H&M is using fake models, real heads on web site

CLOTHES RETAILER H&M has been criticised for running doctored photos of models to show off its wares.

The firm seems to be using a stock body shot, which comes in a range of colours, as a plinth for real models' heads. What the models think about this we do not know, but industry watchers are unimpressed.

"Man, isn't looking at the four identical bodies with different heads so uncanny?" asks the web site Jezebel. "Duly noted that H&M made one of the fake bodies black. You can't say that the fictional, Photoshopped, mismatched-head future of catalog modeling isn't racially diverse."

Others commenting on micro blogging web site Twitter added their own concerns to the debate about whether such body trickery was right. "Real women not good enough for H&M!" says a message from @weareequals, while another tweeter, @elizadolally adds, "If they can't make clothes that look good on real women, they shouldn't be making clothes at all."

We had a look on the H&M web site and put ourselves through the horror of searching its swimwear section to find our own examples of where the same body might have been used, and there were quite a few.

You can enjoy seeing a head and skin tone change, while a swimsuit remains in place here and here and here and here. If you do it fast it's almost like a magic trick involving a tablecloth, but not quite.

"We do this to show off the clothes", said H&M's press contact Håcan Andersson to the Swedish web site aftonbladet.se by way of explanation. "It's not a real body, it is completely virtual and made [on] the computer. We take pictures of the clothes on a doll, that those who stand in the shop, and then, the human appearance with a program on your computer."

Well, that all sounds perfectly normal then. We have asked H&M for a response. µ