SHIFT MAGAZINE Issue 2//Vol. 2

NOVEMBER 2015

VOLUME 2 // ISSUE 2

SHIFT DISTORTED

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SHIFT

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MAGAZINE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Shannon King CREATIVE DIRECTOR Aaron Pelo

FEATURES EDITOR Lauren Guldan

FASHION EDITORS Sola Muno Zach Whitford

DESIGN EDITORS Lexie Johnson Morgan Lovay

PHOTO EDITORS Melissa Freeland Rachel Beglin Courtney Evans

DIGITAL CONTENT DIRECTOR Alex Holmes DIGITAL FEATURES Lauren Guldan

DIGITAL FASHION Mackenzie Kimball

DIGITAL DESIGN Haley Fox

DIGITAL PHOTO Brady Mathieson

VIDEO EDITOR Christina Oh

PUBLISHER Samantha Zwick EXECUTIVE MARKETING DIRECTOR Olivia Cottrell

EXECUTIVE ACCOUNTS DIRECTOR Kirsten Ho

ADVERTISING Kassie Wallace

DISTRIBUTION Amber Lam Jessi Chudler

FINANCE Colleen Natzke

OUTREACH Maddy Moog

EVENTS Karen Bates

SOCIAL MEDIA Sylvia Sankaran

Our mission is to inform, inspire and engage deeply with the University of Michigan campus community at the intersection of student and professional life within the fashion industry. SHIFT is intended to provide a marketable media platform for students to push the boundaries of what has traditionally been possible within print without compromising the level of quality associated with the SHEI brand.

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L E T T E R F R O M T H E E D I TO R

OUR DARK TWISTED FANTASY “Distortion” is rarely a happy word. It reads negative even when used in a technical sense – distorted photos are unusable, vocal distortion is a crutch for less-talented singers, distorted mirrors need to be corrected.

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utside of its technical uses, the idea seeps into themes of personal and social identity, twisting them out of shape.

What forces distort our view of the world around us? What forces distort our self-image? In this issue, you’ll find theories as broad as socioeconomic forces and as literal as Instagram filters. The latter are distorters of identity, upping the brightness and saturation of your life, impressing old friends, and accruing new followers. Whether it’s harmful misrepresentation or an avenue for fun and self-expression is for you to explore.

You’ll also find pages that distort color for fun, stretching out space and time in the name of imagination.

Twisted threads run through this issue of SHIFT, playing with perception and representation. We hope they inspire you to question how and why we use distorted lenses to both represent ourselves and understand others.

Enjoy reading and...

What do you think of this issue? Send your letters to the editor to eic@sheimagazine.com

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CONTRIBUTORS

SHIFT MAGAZINE

SHEI MAGAZINE’S DIGITAL MINI LITERATURE

rachel beglin

jessica wang

natalie sochacki

natalie sherer

alex rakestraw

lauren diamond

haley fox

merin mcdivitt

allison shaune

frances gembis

PHOTOGRAPHERS rachel beglin tina yu

courtney evans brian beckwith sarah wang

shannon maiers

olivia meszaros

becca rudmam sophie kofoid

rebecca deitch

katherine raymond

lorri rasmussen

kristen eisenhauer

DESIGN tara lewis

peri gruenwedel

rachel safenowitz

emma tigerman

FASHION hannah wasserman lahin lalani sybil macdonald julia baer

debbie cheng

dan iammateo

simone pierce

isabelle genshaft

krysten gilmartin

christi suzuki

aishu chandrakanthan amily yang

sabrina zayec

lily stackable

louise bernard

gillian yerington maggie mcmillin

kaitlyn moore

tabaussum mohibi

torrin rittenberg

moona lee tasha lin

adithi deddi

MODELS ali bologna

nathan wilson

helen januszewski

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shelby behrman

frank downing

isabelle genshaft

tabaussum mohibi

akhil munagala

louise bernard

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

IN THIS ISSUE ABOUT THE COVER:

Fashion + Distortion // Talk about a shift in perception. For this shoot, one model takes on 3 different personas. Partially masked by magazine clippings of ‘ideal’ faces, it’s often hard to tell that the same woman appears in each photo. In claiming literal pieces of airbrushed glamour, she paints a picture that’s disturbing, intriguing, and yet beautiful.

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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CONTRIBUTORS

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RADAR: JOEY PECORERO

Meet the self-taught EDM artist whose beats have been getting him noticed since highschool.

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#FREE THE NIPPLE

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PROPORTION DISTORTION AS COGNINTION INTERRUPTION

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A TALE OF TWO SELVES

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SUPERIMPOSED // REALITY

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WARPED PERCEPTION

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TWISTED ME

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BACK FROM THE FUTURE

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MODERN ART: THE SELFIE AS A DESCENDANT OF RENAISSANCE PORTRAITURE

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LYING LAVISH

What happens when we split our personas across various platforms?

