Ever thought there was something not quite right about H&M models? Or just assumed that over-enthusiastic retouchers had edited out the certain je ne se human from its models along with the normal skin texture and traces of arm hair? Feeling slightly unsettled by the eerie quartet above?

H&M have admitted that models featured on its website are ‘almost completely virtual’, and are created by computer, to be dressed in product like paper dolls. The heads are – we are to be reassured – totally real, and the models know about their decapitation prior to any shoot. So I suppose that’s fine then.

Every day I read another blog post about the problematic phrase ‘real women’ and its implications (you might like this and this for B4J’s two cents on the matter…), but unhappily it turns out that’s exactly the term we need. Are we so devoid of sense that all women’s bodies are now deemed inadequate to show off the very products we’re being asked to wear on our own, sub-par non-virtual bodies? The same products we’re being asked to purchase with our (probably-acceptable-in-spite-of-the-chubby-little-fingers-we’re-handing-it-over-with) hard-earned non-virtual cash? Are we seriously expected to put up with yet more of this rubbish?

Ridiculous.

Source and photo: the ever incredible Jezebel.