Are you tired of making sure that every day you measure up to an image of a perfectly slim, perfectly styled model or celebrity? Do we truly want to be that faultless?
Every summer, flying home to the States after visiting family in Europe, I have a few issues of the latest European fashion magazines on my lap. And every year, I am struck by the image of models sporting wrinkles and other imperfections that have become so foreign to my ‘Americanized’ eye. Daily exposure to imagery that has been subjected to painstaking tricks of lighting and retouching to reach new levels of perfection is leaving me emotionally blank, asking for ‘real’ and yearning for the beauty of imperfection.
Last summer, an issue of French Elle featured photos of stars like Monica Bellucci, Eva Herzigova and Sophie Marceau without makeup or retouching. The images were a conversation starter and a response to growing public sentiment against the over-altering of images. Hollywood is also re-examining its ‘perfect women.’ Filmmakers have begun recruiting more natural-looking actors abroad because the too perfect and eternally young-looking crowd in Los Angeles suffers from too much sameness and lacks authenticity.
My visit to Art Chicago reconfirmed that the fine artists are also on the escape from the ‘perfect world.’ Artists chose hand-done mediums that were in complete contrast to the perfect world of computers. The show was filled with notes, doodles and magazine spreads done by hand, layers of textures that celebrate how imperfect but real our humanity is.
We can witness this search for authenticity reflected in many domains of everyday life. We are now re-creating our homes with uncoated floors and making furniture from salvaged materials. We are adding texture back into our lives, and we enjoy the imperfections of the real, the raw and the natural.
We have reclaimed small butcher shops and farmers markets in search of raw, straight from-the-source goods. Sociologists studying shopping behavior reported recently that consumers have “ten times as many conversations at farmers markets as they do at supermarkets” (Deep Economy, Bill McKibben); so too have we recreated our retail to reflect the feel of the small-batch local shop. Now, packaging is also banking on the handmade look to satisfy consumers’ hunger for authenticity.
We no longer want to eat plastic food. Pages of magazines are celebrating half-eaten cookies, broken pretzel sticks and lovely messes of tossed herbs and crumbs everywhere. From formulaic and too perfect, food photography has reached new, mouth-watering levels. The food is alive, natural and imperfect. It drips and pours over, it crumbles, it’s on the tip of the fork… it’s alive and irresistible.
So enough with cosmetic surgery, post-editing, plastic-looking food and any more pummeling with too-good-to-be-trueness. Realness and transparency have become the new nostalgia.
We are tired of fakes… fake women, fake products, fake food…
What we want to see is real.
This article was written by our Creative Director, Ivana Nikolic.
