Women Still Talking About Recent Re-Touching Of Model By Ann Taylor

Re-touching. Photo-shopping. And now the popular retailer Ann Taylor is getting tons of publicity, but not the kind that mentions their beautiful clothing.

As long as the brilliant technology remains, we assume that 'designing' the so-called perfect, yet unattainable body, will continue with the images of ultra-skinny models selling clothing.

But when the gorgeous model herself, has been re-touched to appear even skinnier than she is in person, then we wonder what our culture is really trying to sell.

Website Jezebel.com recently uncovered an error admitted by the Ann Taylor shopping website, of a model having been photographed for the site, and then re-touched to appear much thinner. You can see the before & after shots(above) obtained by Jezebel.com. We think the before photo of the model shows a slender but healthy woman. The after picture shows a much tinier waist, hips, and bust, and all-over frame. We are confused with the photo-shopping and the reason for it.

And this technical glitch has been the talk-of-the-town for a number of days now. Ann Taylor got in hot water with another re-touching model incident a few months ago prior to this newest image altering.

Who cares? Well, a lot of women do. The models are skinny enough. This scary altering promotes a body image that is nearly impossible to achieve, even for an almost 6 foot tall model whose job is to maintain a very slender figure, to begin with.

The retailer told Jezebel.com that, "We agree that our re-touching has been overzealous."

We aren't picking solely on Ann Taylor. We happen to love their classic, lovely clothing. Even celebrated designer Ralph Lauren got raked over the coals several months ago, for an advertisement that depicted an extremely photo-shopped model, one who appeared to have a serious eating disorder. We are aware that re-touching or photo-shopping goes on quite a lot in the industry, for lighting purposes, and to make clothing appear more fitted and wrinkle-free. But erasing too many inches from a woman's body, makes you wonder.

Remember Naomi Wolf's best seller, The Beauty Myth? One woman commenting about the Ann Taylor re-touching error, left this quote from the book:

"More women have money and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers. . . . there is a secret "underlife" poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control. It is no accident that so many potentially powerful women feel this way. We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement: the beauty myth."