‘Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.’ - Donna Tartt (1993) The term ‘beauty’ historically, goes right back to the Industrial Revolution, when power and money were the means of standard beauty. Naomi Wolf (1991: 20) ‘Ideas about ‘beauty’ have evolved since the Industrial Revolution side by side with ideas about money, so that the two are virtual parallels in our consumer economy. A woman looks a million dollars, she’s a first class beauty her face is her fortune.’
Female standard of the word ‘beauty’ is constantly changing. For example, from the 15th century to the early 16th century full figured ladies were the epitome of sexiness and were prized for their natural bodies; this went through many drastic changes until the 60’s, when iconic figures such as Twiggy emerged into the media and stick thin became beauty. Even though the term ‘beauty’ is constantly changing, women still aren’t truthful about their own individual beauty and haven’t been for many years.
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Naomi Wolf (1991) wrote about how Virginia Wolf predicted that it would still be decades before women could tell the truth about their own bodies. This was written 70 years ago and behaviour around the subject matter still doesn’t seem to be improving. Women are still very critical about their own flaws and as stated in the Dove campaign (2010) only 4% of women around the world believed they were beautiful.
Rather than improve, self esteem has worsened over the years and girls have started feeling low about their looks and bodies at a very young age. The BMA (2000) wrote about girls having a low self esteem at the age of 11-12. This is causing severe eating disorders, however the media continues to use thinner models, even though the population grows increasingly heavier.
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Dove is one of the brands using self-esteem as a project. They have created it to help women and girls develop body confidence, encouraging them to think strongly about themselves. A survey was carried out in 2013 with 10 to 17 year olds, 72% said they felt tremendous pressure to be beautiful. The study also found that only 11% of girls around the world feel comfortable using the word beautiful. As a group
we found this statistic very shocking and many of their campaigns very inspiring. One particular campaign really inspired us for our shoot; this was the ‘Dove Real Beauty Sketches’. A few women were invited to an artist’s studio, the artist had them sit behind a screen so he couldn’t see their faces, he then drew the women based on their own selfperceptive description. He then drew the same women again although this time
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based on the description from a stranger, having just spent a short period of time with the woman outside the studio. The two drawings were hung together and it turned out the self described drawing was a lot less realistic and dramatically less attractive.
This Dove Real Beauty campaign video has now received 59 million views, 135 thousand likes and is the most shared commercial from 2013 so far. We thought this was a very effective way of conveying the message across to people; that the reality is clouded by our distorted perceptions on beauty and that women are hard on themselves.
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So, why don’t we see ourselves like others do? Our perception of our self image is created throughout life experiences, complicated interplay between cultural ideas and comments by others. As written by Emily Sohn (2013)
“It’s not a perceptual thing. It’s a combination of emotion, meaning and experience that builds up over our lifetime and gets packaged into a self-schema.’’
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In our photo shoot we tried to interpret all these theories and ideas about self perception. We wanted to reinforce the idea that women are far more critical of their own flaws and also to highlight the distorted view of perception vs. reality. We asked a woman to draw herself on to laminate paper; we then projected this drawing onto a screen and had her take the same pose in front, whilst we took photos. We thought having the model do a quick line drawing of herself would
mean she wouldn’t have time to really think about it and would just draw the first thing that came into her head. As you can see on the test shoot (figure above this) she focused straight away on her curly hair, making it very frizzy and then on her body shape; she drew the middle as a big circle. We loved the concept and thought it could have a really interesting impact. However, the images weren’t as artistic and strong as we’d hoped, the drawings and poses were too basic.
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After attending a life drawing class we had a very different view on things, rather than seeing the body just as a simple body, I felt it was more like a mixture of interesting shapes and we could get really experimental with the perception drawings. Egon Schiele is the life drawing artist we mainly focused on. He did many self portraits, so he was a
good creative to look at. His self portraits were really interesting as I assumed if you were drawing yourself you would be self obsessed and very body confident, however as Edward Lucie-Smith (1999) says, he was fascinated by his own appearance. These unique portraits attracted people such as Arthur Roessler, who was one of Egons staunchest
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defenders. He describes Egon in Edward LucieSmiths book with strong statements such as; his face looked ‘sunburned’ with his ‘angular forehead’. We found it very inspiring that he was known for his ‘unusual looks’ but drew himself anyway. We tried to recreate similar drawings with a twisted body and expressive lines.