Work hard, play hard.

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RADAR

JOEY PECORERO

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espite having eleven thousand followers on SoundCloud, with songs reaching over 225 thousand plays, Joey Pecorero does not have the classical training one might expect. While in high school he dabbled in several forms of music—including a brief stint playing guitar in a screamo band— before discovering jazz music. His inherent aptitude for making music prompted him to start messing around on a keyboard as well as with his brother’s music production software, Abelton Live. With those first small steps, he began producing jazz music himself.

“I started writing a bunch of jazz music. I literally cannot read music, but I would just take it one step at a time. Like cookiecutter style, just hit a note and if I liked how it sounded I’d hit another one.”

Around senior year of high school, Pecorero became consumed with making music. He began forgoing his academic responsibilities to compose and produce his own unique sound.

“You could say it was wasting time because I bombed all of my exams and I didn’t do my homework,” Pecorero said. “But I had formulated this really farfetched dream that I would play shows and tour and have people know me who didn’t know me.”

Pecorero’s ambitions were realized when he started to receive positive feedback from friends and family. So much so that friends prompted him to post his music on a burgeoning music sharing platform called SoundCloud. Soon enough, his sound gained the recognition of fans worldwide, including an associate agent from the Windish Agency. The agent flew from Chicago to Birmingham, Michigan to meet with Joey at a local Starbucks and convince him he should start playing live shows.

At this point, Joey’s dream of becoming a professional, touring artist was starting to become incompatible with his parents’ wish for him to get a degree.

“So [this agent] comes over to my house and sits down with my parents and says ‘I think your son has a shot, he could do this.

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Right now I’ll put him on some shows.’ He basically convinced my parents to [let me] take at least a year off,” Pecorero said. At the age of seventeen, he began playing shows at nightclubs and bars across Detroit, typically three nights a week from 2am to 4am, where he was making and playing “the deepest, techiest, untz untz untz kind of Detroit house music.” Ironically, he would play his set and then be kicked out of the bar because he was too young to be inside. Then in the morning, he would wake up and go to high school.

After he graduated, he began playing shows full time, eventually opening for well-known artists ranging from Purity Ring to James Blake and Gang Starr, one of the members of the Wu-Tang Clan. He even had the opportunity to headline his own sold-out show in Chicago.

He was simultaneously getting attention on SoundCloud from famous artists and major inspirations of his, such as Disclosure and Odesza. “It makes it a little more stressful because I’m under the lens of these idols of mine. Really, really good musicians who are listening to what I make. But at the same time it’s really cool because I’m getting validation for what I’m doing. It’s really

important to be validated when you make music,” Pecorero said.

Though he was gaining recognition from the music industry, his work was still available on Creative Commons, which made it so his music could be legally downloaded and distributed for free. “I think that all music should be in an equilibrium pool, free for everyone to take. All of my music is on Creative Commons, so whoever wants to remix it or listen to it can. I have my music available for download on iTunes. If you want to buy it just to support me, you can, but if you can’t afford it, you can just download it. I give people the choice.”

The choice to have his music available on Creative Commons proved to be advantageous to his career when an assistant producer at Buzzfeed contacted him in 2013 asking to use one of his songs in a Buzzfeed video. A few months later, Joey unintentionally came across a funny video about how to “drink incognito in public places,” that used his song as the background music. Thrilled by the sheer number of views the video had, he wanted to capitalize on the fact that Buzzfeed wasn’t using any original scores for their videos and began composing music to send to Buzzfeed. After Buzzfeed changed their copyright

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guidelines, Joey became their sole independent music licenser.

This unique experience has shed light on his true career ambitions and helped him hone in on his dream of directing and scoring films. In order to deepen his knowledge of the film industry, he declared a Screen Arts and Culture major upon starting at the University of Michigan last spring.

To Joey, music has perpetually served as an emotional release. “I feel like I have a really bad time portraying emotion personally. You could talk to me for hours and not get anything, not even break the surface. But you can listen to one of my songs and know more about me from what I put into that song than a whole night of conversation,” Pecorero said.

In that vein, Joey believes the most cinematic and evocative aspect of any film is the music, so when he is writing a film, he begins with the score. He will sit down and produce an entire score with no particular film in mind. His primary intention is to create powerful, poignant moments in which the music itself can

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elicit vicarious joy, sadness, or fear.

So far, he has brought his cinematic ambition to life through two feature films—the first a creepy horror film called The Sad Witch, and the second a dark comedy entitled The Bite. Along with preliminary work with a production company that writes original scores for major national ad campaigns, for companies such as Samsung, Coca Cola, and Nivea. As of now, he is waiting to hear back about whether his score for the latest Samsung Galaxy Edge commercial will be picked up.

