Slimming down - thanks to digital retouching

A slim-looking Kelly Osbourne fronts today’s Independent Extra feature on digital retouching. This is how she looked on the cover of Fabulous in February:

Other examples include:

• Kate Winslet being ’stretched’ to make her look so tall and thin on a February 2003 GQ cover that she appeared to have size 12 feet (see below). Winslet described the digital manipulation as ‘excessive’. In 2006, the Closer Diets website identified Winslet as having the perfect celebrity body.
• Kate Moss was turned black for the Red Independent issue in September 2006 to highlight the issue of black models on covers.
• Princess Eugenie being touched up and ‘busomed-up’ - ‘Tatlered’ according to the Daily Mirror - this year (see below).

The article discusses the work of Pascal Dangin and the Dove advertising campaigns, which featured photographs by Rankin. The Hayward gallery held an exhibition in April that featured manipulation of images as far back as the 1920s by photographer Alexander Rodchenko.

How Kate Winslet appeared on GQ - one of a series of images at the Indpendent website

Below - how the Mirror reported the treatment of Eugenie’s image

The Devil wears her heart on her sleeve

The Devil Wears Prada portrayed women fashion magazine editors as very strange people. So seeing one come across as human can be a tad surprising. Alexandra Shulman - the UK peer of US Vogue’s Anna Wintour, on whom The Devil was supposed to be based - reveals a quandry at the heart of her life in an Independent interview:

‘I think we have a very unhealthy relationship with how people really look and I have to marry my personal feelings about it, which is that people should relax a bit and concentrate a bit more on other aspects of themselves, with the fact that I edit Vogue, which is a magazine which is all about creating that idealised image for people.’

And perhaps she does stay up at night worrying about skinny models and black models.

Last year, Naomi Campbell hit out at British Vogue for not putting her on the cover. In fact, Campbell has appeared on the front of Vogue at least six times. Shulman dismisses the comments as ‘a PR thing’ – ’she was just trying to get publicity for the event she was doing’.

But she adds: ‘What I think is an absolutely valid criticism is there aren’t enough black people in all areas of successful life.’

‘I have to be realistic about these things. If you look at the black population in this country and you look at the amount of black women featured in the magazine throughout, we’re absolutely on a par with the whole population, but what we’re not doing is overcompensating.

‘I happen to think she [Naomi] really likes being one of the few really successful black models, because it gives her a huge advantage and she’s had an incredibly long career.’

‘Still in Vogue after all these years‘ by Ciar Byrne in the Independent.

Covered in glory: Marie Claire

Claire Atkinson in the Independent profiles Joanna Coles and sees the Yorkshire-bred ‘gritty’ editor of US Marie Claire as a potential new Tina Brown. The piece discusses the ups and downs of black art of choosing cover models:

Coles has also shaken up conventional wisdom about who should grace the covers of American Marie Claire in age when newsstands are heaving with celebrity cleavage and fly-away tresses. Some choices have had praise, others criticism. Media-industry blogs criticised choices like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Sarah Michelle Gellar as uninspiring, while another cover girl, Ashley Simpson, caused a stir when she told women to love themselves as they are, and then promptly turned around and got a nose job. Coles wrote a stern editor’s letter on that turn-about. Grey’s Anatomy star Sandra Oh, one of the first actresses of Asian descent to make the cover, raised both eyebrows and interest. The issue helped lift newsstand sales by 22 per cent. Ultimately though, staples such as Angelina Jolie (with whom Coles spent an afternoon) and Ashley Olsen have been the best sellers.

Kelsey on black cover models

Former Cosmopolitan editor Linda Kelsey has blamed the conservative nature of the industry for the lack of black models on magazine covers - and the fact that there are so few black celebrities. Speaking on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, She recited an anecdote from when she was Cosmo editor that distributors had warned her off using a black model because such covers did not sell. The magazine used the black model and she said it had no discernible effect on sales.

Nowadays, such titles no longer used models, but celebrities instead, she said. Also, Kate Moss would be used rather than Naomi Campbell because she was guaranted to sell copies.

The interview comes after a Guardian report earlier this month asking ‘Why are all the models white?’

See about 250 covers at Magforum.com