Victoria's Secret Revealed

Not a paradigm shift, per se, but a torso shift

Victoria, we know your secret—and it's brutal, heavy-handed airbrushing and digital re-imaging.

We're in the midst of a recession (or recovery), yet the hacks working in the Victoria's Secret graphic design department are still willfully employed—despite repeated, embarrassing flubs.

I'd think competition for graphic design positions at Victoria's Secret would be stiff—VS being the holy grail for [male] designers. (Imagine, being paid to stare at bikini and bra-clad supermodels all day.) Still, Vicky has some mighty shoddy designers on staff.

Models frequently are shown in brochures with their arms totally airbrushed off their bodies; their torsos (and legs and other limbs) shifted in atomically impossible ways, and more. There are several sites and news stories dedicated to pointing out these flubs, including this one (Brittan's Daily Mail) and this one (HuffPo). Yet somehow, the incompetent VS designers still have jobs.

May I carry that for you? On second thought,
let me delete your handbag altogether.

HackerFactor has a great page dedicated to breaking down the various manipulations in this photo (left), in which the model is holding what appears to be the remnants of a handbag strap in her right hand, but the rest of the bag is missing. Oops! Body By Victoria, indeed. And By "Victoria," we mean Photoshop.