Joey’s infallible dedication to his craft is what makes him a true artist. It is clear he will stop at nothing to realize his dream of scoring films and creating gripping, unforgettable moments in time that last far beyond the duration of a film.

WRITTEN BY NATALIE SHERER AND LAUREN DIAMOND PHOTOS BY COURTNEY EVANS

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# free the nipple E

veryone’s familiar with the first wave of feminism in America; images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and black and white suffrage protests come to mind. And everyone’s familiar with second wave feminism – women getting access to birth control, the free love movement of the 1960s allowing women to liberate their sexuality and rejoin the workforce.

And then there’s the present day, a time when we are fully enveloped in what historians have dubbed the third wave of feminism. It is marked by slogans such as “Equal Pay for Equal Work,” “Cats Against Catcalls,” and yes, “Free The Nipple.” Unsurprisingly, looking back on social movements makes it easier to distinguish right from wrong, whereas living in the midst of one leaves both opinions and facts murky and unclear. Thus, it is not at all surprising that the recent “Free The Nipple” movement has garnered controversy, headlines, support, and disdain.

Free The Nipple is a decentralized campaign that has attached itself to an inequality between men and women; namely, that men’s nipples have been desexualized and are permitted in public, on social media outlets, in the news, on college campuses, even in some stores and restaurants. A man, purely because of his male anatomy, can go for a run, realize it’s a little hotter than he anticipated, and rip off his T-shirt without worrying about getting arrested.

Women can’t.

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The movement has gained particular traction thanks to Instagram’s Community Guidelines that say users should “post photos and videos that are appropriate for a diverse audience.” Instagram further elaborates, “We know that there are times when people might want to share nude images that are artistic or creative in nature, but for a variety of reasons, we don’t allow nudity...it also includes some photos of female nipples.” More than one celebrity, including Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Christine Teigen, Scout Willis, who flaunted and documented her topless breasts in New York City for all of Twitter to see, and Rihanna, who actually had her Instagram account suspended after posting a picture of her breasts exposed on the French magazine Lui. Kendall Jenner and Cara Delevingne have both joined the movement, as did Miley Cyrus, who interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! with nothing covering her nipples except for sparkly heart-shaped pasties, talking about how Americans are fine with “tits,” it’s the nipples they don’t like.

It is fairly foreseeable that a radical campaign like Free The Nipple has experienced some flack as well. Changing such a long-standing norm for Western culture would not be expected to go through without a hitch. This movement raises questions about child pornography, subjecting citizens to unwanted images, endangering the safety of women, unwanted attention, and even distraction that could make people less productive and uncomfortable.

Thus, a mediated form of Free The Nipple has arisen that has less to do with toplessness and more to do with women freeing themselves from the sometimes painful, stifling boob-holder-uppers commonly referred to as bras. It’s less about revealing their breasts and more about freeing them from the wired constraints of discomfort that date back to the days of corsets (yes, women did used to pass out from difficulty breathing when their corsets were too tight.)

Peering deeper into the history of this issue and looking internationally, there are examples of cultures, particularly in Africa, where the female breast is often exposed, such as in Ethiopia, Swaziland, and Namibia. There, the breast is not what Fergie might have identified as her “lovely lady lumps,” but rather an innocent utility freely exposed and not representing any kind of sexual organ. Native Americans often had exposed breasts as well. Europe has always been notorious in the United States for being more lax about nudity, with its nude beaches, nude art, and nude cinematic scenes. Think Liberty Leading the People by French artist Eugene Delacroix.

The issue can also be dissected through our microscopes if we look at the anatomy of the nipple itself – is a man’s nipple somehow different than the female’s? The answer

is no. Up until week seven of embryonic development, the fetus follows what Medical Daily calls a “female blueprint.”

That is, up until week seven of pregnancy, all babies are girls. All human embryos develop nipples and parallel mammary ridges called milk lines. Pictures have surfaced of men and women labeling their nipples with marker, pointing out the similarities – the breast tissue, the nipple, the areola – making a point about how men and women, anatomically and biologically, aren’t that different after all.

Legally, however, we still see a distinction. While indecent exposure laws vary state to state, a look at Michigan’s laws makes it clear that sexual distinctions still exist. In the state of Michigan, a person qualifies as disorderly if he or she is engaged in indecent or obscene conduct in a public place; however, Michigan law allows its cities and towns “to regulate or prohibit public nudity within village boundaries,” meaning that it is up to the townships to regulate public nudity, which is defined as “any individual’s genitals or anus with less that a fully opaque covering, or a female’s breast with less than a fully opaque covering of the nipple and areola.” In essence, there’s no end-all-be-all norm, but social constructs and attitudes make it nearly impossible for a woman to step out in public with her nipples showing.

