Victoria’s Secret Retouching Secrets: A Fashion Insider Confesses

A former photo retoucher who worked for Victoria’s Secret has come forward with information about the company’s editing techniques used to reshape models’ bodies. The process sounds like an extreme and absurd version of playing with dolls. It was reported that whole body parts from other models are swapped in and out for a more desirable look in Photoshop.

The unnamed sourced spilled the secrets of the trade to Refinery29, including the fact that most of the models show up to photo shoots unshaven because body hair is edited out in post-production. The website referred to the fashion industry insider as Sarah. Sarah’s description of her time working full time with major fashion brands is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s horror novel Frankenstein. She stopped retouching for Victoria’s Secret because of the guilt she felt on the job.

Sarah, however, made clear that the industry players aren’t the only ones with their hands dirty. She told the website, “As a society, we’re the ones who choose this.” Retouching is really just another sales tool.  Sarah noted that the boundaries between tweaking an image to make it clearer versus manipulating an image for way less ethical reasons are slippery.

All sorts of things are digitally added or removed during retouching, including bras to give skinnier models the illusion of curves. When asked why the company wouldn’t just hire curvier models, Sarah explained it was because they didn’t sell the brand well enough.

Jezebel revealed a set of leaked, unretouched images from a Victoria’s Secret shoot a few years ago. The photos of the swimsuit models barely look like the glossy picture perfect girls the lingerie company depends on so fiercely to sell its brand. There’s more at play here than just the ethical implications of treating women’s bodies as a product of disposable parts that can be mixed and matched to fit someone else’s fancy. That entire careers depend on this sort of image manipulation and mass dissemination of an impossible to attain beauty standard is even more disturbing.