Image manipulation in the fashion industry

You may have seen this recent cover of Elle. It's a good example of one type of beauty being transformed into the default more "standard" type of beauty in the fashion industry - the skinny white woman. Based on this cover image, would you have any idea the woman on the cover was of Indian descent? I certainly didn't.

This cover reminds me of the parliament debate in France in 2009, when MP Valérie Boyer proposed a legislation that all digital manipulation in advertising be labelled as retouched (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/fashion/03Boyer.html). I have to admit, as troubling as the relationship between photo retouching and body image is today, I don't think mandating photos to be labeled when retouched would change anything. The only difference between flipping through an issue of Elle after such a legislation has passed is that every photo would have a small "retouched" label in the corner, which would eventually become invisible to the reader. As the article above points out, all published photos in the media these days are manipulated in some way. Such a legislation would in all likelihood miss the mark because it'd be impossible to set realistic criteria as to what constitutes a retouched photo. Would you still be allowed to adjust the contrast and brightness, flip the subject horizontally, etc? Would that be lying? The extreme type of beauty retouching in fashion photography has given "Photoshopping" a bad name - not all photo retouching seeks to distort reality but rather accentuate what's already there in the original photograph. But it would be far too complicated to set a standard as to how much manipulating is acceptable - what's distorting and what's accentuating?

I think the problem is deeper rooted than just providing more information about the photos: in the end people buy these magazines because they want this imaginary perfection. And so from the standpoint of the fashion and beauty industry, everyone benefits from retouching photos, so why change the arrangement? This is the problem. The product looks better so the client is happy, the models look immaculate so the their career is advanced, the customers get their dose of heightened beauty so they keep buying the magazines, thus the publisher is happy, and so on in an endless loop. A society obsessed with one particular type of female beauty - the stereotypical skinny caucasian big-eyed woman - will always be more interested in consuming that type of image. What needs to happen is a broadening of our culture's definition of beauty to include other varieties of beauty, including the beauty of the everyday. While there is only one acceptable definition of beauty being embraced in mainstream society, images reflecting that definition of beauty will continue to be pushed in that society's face.