While “Free The Nipple” matters to many women for artistic and moral reasons, it also has some important health values. For one, the desexualization of women’s breasts would make it easier for women to breastfeed in public and easier for women to rejoin the workforce and public spaces after a pregnancy. While laws are becoming more lax about women breastfeeding, which is becoming more and more normalized and seen as beautiful rather than repulsive, the Free The Nipple movement is important for supporting these women. Additionally, Free The Nipple takes some pressure off of certain breast cancer campaigns that appear to value the breast over the person. Breast cancer campaigns like “Save the Tatas” and “I Heart Boobies” gain popularity thanks to the liberation of being able to speak of breasts in a socially acceptable way, but makes us forget what’s really important when a woman is facing breast cancer and mastectomies. By desexualizing and devaluing the woman’s breast while simultaneously increasing the respect and value of the woman herself, the Free the Nipple movement could do some pretty amazing things. We’ll just have to wait and watch it unfold.

Men and women, anatomically and biologically, aren’t that different after all.

WRITTEN BY RACHEL BEGLIN PHOTOGRAPH BY RACHEL BEGLIN

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Proportion

Distortion as

Cognition

Interruption:

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All that Glitters is Not Golden

he axiom of cognitive fluency states that human beings prefer things that are easy to things that are not. Making something cognitively fluent – simple, digestible, and familiar – increases the chance that we perceive it to be “good.”

Stocks with easy-to-pronounce names trade higher than their competitors; models with symmetrical facial features rank better than those without. This split-second judgment of character on which we base so much of our decision making is as sympathetic as breathing, as reflexive as a blink, and is completely rooted in humanity’s survival as a species. Professor Norbert Schwarz (USC) said it best: “If it’s familiar, it hasn’t eaten you yet.”

No visual appraisal is more relevant than the hurried glance we give passerby, and nothing ensures a positive appraisal quite like features that are considered cognitively fluent. A quick look and a snap judgment takes visual stimuli, subconsciously processes it through our primitive brain, then spits out any information that could be considered biologically useful. Any slight halt in that process, from an off-step walking gait to the subtlest of facial lines, is a source of concern – a jarring signal to kick in the higher-order brain functions responsible for consideration, with the original goal of keeping you alive.

In many senses, fluid aesthetic experiences are the result of obsessive “halt removal.” Symmetry, in features both bodily and concrete, leaves your subconscious mind – and therefore, your emotions – in the driver’s seat. The goal of many a designer is to create an emotionally immersive experience, and therefore to iron out anything that could pause emotion and introduce logic.

Across all media types, from fashion to sculpture, there is no more fluent a principle to designer and observer than the Golden Ratio: a/b = 1.618.

Many of the world’s most captivating objects (the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, even Japanese woodcuts) abide by the Golden

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Ratio, whether the designer had planned it or not. Simply put, 1.618 looks intuitively good to human beings because it never disengages your emotional brain. Art, architecture, fashion, and even facial beauty standards across cultures and eras all conform to this numerical guide.

“These faces fit right in… In effect, you’ve already learned the facial features, so people like them,” explains Piotr Winkelman, a psychologist at UC San Diego. The same principle, according to Winkleman, extends to nearly every aspect of visual recognition: more symmetry (top left), more ease (top right, and more uninterrupted emotion.

But what if the designer plans otherwise? Rather than encourage fluency, some aim to yank the viewer from their cognitive trance in order to encourage thought rather than prevent it. It is through this disruption of service, this forceful shake-awake, that new ideas are first introduced and progress is created. Tarnishing the Golden Ratio, paradoxically, generates new ideas onto which the Ratio is later applied to optimize the “new familiar.” Without proportional distortion, art could not evolve.

Fashion is no different; from Christian Dior’s New Look to the oversized aesthetic of Haider Ackermann (bottom left), newness has typically involved an element of skewed proportions that create both the unfamiliar and the fascinating. When designed well, this manipulation of features is interpreted as curious rather than threatening; the repulsive “Uncanny Valley” effect is alleviated by the novelty of the skew and the flawless execution of its surrounding. Proportional distortion is, in effect, just another brush ready-made for an artist seeking to transcend and progress.

Take, for example, Rei Kawakubo’s maniacal focus on the avant-garde, expressed through the main collection of her label

Comme des Garcons (bottom right). The anti-fit outerwear unexpectedly tapers into the model’s waist while extending well past even “oversized” length in some dimensions.

This specific piece from Comme des Garcons’ Readyto-Wear FW14 creates a top-heavy, exceedingly tall visual far from 1.618 times its width – in other words, it is not familiar. It is discordant. Yet it still features several uninterrupted lines, is made of top-notch material, and demonstrates exceptional attention to detail regarding how the piece is worn on the body. Behind the madness lies tremendous expertise; all it took was a challenge to the stupor of the typical to realize it.

Your jerk from emotion into logic challenges, rather than threatens. Perhaps that atypical perspective may not suit you just yet. But a few years later, as other designers synthesize that original discordant inspiration and release their own, slightly more familiar takes on the source material, the end results will shift. Distortion serves an explicit purpose—it is managed malformation, a catalyst for change, and someday, it may be the new familiar.

