French Legislator to Battle Idealized Beauty in Ads

People have complained for years about too-thin models on the runways and the unrealistically high standards presented by celebrities in advertisement, but French legislator Valérie Boyer is actually doing something about it: proposing a law that would require all advertisements featuring digitally retouched people to say so on the advertisement.

In such a commercial world, people, especially the youth, are constantly being bombarded with advertisements. Boyer argues that seeing the idealized beauty of advertisements has a negative impact on self-esteem, especially of young women, and may incite eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Boyer told The New York Times, "If someone wants to make life a success, wants to feel good in their skin, wants to be part of society, one has to be thin or skinny, and then it’s not enough — one will have his body transformed with software that alters the image, so we enter a standardized and brainwashed world, and those who aren’t part of it are excluded from society.”

This debate is not new: arguments against the idealistic women in the fashion industry have been happening for a while, from model Fillipa Hamilton's extremely retouched Raplh Lauren advertisement in which her waist was shrunk to the width of her head and Self magazine's publishing of a thinned-down Kelly Clarkson. Boyer hopes, from a mother's perspective, that labeling these retouched images will start to open up the eyes of young girls who idolize the stick-thin models.

Many French women disagree with this idea. A former model, Inès de La Fressange, says that the bill is "demagogic and stupid," claiming the causes of anorexia are more complex than pretty pictures. Dominique Issermann, a French fashion photographers, goes even farther to say,  "There is this illusion that photography is ‘true,’” but "as soon as you frame something you exclude something else." She argues photo-retouching is not always used to slim girls down. Issermann uses her photograph of actress Keira Knightly in an advertisement for Coco Chanel perfume as an arguing point, saying that it was retouched to add to her thigh, because the actress was too thin there.

This debate will probably not be solved by the passing of this law, if it even passes. Anne-Florence Schmitt, editor of fashion magazine Madame Figaro argues, “Michelangelo painted idealized bodies, so the idea of idealized beauty was already there. It’s a fake debate.”