This looked a lot more effective when we merged the life drawings we created on top of our previous photographs. However we still weren’t fully satisfied, so decided to re take the main photographs anyway but instead of having the models in standstill positions we wanted to focus a lot more on movement to create interesting poses.
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We were intrigued by Jas Masny with her interesting fashion photography image. By capturing the human form in motion it creates a very strong image to show movement. This is exactly what we wanted to portray through our images so we took a lot of inspiration for poses from these images. We decided to use a different model, someone who could help us create these interesting moving poses. We chose Jasmine who is a dancer and a model.
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Our final images are a lot more effective, we find they focus on the strength and independence of women and diminish the constraints that affect perceptions of their beauty. After trying lots of different poses, the ones that took us the longest to capture were definitely the most creative, these are the ones where she is jumping in the air and spinning. The projection idea wasn’t very successful as the projection wasn’t a strong image. It worked much better when we just scanned the images into the computer and merged them into the photographs.
For our exhibition we wanted to use 3 of the strongest images and found the ones without the studio cropped out worked really well. We chose two with the studio and one without. To key all these different images together we decided to have one singular creative line that joins up throughout. This line was a pale purple colour and very minimal as we thought it would fit nicely into our chosen magazine which is The Gentle Woman.
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‘I’ve never looked at a magazine cover and gone that’s what I need to look like’ – This quote is taken out of
The Gentle Woman is a magazine that offers a fresh and intelligent perspective on fashion that is focused on personal style – the way women actually look, think and dress. Since our images are embracing how woman look in reality vs. how they think they look it will fit in perfectly. Our photo shoot should be inspirational, moving and for the ambitious, independent woman we’re aiming it at, which is the typical Gentle Woman reader as they state on their Facebook page. They also currently have a page on ‘The People’ which is 55 biographies of interesting, strong women. Adele (2013) -
Adele’s biography, I found her words really inspiring and that’s when we decided this would be the perfect section for our photo shoot. We want to make women realise they are far too hard on themselves and the flaws they see, no one else can. Which most campaigns and blogs are aiming for; Dove (2013) ‘Dove is committed to help all women realise their personal beauty potential.’ ‘Dove believes that beauty should be for everyone’.
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Women are becoming a lot more aware they’re not the only ones that are critical about their own perception and that it is a population trend. The distortion between perception and reality seem to be getting a lot clearer to everybody which is what campaigns and individual brands are aiming for. The main cause of self perception and self esteem is the constant comparison we share with others, Bob Hurling (2013) mentioned in a self-esteem lecture that comparison against each other is the reason the human race is so successful. If we weren’t all trying to be better than each other, electricity and many other things wouldn’t have been invented, we would all be living in caves and no one would care. So is this what we want? Mabe we’re happy in this distorted view of reality. Alison Lynch (2013) talks about this with great depth and explains
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we definitely need to recognise you don’t have to be a size 10 to be beautiful but differentiating between images we see in magazines and what is healthy and achievable for the ordinary girl seems a lot more realistic. Naomi Wolf (1991:277) ‘It is often said that we must make fashion and advertising images include us, but this is a dangerously optimistic misunderstanding of how the market works.’ Women are hard on themselves but if there not who will be? We want to be transported to the catwalks of Paris and Milan, not because they want to look like them, but, perchance, to dream. Donna Tartt (1993) ‘Beauty
is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.’
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This was one of the mood boards we created to help us with the photoshoot. It included over laying of life drawings and different poses of movements.