WRITTEN BY ALEX RAKESTRAW PHOTO SOURCE: VOGUE.COM

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ur lives revolve heavily around our cell phones.

Undeniably, it starts before we even wake up in the morning, when our hands almost instinctively reach for them, eagerly taking in whatever was missed in five to eight hours of sleep. Frightening numbers are being assigned to cell phone use as of late—the average person checks their phone 150 times per day and spends 90 minutes or more on their phone per day. This totals out to around 23 full days in a year.

Just look around. Among the couples sitting down to dinner at a fancy restaurant, people bow their heads towards their laps, faces illuminated; during classes at school, students attempt to hide their averted eyes, their tapping fingers. During a baseball game, a concert, even while driving, people are on their phones checking Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the weather, what’s happening across campus, what’s happening across the country—the list is endless. People are using their phones everywhere, all the time, and for everything. But more than anything, what keeps our hands clutched around our phones, our eyes glued to the screens, is each other.

Perhaps it all started with the venerable AIM and MySpace. Kids rushed home from school, running straight from the bus to their household computers to eagerly sign

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in to their profiles. For the first time, kids found the power to create a certain reality through their profiles. No matter how you looked or felt at school that day, you could always come home and reassuringly upload those pictures that you and your friends took at your mall photo shoot; you could always change your profile song to “Lollipop” by Lil’ Wayne to show how cool your taste in music was; you could take the time to write a perfect, witty message to your crush. For the first time ever, there was the ability to craft a life in a way separate from how everyone behaved at school, in a way everyone wanted to both see themselves and be seen.

Soon enough, use of these more original social networks declined, giving way to new social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Home computers became laptops and smartphones, and slowly these profiles, pictures, and words became integral to how people all over the world presented themselves to one other; it became an outward show of identity. No matter how you put it, the people that are presented online with every upload, tweet, or snap do not correspond to their nearest realities. Those online personas consist of carefully curated representations. A word like curated, once used primarily for describing art exhibits and museums, has now shifted to describe how online identities come to be created.

So what are people selecting to show through their various social medias? Do people regularly display photos of a Netflix binge-watching session? Is it common to see updates and photos from when you last cleaned the bathroom or emptied the dishwasher? The best part about curating our social identities online is that we get to show the best parts of our day. And when creating our online identity, every post matters. A snap of a homemade dinner shows we can cook! A group picture at our favorite bar shows we know how to have fun! An article shared from the New York Times about a hot-button political issue makes us seem smart and informed! Posting an underground/indie/ post-punk song demonstrates our elevated taste in music!

Every post is a piece we use to create our story, to combine into our ideal picture of “me.”

But with this selected sharing, this created self, people tend to stop interacting with the most realistic versions of themselves. The person who spent the last Friday night reading their book, the person who misses their mom, and the person who wears nothing but underwear around the house after 5:00 PM, are all somehow lost, which begs the question, is this really us?

And what about everyone else? While we are busy selecting and adding and typing, we forget to recognize that

each person we view online is doing the same thing; nearly every other person we meet is just as curated as we are. It’s hard to remember this when we are sitting alone in the library watching videos of people out at bars or having fun with their friends or partners. It’s hard to remember this too when you see pictures from a friend’s summer trip to Europe during the same summer you spent working at home. It’s (especially) hard to remember this when people post about their accomplishments—internships earned, job offers accepted—and you in turn feel diminished by your lack.

This is the common cautionary tale for the dynamics of the changing world we now face. In a time when we are connecting more and more with people online, when we are spending 23 days (or more) of our year on our phones, navigating the line between these two identities—online and real—becomes difficult. We forget about the reality that exists around the screen; we forget about the people that exist behind the profiles. As we continue to spend more time creating and comparing our online selves, we could find that in the end, we will start to feel more alone in our own reality.

BY NATALIE SOCHACKI ILLUSTRATED BY TARA LEWIS

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superimposed

Shoot Directors: Debbie Cheng, Hannah Wasserman Stylists: Aishu Chandrakanthan, Gillian Yerington, Lahin Lalani, Dan Iammateo Photographers: Shannon Maiers, Becca Rudmam, Katherine Raymond Writer: Allison Shaune Model: Ali Bologna, Nathan Wilson

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reality

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Distorting reality is a difficult task; transforming average to extraordinary and basic to unique.

We as humans crave to discover new ways to stand out or blend in. Either way, we use distortion to express ourselves in ways we can’t always vocalize. Distorting our appearance can portray those emotions that we feel but can’t necessarily put into words.

Who says we need to be confined to the limits of reality? There’s a certain thrill in discovering new ways to both stand out and blend in.

