Pascal Dangin, the premier retoucher of fashion photographs, casually admits he’s “complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body,” particularly those of women, so it pleases me to see he’s a fat French guy who I can imagine jerking off to jpegs of Alyson Hannigan in his rec room. In fact, like Dangin, “I look at life as retouching,” so I’m going to retouch that as fact:
Pascal Dangin is a fat French guy who jerks off to jpegs of Alyson Hannigan in his rec room.
That is intriguing, but left unanswered by the profile of Dangin in this week’s New Yorker is how he realizes his ideas of physical perfection when no such thing exists (although I read somewhere that this process might be intertwined with his masturbatory tendencies), the ridiculousness inherent in everyone knowing fashion photos are heavily retouched but the practice continuing, and why Dangin activated his 25-pixel Obfuscate Brush in Photoshop to recast onetime girl-next-door Drew Barrymore as a melty wax figurine for the March cover of Vogue. (The Jezebel article doesn’t mention it but the New Yorker article confirms the cover is Dangin’s uncredited work.)