Cindy deserves better coverage

19 February 2015 - 02:05 By Linda Kelsey
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An unairbrushed photo showing Cindy Crawford's post-baby, post-40 body is causing a sensation on social media. Praising the then 47-year-old supermodel for 'revealing a body that defies expectations - it is real, it is honest, and it is gorgeous' - Marie Claire magazine said the photo originated from a December 2013 cover story in its Mexican and Latin American edition. It described the unretouched version as a leak. Fashionistas rallied around Crawford on Twitter, with many praising her for being 'beautifully real' - Staff reporter
An unairbrushed photo showing Cindy Crawford's post-baby, post-40 body is causing a sensation on social media. Praising the then 47-year-old supermodel for 'revealing a body that defies expectations - it is real, it is honest, and it is gorgeous' - Marie Claire magazine said the photo originated from a December 2013 cover story in its Mexican and Latin American edition. It described the unretouched version as a leak. Fashionistas rallied around Crawford on Twitter, with many praising her for being 'beautifully real' - Staff reporter

"Bravo Cindy Crawford. Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye need to know on earth, and all ye need to know.''

Thus tweeted actress Jamie Lee Curtis in response to a leaked, unretouched photograph of the presumed perennially perfect supermodel who is 48-year-old Cindy Crawford, an image that has gone viral on the internet.

Unlike most Hollywood celebrities, who celebrate their maturity in interviews while submitting to plastic surgery and digital skulduggery to please the camera, Curtis is no hypocrite.

Quoting directly from John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, she is a tinseltown rarity, who, at 56 has embraced grey hair and posed in work-out clothes revealing love handles and not a millimetre of space between the tops of her legs in an age when thigh gap is the holy grail of beauty.

While Crawford has bravely responded to the social media storm by saying she hopes it teaches her 13-year-old daughter about healthy body image, the fact is that this image, shot two years ago, was never supposed to see the light of day.

It was an outtake from a 2013 shoot for Marie Claire Mexico and Latin America, for which Crawford appeared on the cover. The front page showed her from the chest up, while in photos inside her stomach was covered.

My hunch is that Crawford is mortified that this image of her less than toned tummy and not quite made-of-steel inner thighs has leaked out. Supermodels aren't paid for being real, they're rewarded for being as unchanging as Botticelli's Venus. And if they slip up because of the ravages of time, motherhood or a break from the chive diet, there's always a less time-worn model to take their place.

(Crawford's husband of 16 years, Rande Gerber, retaliated by releasing a photo on Instagram showing a honed and toned Cindy reclining poolside.)

A representative of Marie Claire US has declared the un-retouched image "real, honest and gorgeous". But you can bet your bottom dollar her magazine would not have printed it.

My own response to the image is, I confess, oddly unsettling. On the one hand it's a relief to witness that even naturally fabulous-looking women like Crawford succumb to the passing of the years.

A part of me wants to shout to an unforgiving world: ''Yes, women age, get over it.'' But I can't help feeling the photo is unflattering and not one I especially want to linger over.

I find myself thinking she'd look more alluring by far in a slip, rather than raunching it up in a pose that makes her look like a stripper past her best. It's not a politically correct thing for me to say, perhaps, but a straw poll of my women friends reveals that all but one agrees with me rather than with Curtis.

''We only have to look in the mirror to know what we look like as we age,'' said one 54-year-old, ''which is why I avoid changing rooms and buy undies online.''

'I'm buying into a fantasy when I buy a Vogue or an Elle,'' said another, aged 60, ''an escape into a more beautiful world.''

A third commented: ''Lucian Freud may be a brilliant, unflinching painter of the body but I'd rather have a Velazquez nude on my wall any day."

I'd go so far as to say that the leaked photo is cruel rather than liberating and that Charlene White, the newsreader who first shared it on her Twitter feed, is being disingenuous when she says she did so because ''I find it incredibly empowering to see someone as beautiful and iconic as Cindy Crawford in her natural form''. Empowering for her, perhaps, but for Cindy more of an embarrassment, and hardly a demonstration of sisterhood.

I may never have lied about my age, which is 62, but I'm more than happy to have any picture that appears next to my byline gently tampered with.

If older women are finally having their moment - on screen, on the catwalk and in beauty adverts - I think we have to be prepared for the fact that what we see in these images involves a degree of deception.

For Keats, truth and beauty may have been synonymous, but for the modern woman a little white lie is quite acceptable when nature inevitably takes its toll. - ©The Daily Telegraph

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