Often these methods are visual. Distorting our appearance can express emotions not easily put into words. Sometimes, not saying anything at all says the most. Fashion allows us to silently break down predetermined standards in protest of a singular ideal beauty. It says we don’t need to be confined to the limits of perceived reality. In our world, distortion becomes a tool for expression.

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d p r Wa e n i t o c Per ep

here are five senses: taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch, and whether people realize this or not, these senses are often being deceived on a near daily basis. The things people eat aren’t always completely natural. Artificial preserving chemicals are added to beef jerky to achieve the trademark seasoned and dry chewiness that Americans love, despite its tag claiming “100% natural ingredients.” That new pop soundtrack that sounds like a plain guitar solo recorded in a studio? It’s been put through a program to smooth out the riffs and enhance certain snippets.

One of the human body’s most dominant senses is sight—people obtain a lot of information using their eyes. All across this planet, humans read, observe, examine, peruse, and watch for the majority of their days. Having the ability to see is wonderful, but sight also has its weaknesses; it is the most commonly and easily tricked sense.

From media sensationalism to magazine models altered using professional software, a lot of what readers consume nowadays is not at all the truth. Sometimes the stories being read are exaggerated in order to create a sense of urgency and high stakes. Other times, they are just outright not what they purport to be. They are not raw, taken from their sources and then published. They are distorted.

One of the main distorted elements in the media is photography. Many people think that the gorgeous model on the magazine cover is a pure natural beauty—that her teeth are naturally that white, and that her small waist and large hips were just something she grew into during her adolescent years. The truth, though, is that many companies nowadays adjust their publications as much as is possible without appearing false. Using technology that is available to practically anyone with access to a computer, artists can add a rosy shine to make skin look sun-kissed, enlarge eyes for a dramatic effect, or increase the height of the subject

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in the picture. Why are the thighs of models slimmed with the liquefy tool in Photoshop? How come the chin also has to be shaved down? Quite simply, the all-encompassing question is: Why are women Photoshopped?

Now, people might not be able to control what these giants of industry choose to do, or understand why they do these things, but as viewers they do have the power to educate themselves and prevent these standards of beauty from influencing their outlooks. The effects of people comparing themselves to these digitalized photos are inexhaustible. Ranging from varying degrees of selfesteem issues to the development of severe disorders like anorexia, a plethora of problems can arise.

One of such problems would be the beauty standards subliminally set for women in such a Photoshop-heavy pop culture. Seeing beautiful models everywhere who have wrinkle-free faces and lifted cheeks can reinforce the idea that all women should look like that. From The Huffington Post, a study in the JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery journal found that women who had facial surgery were typically perceived to not only be more attractive, but also more likeable. This is known as ‘facial profiling.’ It’s essentially how people deduce information based on specific facial expressions. Corners of the mouth that are pointed down typically indicate to others that this person is not as likeable or doesn’t possess social skills. Likewise, full cheeks with a smile are signs that someone is likeable, due to their inherent appearance of happiness. Perhaps, when readers glance at the flawless, glamorous models in magazines, they are not only wishing to be as physically beautiful as them, but also to possess the same psychological effects these models have on others.

So while the effects of facial surgery have plenty of psychological effects, such as convincing others that they are more trustworthy or affectionate simply because of their

lifted eyebrows, other body parts have a much different effect. A once obscure surgery, Brazilian butt lifts are now all the rage. Women who have smaller amounts of fat or are simply out of shape can hand over thousands of dollars to be taken into the surgery room. People who don’t know that these aesthetically-pleasing body types were obtained through plastic surgery may think that if they work hard enough – do their squats, eat their vegetables and lean meats – they’ll also build a butt that looks like that, too. But that is unfortunately not the case. It is this manipulation of media that has this profound effect on the minds of readers.

To constantly strive for something that is impossible to obtain without the help of software or surgery.

Constantly seeing this distortion that many believe to be real can cause the millions of consumers of pop-culture to set high standards for themselves, ones that are near impossible to reach. In the end, these people do not fall in love with the bodies of celebrities or models; they become enchanted with the distorted versions, put under a spell that brings about a belief that these images are authentic and natural. Perhaps this misinformation is what allows these

mere images to control women’s minds, causing them to set a high, nearly unattainable standard for themselves.

Indubitably, the impact of distortion is powerful, and the answer to the aforementioned question: “Why are women Photoshopped?” is not a simple one. The thing is that beauty standards world-wide are constantly changing as society adapts and morphs with each generation, In Rosalind Coward’s book, The Body Beautiful, she notes that a common idea of the ideal female body is characterized as having a height between 5’5” and 5’8”, possesses long tanned and athletic legs, and “above all, without a spare inch of flesh.”

There is one lesson that can be taken away from this, and that is that perhaps the most important thing people can do to empower themselves is to understand this prominent distortion, and to keep this manipulation of reality in the media, away from their lives.

