From the title by itself, I was expecting a simple change to skin tone, which would have been bad enough. Reading the story and looking at the pic made me realize that things are much, much worse. What the FUCK.
You know what is the worst thing about this for me.
According to his post, he did not produce the show and did not know that Wu was not compensated for her time until he saw her TikTok.
Not only did they cheat her out of being the model, and replacing her with a terrible AI photo. They also didnt pay her for doing the actual show, until this blew up and the designer saw the tiktok.
He also initially threatened legal action against her, for unclear reasons. Like, he's shared some racist Photoshop, gets called out for it, and his first response is to... Threaten to sue the model who simply made public comments about it?
Guy is a real piece of shit. He can walk back on stuff all he wants, but the first thing he did speaks volumes about what kinda person he is.
This isn't saying she got paid after the TikTok -- it's saying the guy didn't know she wasn't paid, until he saw the TikTok. AFAIK she hasn't been paid at all.
To be fair, Wu also states in the article that she wasn’t expecting to be paid in anything but “exposure.” But that i think is what makes this particularly egregious - she wasn’t even getting paid in that fake currency for the naive. Although the article says that many of the models are under a similar arrangement for the fashion week this occurred during, so maybe exposure still counts for something in the fashion and modeling industries.
Supermodels are why I don't really buy the whole "the media decides what's attractive", because it's been trying to say that that's the peak of attractiveness all my life but I've never bought it.
I knew someone who was a photographer in it and drunk one night she confessed how so many of those photos are fake. Just props and settings. The real model headshot just got moved around.
If I hadn't read the headline, and just looked at the pictures, my first reaction wouldn't that they changed they changed her race, but that they faked a ton of makeup, added highlights, and "enhanced" the outfit's shoulders.
She should be objecting to all the edits, not just the eye shape and overly filtered skin tones. Why did they need to edit her nose, or make that one giant dumbo ear? how could anyone think this mess is an improvent on the model’s great looks?
The high fashion industry has always been a corrupt garbage fire.
Go right now to some normal store's website and check out the clothing section. You are going to see normal looking people smiling. Why shouldn't they be smiling? They have a nice sweater on.
High fashion it is all about taking these very unusual looking people, having them drain their face of touch of humanity, selling clothing that fits no one and costs thousands of dollars. And it is all performative. A game the super rich and their lackies are playing against other super rich and their lackies. If you had two investments available to you today the first is some "tech" company with an idea for a social media site and the other is a fashion maker the tech company (with it's 5% chance of success) has a higher chance of success.
Lay down with dogs, get up with flies. This whitewashing is disgusting but not shocking especially given the decades of photo editing these shitstains have done.
I was expecting something like what they did to Mindy Kaling where they lightened her skin (way too much) but they didn't make her look white, they straight up replaced her head.
While the origin of the altered runway photo is unknown, Wu believes someone – she doesn’t know who – used AI to create the white face that covered hers, a theory Costello echoed in his Instagram post.
If you think the designer had no input into the photos from their own show, either you're nuts or they don't care very much about their designs.