Lena Dunham Fronts Lingerie Campaign For Real Women

Lena Dunham is featuring in a lingerie campaign for New Zealand brand, Lonely Girl, with her co-star from the popular TV series, Girls, Jemima Kirke. The actresses appear in lacey underwear with strictly no Photoshop retouching.

This campaign is significant because it shows how real women look in lingerie. Their body types are not the usual perfect lean size 8 in a provocative pose aimed at the male gaze. Instead the women are featured hanging out together without posing, being more natural and themselves.

Lena Dunham has been admired for doing what she can to help women to feel comfortable in their own skin. This came through with her character on her series, Girls. Her co-star Jemima Kirke says about her

“It’s not that she’s proud necessarily or showing off. It’s that she’s making an effort to fight the standard so that one day we’ll stop calling nudity and self-love ‘brave’.

The brand Lonely Girl aims to show how women would look wearing the underwear in everyday life and encourage a positive body image

A spokesperson for the brand Lonely Girls said “As an unconventional approach, Lonely aspires to showcase women wearing underwear in a way that we usually don’t see in mainstream advertising and the media. Instead of being objectified, the women who participate in this journal series – in this case, Lena and Jemima – are empowered and exhibit real beauty that will hopefully help women everywhere feel a little more liberated. The brand also never retouches a single image.”

Lena Dunham has always been against photoshopping, and earlier this year she criticised the Spanish magazine Tentaciones for photoshopping her image for their cover. Although they ended up proving that the photographs were real, Dunham remained adamant about only representing images of herself that were authentic.

Dunham wrote “I have a long and complicated history with retouching. I wanna live in this wild world and play the game and get my work seen, and I also want to be honest about who I am and what I stand for.”

Some of the media have reacted against the lingerie campaign saying that the images are suggestive of a lesbian relationship between Dunham and Kirke and that the photographs are Sapphic. There has also been criticism that images of women who are anything but thin should not be celebrated, because it means they are not healthy and obesity is an issue. However, these kind of images that form part of the Lonely Girl campaign are unusual and can go a long way in helping women accept their bodies.

The head designer for Lonely Girls, Helene Morris said “I think as a brand we have always been slightly rebellious and we’re happy to challenge preconditioned norms. We think the fashion industry could be more diverse. To us, it is important to represent women in empowering ways that help give them the confidence to be themselves.”