WRITTEN BY JESSICA WANG PHOTO SOURCE: MODELS.COM

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Twisted Me

Shoot Director: Simone Pierce Stylists: Amily Yang, Maggie McMillin, Sybil MacDonald Make-up Artists: Tina Yu, Simone Pierce Photographers: Brian Beckwith, Tina Yu Model: Shelby Behrman

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BACK FROM THE

FUTURE

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Shoot Directors: Tasha Lynn, Tabaussum Mohibi Stylists: Christi Suzuki, Louise Bernard, Torrin Rittenberg, Adithi Reddi Make-up Artist: Christi Suzuki Photographers: Sarah Wang, Rebecca Deitch, Kristen Eisenhauer Writer: Merin McDivitt Models: Louise Barnard, Tabassum Mohibi

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They thought they knew what was coming.

Those ‘80s dreamers, they thought they could see the future bright and clear, but their tool of prediction was not a telescope, but instead a broken old kaleidoscope, distorting each image like a paintball fight in Plato’s Cave.

They got it all wrong, we say now, with the harsh, charcoal-tinted glasses of hindsight. We scoff at their garish colors, the grotesque shapes and strange silhouettes that marked the decade’s fashion tribes like war paint. Our present, the real version of their deluded future, spins around us, swirling with fragmented shards of bitter nostalgia and grim predictions of dystopia. But this cleareyed cynicism, this stream of black and gray, navy and brown, it’s better, right? More realistic.

And yet...there is a beautiful logic, a gaudy geometry to that time that speaks to something deep inside of us. We can’t help but be a little envious of those angles, the shapes that bodies formed when urban warriors would swathe themselves in clothes that distorted without digitalizing, pixelated bodies of mesh and color blocks untouched by the Internet age.

Our nostalgia is a little funny, a blend of smug mockery and wistful envy. Next time you put on your makeup, look into the bathroom mirror for a moment, then close your eyes. The fluorescent lighting and smudges on the glass fall away, and just for a second, imagine the ‘80s palette. Imagine the vividness of the colors— tropical oranges and cerulean blues and neon pinks that could be seen for miles away. The sense of freedom that came from knowing that with those colors, you could do whatever you wanted, smear it in big globs, angular streaks, or geometric patterns that boggled the eye. Open up and take a closer look at your Naked palette, the understated sophistication of today’s muted tones and subtle contouring. It is beautiful, no doubt about that. But remember, at the very least, a time when life had a little bit more moxie.

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MODERN ART The Selfie as a Descendant of Renaissance Portraiture

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n the music video for the song #SELFIE, heavy base pulses rhythmically as a female clubber monologues about her night on the town and bemoans her inability to take a good selfie.

Images of her and her friend fixing their hair and makeup in a bathroom mirror are interspersed with bright strobing lights from an outdoor music festival and tilted shots of strangers on the club’s dance floor. As the base drops, video clips and pictures posted on the social media sites Vine and Instagram featuring celebrities and non­ celebrities alike swipe across the screen, at once glorifying and mocking the eponymous selfie. It’s no surprise that the the selfie’s cultural significance helped thrust the song’s creators (electronic dance music duo The Chainsmokers) into the spotlight, even though this song was apparently never intended to reach the radio audience.

Chosen as the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2013, a selfie is defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” While this definition of selfie isn’t inherently negative, the sudden saturation of this type of photo, enabled by the introduction of the front­facing phone camera in 2010, caused a well­documented cultural backlash against the selfie. Selfies have been condemned as degrading, obsessive, narcissistic and even dangerous. On the other hand, some defend the selfie as empowering and self­constructive; however, these people are few and far between.

No matter one’s personal opinion, it is clear that the selfie is a vehicle for self­expression that is substantially more accessible than painting or poetry. Even though the selfie seems to be a modern phenomenon, the practice of documenting the self dates back to the year 1493, when the earliest known formal self portrait was painted by arguably the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer. By examining the culture surrounding the selfie in comparison to the culture that surrounded self portraits during the Renaissance, one could argue that although the technologies used to create images of the self have changed, the selfie has clear historical roots that lend it cultural significance and inherent value.

The discourse surrounding the selfie has been largely one­ sided. There is no shortage of articles decrying the selfie as a “cry for help,” or an “out of control” symptom of the narcissistic “me” generation. Through this lens, the selfie is a modern production of societal vice. What these people do not realize is that the selfie is actually the latest version of the age­old tradition of depicting oneself in a pleasing matter to gain social capital. This tradition can be easily traced to before the Renaissance, when the visual arts were commonly seen as a form of manual labor, whereas literature and music were seen as forms of intelligent expression. During the fifteenth century, a person’s social status was decided by their occupation (Woods­Mardsen, Renaissance Self­Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social

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Status of the Artist), with those who worked in manual labor taking up the lowest class. The artistic community of the time wanted to reclassify art as a respectable, intellectual field, and evidence of their desire for social recognition can be found in the ways they chose to depict themselves. For example, Dürer’s first self portrait, titled Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle, shows the artist dressed in expensive robes of Italian fashion, signifying his international success and reputation. As said earlier, this is the earliest known formal self­portrait, and it currently resides in the Louvre.

