14 DAY TRIAL // A little over a week ago, buzz online about a very bad Photoshop job on a fashion campaign started to pick up once more. This time, the company at fault was Nordstrom, while the model was none other than waif-like Tao Okamoto, whose appearance was altered digitally to such an extent that she resembled one of the blue aliens (Na’vi) in the blockbuster “Avatar.”
Initially, when fashion blogs and e-zines noticed just how unnaturally thin Tao was looking in one of the company’s ads, Nordstrom denied any retouching had been done to the image. Now that the scandal is almost over, the company admits that it wasn’t exactly honest in the initial statement. In a new statement cited by the Daily Mail, Nordstrom says that, indeed, retouching of the photos was carried a little to the extreme, and that the result was neither what they were going for nor something they were necessarily proud of.
“For the sake of clarity the orange T-shirt photo was indeed retouched: we smoothed out the model’s nipples, removed a few wrinkles from the pants and shirt and punched up the shirt’s color. In addition... we also smoothed out her left hip (something that we neglected to originally mention),” the statement says. It refers to one photo in particular (also attached to this article), in which the model is wearing a pair of white jeans and a bright orange Ralph Lauren shirt.
It’s not hard to notice that the model has almost no hips, which, Nordstrom now agrees, is the result of very bad photoshopping. “After taking a closer look at the final image, we think the smoothing was a bit heavy-handed and we're disappointed with the result. There have been times when we have ‘thickened’ or added weight to a model or ‘thinned’ a model by smoothing out bulges that may distort the shape of the clothes. It’s not a common practice for us, but we have done it on a case-by-case basis,” the statement further says.
As the Mail also underlines, though unwittingly, with this statement, Nordstrom managed to drag Ralph Lauren into another photoshopping scandal, after a couple of models were digitally altered for different campaigns to look unnaturally (and unhealthily) thin, with non-existent hips and waists that were narrower than their own thighs.