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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fashion victims

Donatella Versace's Not-So-Gilded Designer Age

At twelve, Donatella had her first highlights— "'Lighter and lighter and lighter,' I told them!" she recalled. At fourteen, she was suspended from school for wearing eyeliner to rival Cleopatra's; by sixteen, she was a platinum blonde.

This chronology is courtesy of writer Lauren Collins, who, in this week's New Yorker, offers up a strangely moving portrait of designer Donatella Versace. Yes, of course, as Collins aptly points out, there are the elements of the perverse surrounding the designer and her famous family — as Collins puts it, "When was the last time you saw a pubescent boy on YouTube impersonating Donna Karan?" — but there is also something charmingly vulnerable about a group of individuals so enmeshed in its own over-the-top fantasy world. (During a earthquake, relates Donatella's ex-husband, the designer called out for her face creams. She also travels with her own furniture so she can bring her home with her everywhere.)
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