In the same way, it has been reported that teenagers are “branding themselves, starting with the selfie and then moving to the hashtag.” (Gordon, CBC News). The very point of taking a selfie is to to share it on a social media site and thus show the world the way in which that person desires to be viewed by their digital social circles. The action of seeking attention and affirmation from one’s peers is not inherently bad, but have been deemed as such by many. Similarly, Renaissance artists often worked for a court or a patron, and had nothing to gain monetarily by painting themselves. Thus, the Renaissance self­ portrait fulfilled the same role of the selfie in it’s day, to be no more than a promotion of the artist and a celebration of the self.

On the other hand, a major discrepancy between the self portrait and the selfie is the characteristics associated with each form self­expression. Selfies are seen as vain and pointless, whereas Dürer’s series of self­portraits are seen as a testament to his genius. Additionally, it is interesting to note that teenage girls are the group most commonly associated with the selfie, and are also the group that is often stereotyped by society as petty, vain, and unimportant. Certainly, more effort goes into making a painting rather than taking a photo, but the fact that vanity has been dissociated from portraiture seems laughable when one takes into account the money and time spent preparing and sitting for those portraits.

The most self­evident example of the dissociation comes from Dürer’s final self portrait, titled Self ­Portrait In a Fur­Collared Robe.

It is commonly considered a masterpiece, and many agree that the artist painted as himself in imitation of previous depictions of Christ. Even though the artist painted himself as Christ, this work is not even remotely considered narcissistic by the art community of today. One reporter comments that “selfie culture doesn’t enhance the self but degrades it” (Guengerich), another remarks that selfies are “a high tech reflection of the... way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness” (Ryan). However, if both selfies and self­ portraits are driven by both “the desire to represent the subject accurately and the desire to transform or idealize the subject” (The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia), where did this massive backlash about selfies come from?

Perhaps the cultural significance put on self portraits and

“Can you guys help me pick a filter? I don’t know if I should go with XX Pro or Valencia. I wanna look tan. What should my caption be? I want it to be clever. How about, ‘Living with my bitches, hashtag LIVE.’ I only got 10 likes in the last 5 minutes, do you think I should take it down? Let me take another selfie.”

– The Chainsmokers, #SELFIE stripped from the selfie is a product of historical value and stereotypes of age and gender. Perhaps, like the Renaissance self­portraits, the selfie is an unconscious effort by teenagers to raise their own social capital–to say, like Dürer, that they are doing something of worth, that they want to be respected, that they want to be given meaning. Perhaps the cultural significance of the selfie is not as petty or vain as it’s often made out to be.

Perhaps one day the selfie will be recognized as a respected medium of self­expression. Perhaps instead of being dismissed as a side effect of digital culture or a sad form of exhibitionism,

the selfie will share another aspect with Renaissance paintings and become a form of visual social commentary, a way to mark the trends of the rapidly changing digital landscape that will hold up over time. Either way, it is clear that the cultural climates surrounding the advent of the self portrait and selfie are similar, and though the means with which these images of the self are created has greatly changed, the both possess cultural value.

WRITTEN BY HALEY FOX

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Lying L 48

Shoot Directors: Isabelle Genshaft, Sabrina Zayec Stylists: Kaitlyn Moore, Moona Lee, Julia Baer, Krysten Gilmartin, Lily Stackable Photographers: Olivia Meszaros, Sophie Kofoid, Lorri Rasmussen Writer: Frances Gembis Models: Isabelle Genshaft Helen Januszewski, Akhil Munagala, Frank Downing

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Distortion affects all shapes and sizes.

From Studio 54’s glitter-blasted, money-raining celebrity parties of the 70s to today’s extravagant galas, the lives of the young, rich and famous have been painted in public view. Throughout modern history, the media has tended toward misrepresentation and over-glamorization.

The alluring image of wealth as glamour, success and extravagance is a façade, constructed with the tools of distortion. Masks deface these models; they become objects of desire and envy, their lives distorted through the camera’s lens.

Society is beginning to come to the realization that this fascination with the rich and famous has been overexposed and overemphasized through media portrayals. The alluring social construction that relates wealth to glamour, success, and extravagance is just a façade; the inclusion of facemask literally defaces the models and as an extension, the party and glamour scene as well. The use of facemasks objectifies the models wearing them. They become objects whose purpose is to vocalize the misinterpretation of the rich, young, and the famous.

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...wait. you’re not following us on instagram yet? awkward.

@shei_magazine

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