I admit it. I love online and catalogue shopping.
The comfort, the convenience — it’s the best of window shopping without all those annoying fellow shoppers and salespeople.
Lately, however, I’ve been noticing something a little odd about catalogue models (Don’t even get me started on the amount of Photoshop used); a large population of them can’t seem to stand up normally.
In a single website or catalogue, you can see hundreds of poses, but the ones that always stick out to me are the ones where the girls are half-falling over. It usually looks like the girl is bent sideways, arms hanging lifelessly, head cocked to the same side that she is leaning toward, and of course, mouth open.
Once I see this pose, I can’t focus on the clothes anymore. All I’m worried about is how that poor girl got drunk and wandered onto a photo shoot. She needs to lie down and drink a glass of water, perhaps eat some charred toast, not have a camera flashing in her face.
While I understand that sometimes poses are chosen because they help show how the garments move, the contorted drunk-girl pose doesn’t do that. In fact, it makes the actual cuts of the items more difficult to see.
I don’t understand how this pose because so popular, but it seems to be especially prevalent when the model is wearing a dress. Maybe she’s having trouble with her heels?
— Miriam Traore
I have been noticing the same thing! The J. Crew web site is full of it, and I let them know in the follow up survey they sent me. Besides the emaciated look of a lot of these models, there’s no way those clothes will look that way on my size 6 body simply because I don’t stand like that! (I exclaimed while looking at the Banana Republic site with its flat-chested thin models, “yeah, but how will this top fit if you actually have BREASTS?!”)