Jezebel
photo shop of horrors
French (Photo Retouchers) Don't Let Famous Women Get Fat
Remember the horror of that almost-unrecognizable atrocity at left? Turns out we can blame Pascal Dangin for that. Dangin, you see, is what writer Lauren Collins, in this week's issue of the New Yorker, calls "the premier retoucher of fashion photographs", a onetime hairdresser who so believes in reincarnation (symbolic, not metaphysical) that, when he moved from France to the U.S in 1989, he chose the first very flight out of Charles de Gaulle airport on the very first day of the new year.
Many women are transformed by Dangin's computer stylus, which sits in a basement laboratory at "Box", his four-story, Manhattan Photoshop fortress: In addition to Drew, there is the trophy wife with the "flat" face and "short" legs; the shoulder blade found "in a recent project at W"; the cast of the Sopranos; Prada models; "a famous actress in her late twenties"; a "crunchy"-faced model; "another well known actress"; "an actress with a movie coming out this spring"; Kate Moss; models Liya Kebede and Raquel Zimmerman; Madonna. And then there is model Christy Turlington, who, Collins explains, "needs the least help".
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