning viewers that they are not real. I am very keen
that children and young women should be informed about airbrushing, so
they don't fall victim to looking at an image and thinking that anyone
can have a 12in waist. It is so not possible, she told the Sunday
Times.
The minister wants to see more women of different shapes and sizes
used in magazine photoshoots, including curvaceous role models such as
Christina Hendricks, who plays vivacious office manager Joan Holloway in
Mad Men, the US TV series about the 1960s advertising industry.
Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous. We need more of those
role models, she said. Instead, young girls and women were
continually confronted with false images of incredibly thin women, which
could create lifelong psychological damage.
[Perhaps we'll then get a generation of girls feeling inferior over an
impossible dream of boobs like Hendricks].
She is trying to convince magazine editors and advertisers to stop
using digitally altered photographs and underweight models.
Advertisers and magazine editors have a right to publish what they
choose...BUT...women and girls also have the right to be
comfortable in their own bodies. At the moment, they are being denied
that, she said.
Magazines that do retouch pictures run the risk of breaking their own
code of conduct, which states they should not publish inaccurate,
misleading or distorted information, she added. Magazines regularly
mislead their readers by publishing distorted images that have been
secretly airbrushed and altered.
She also called the actions of the advertising industry into
question. Likewise, the advertising standards code says no advert
should place children at risk of mental, physical or moral harm, but
adverts do contain airbrushed images of unattainable beauty in magazines
aimed at young teenagers.