‘JESUS CHRIST WHERE’S HER LEG??’ That’s courtesy of the email my friend sent after seeing Moschino’s new campaign. The brand that brought us McDonald’s iPhone cases and a Barbie-themed runway show is guilty of the worst fashion sin of all: the photoshop fail. In this case, Sasha Luss’ left leg has gone missing in Moschino’s spring campaign. Where is it? Nobody knows. It has disappeared mid-leap, never to be seen again.
The mysterious case of Luss’s left leg (soon to appear on a Sherlock episode) isn’t the first Photoshop of horrors to afflict a fashion campaign. History is littered with too many retouching mishaps to recount. The exact same thing happened to Emma Watson’s left leg in Burberry’s spring 2010 campaign – it literally appears to vanish into the panelled wall behind her.
There’s something uniquely fascinating about the Photoshop fail. There are entire websites devoted to cataloging the worst offenders (my personal favourite: psdisasters.com). Target’s online store is basically a repository of crimes against photography, including one which made a model look like she was suffering from reverse melanoma. Retouching disasters can be hilarious, but they’re also sort of counterintuitive. We laugh over how tooootally lame and obvious they are – but they also make us, by extension, skip over all the times when Photoshop is deployed in all its sneaky, non-conspicuous glory.
So much of the photography we see has been stretched, whittled away, magnified or slimmed down. This isn’t just confined to models in luxe fashion campaigns. It happens all the time. Take, for instance, Keira Knightley. She’s no stranger to the pitfalls of Photoshop – when she was 19, her chest was artificially blown up for the poster of King Arthur.
In a recent interview, Keira shed light on some of the surprising instances that Photoshop is used. ’I’ve had my body manipulated so many different times for so many different reasons, whether it's paparazzi photographers or for film posters.’ Hold up. Paparazzi photos? Yep, the images that pretty much exist to make celebrities look hideous and bloated get retouched too.
It even happens in gig photography, as Lorde pointed out last year on Twitter. (As a sometime music writer, photoshopping out Lorde’s tiny sprinkling of spots makes zero sense to me – when was the last time you saw a video editor trying to wipe out Mick Jagger’s wrinkles in the Rolling Stones concert film?)
The bad news is, most of us are still oblivious. We don’t realise the extent to which the images around us are retouched. Even photographers who pride themselves on their raw/gritty/insert trendy adjective here aesthetic still fiddle with their pictures; just look at how Terry Richardson goes in on Mariah Carey’s waist in her Wonderland cover shoot.
We get so hung up on the big things – missing knees, rogue arms, whittled-out thigh gaps – that we sometimes forget how these images routinely erase other smaller, but no less vital, markers of realness. Pimples. Laugh lines. Lower arm fuzz. Back chub. Muffintops.
Thankfully, that’s slowly changing. People have pretty much cottoned onto adverts and fashion magazines. We’re starting to realise that even the most casual images on a celebrity’s Instagram account are retouched to hell (soz, Beyonce). There’s even an Insta account called @wephotoshoppedwhat which calls out fashion bloggers for ‘shopping their pics. Some brands have cottoned onto the commercial potential of ditching the airbrush; sales at lingerie brand Aerie have risen by 9% since it committed to a no Photoshop rule. But here’s a tip: the next time you laugh over a missing leg on a model, keep your eyes peeled to spot what else isn’t there.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.