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Abigail McEwan N0477209 Fashion Communication and Promotion Year 2 Communication and Message FASH 20031 Word count: 1,626 (without quotes) 1,751 (with quotes)
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Adele, 2013. The People. The Gentle Woman [online blog] Available at: http://thegentlewoman.co.uk/#/names/adele [Accessed on 21/11/13] Alison Lynch, 2013. Debenhams use size 16 mannequins but is this what shoppers want? [online] London: Metro. Available at: http://metro.co.uk/2013/11/07/debenhams-to-use-size-16-mannequinsbut-is-this-what-shoppers-want-4175406/ [Accessed on 24/11/13] BMA, 2000. BMA takes part in body image summit [online]. London: BMA. Available at: http://web. bma.org.uk/pressrel.nsf/wall/6F75AF7A34C7AEBF8025692100346D5A?OpenDocument [13/11/2013] Bob Hurling, 2013. Self Esteem. [Fashion Communication and Promotion, Nottingham Trent University]. 05/11/13. Chuck Palahniuk, 2005. Haunted. 1st ed. America: Doubleday. Donna Tartt, 1993. The Secret History. New ed. London: Penguin books. Dove, 2011. The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty [online]. London: Dove. Available at: http://www. dove.us/social-mission/campaign-for-real-beauty.aspx [Accessed on: 22/11/13] Edward Lucie-Smith, 1999. Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists. 2nd ed. London: Thames and Hudson. Emily Sohn, 2013. Why we don’t see ourselves as others do [online].London: Discovery Communications. Available at: http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/why-we-dont-seeourselves-as-others-do-1304231.htm [15/11/13]. Naomi Wolf, 1991. The Beauty Myth. New Ed. London: Random House. The Gentle Woman, 2010. About Description. Facebook [online blog] 24/03/2010. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/thegentlewoman/info [Accessed on 21/11/13]
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FIGURE 1 WENN, 1960. Twiggy modelling [digital image] Christine Egan. Available at: http://www.blisstree. com/2010/03/30/beauty-shopping/what-to-wear-to-a-sex-party/attachment/people-request-twiggy-2/ [Accessed 25/11/13] FIGURE 2 Getty Images, 1780. Old fashioned women [medium]ELLE. Available at : http://www.elle.com/beauty/ makeup-skin-care/red-lipstick#slide-1 [Accessed on 25/11/13] FIGURE 3 Mel Schwartz, 2013. Not Good Enough – Self Esteem. [digital image] A shift of mind blog. Available at : http://blog.melschwartz.com/2013/07/29/self-esteem-or-other-esteem-2/ [Accessed on 24/11/13] FIGURE 4 Own Image, 2013. Jasmine covering one eye – Self perception [photograph] Nottingham Trent University. FIGURE 5 Dove, 2013. Real Beauty Campaign [digital image] Dove Social Mission. Available at : http://www.dove. us/social-mission/campaign-for-real-beauty.aspx [Accessed on 24/11/13] FIGURE 6 Dove, 2013. Real Beauty Sketches [digital image] The Morning Show. Available at : http://au.tv.yahoo. com/the-morning-show/factsheets/article/-/16862495/dove-real-beauty-sketches/ [Accessed on 24/11/13] FIGURE 7 Own Image, 2013. Projection curly hair self perception [photograph] Nottingham Trent University FIGURE 8 Own Image, 2013. Life drawing, soft lines and no head [drawing] Nottingham Trent University FIGURE 9 Own Image, 2013. Life drawing, hard lines [drawing] Nottingham Trent University FIGURE 10 Egon schiele, 1912. Self Portriat [painting] Mimi. Available at: http://www.lesvanites.fr/?m=201011 [Accessed on 24/11/13] FIGURE 11 Own Image, 2013. Life drawing and self perception merged [edited photograph] Nottingham Trent University FIGURE 12 Jas Masny, 2013. Movement fashion photography yellow dresses [digital image] Shanti blog. Available at: http://fromswithlove.com/photography/jan-masny-lets-dance/ [Accessed on 25/11/13] FIGURE 13 Jas Masny, 2013. Movement fashion photography white/blue dresses [digital image] Shanti blog. Available at: http://fromswithlove.com/photography/jan-masny-lets-dance/ [Accessed on 25/11/13] FIGURE 14 Own Image, 2013. Self Perception Final 1, pointing up [edited photograph] Nottingham Trent University FIGURE 15 Own Image, 2013. Self Perception Final 2, spinning no studio [edited photograph] Nottingham Trent University FIGURE 16 Own Image, 2013. Self Perception Final 3, high kick [edited photograph] Nottingham Trent University FIGURE 17 The Gentlewoman, 2013. Adele biography [digital image] The Gentlewoman biographies. Available at: http://www.artpartner.com/artists/image/alasdair-mclellan/the-gentlewoman-adele/ [Accessed on 25/11/13] FIGURE 18 Own Image, 2013. Self Perception shoot, jumping leg pose [photograph] Nottingham Trent University FIGURE 19 Own Image, 2012. Self Perception Mood Board [digital image] Nottingham Trent University
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“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.” ―
- Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
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