From the title by itself, I was expecting a simple change to skin tone, which would have been bad enough. Reading the story and looking at the pic made me realize that things are much, much worse. What the FUCK.
You know what is the worst thing about this for me.
According to his post, he did not produce the show and did not know that Wu was not compensated for her time until he saw her TikTok.
Not only did they cheat her out of being the model, and replacing her with a terrible AI photo. They also didnt pay her for doing the actual show, until this blew up and the designer saw the tiktok.
He also initially threatened legal action against her, for unclear reasons. Like, he's shared some racist Photoshop, gets called out for it, and his first response is to... Threaten to sue the model who simply made public comments about it?
Guy is a real piece of shit. He can walk back on stuff all he wants, but the first thing he did speaks volumes about what kinda person he is.
This isn't saying she got paid after the TikTok -- it's saying the guy didn't know she wasn't paid, until he saw the TikTok. AFAIK she hasn't been paid at all.
According to his post, he did not produce the show and did not know that Wu was not compensated for her time until he saw her TikTok. “After finding out through her videos that she wasn’t paid, I offered Shereen compensation for her time and talents,” Costello wrote.
It sounds like he at least offered to pay her, despite not being the one that was running the show and paying her.
To be fair, Wu also states in the article that she wasn’t expecting to be paid in anything but “exposure.” But that i think is what makes this particularly egregious - she wasn’t even getting paid in that fake currency for the naive. Although the article says that many of the models are under a similar arrangement for the fashion week this occurred during, so maybe exposure still counts for something in the fashion and modeling industries.
Supermodels are why I don't really buy the whole "the media decides what's attractive", because it's been trying to say that that's the peak of attractiveness all my life but I've never bought it.
You aren't wrong. High end women models and women porn stars look vastly different. One looks like a 19 year skinny boys the other look like women.
I think when people say that they mean that girls with confidence issues see these runway models and think that is what it means to be attractive, not that suddenly men will be attracted to that.