This might seem a funny thing to say about a woman who is constantly flailing around in bikinis trying to look as unsexy as possible. Barber has 8.4 million followers on Instagram and has won a Webby award, presented by Naomi Watts, who praised Barber for her empowering self-love. This shtick, which Barber calls “Challenge Accepted,” began in 2015 “as a fun experiment to see what it would look like for an average person to photograph herself doing rich-people things.” Six years later, it has spawned a book and a stand-up show. Her persona is that of an ordinary woman with no internalized shame about failing to satisfy an artificial beauty standard - someone who sees a gorgeous woman in a bikini and boots clutching a wall and simply decides to try it for herself. Barber looks ridiculous - not because she is failing to live up to an image, but because it is so ludicrous to even try. She posts a video of Gwyneth Paltrow waking up “glowy,” thanks to her skin-care routine, then one of herself waking up in yesterday’s makeup. In her take on a video of Britney Spears writhing beside the ocean in a bikini, Barber ends up tossed around by waves. In the version of that Kardashian video Barber posted to Instagram, she feels her way around a hallway in a skintight jumpsuit as someone flicks the lights awkwardly on and off. She does this by guilelessly emulating the images around her, as though she fails to perceive their strangeness, as though they were the most natural thing in the world. For years, the Australian comedian and actress Celeste Barber has focused on something different: Rather than show how these lavishly stylized images distort reality, she shows how crazy it is to think they’re depicting any kind of reality, any realm of normal human behavior, at all. But a photo comparison showing how the subject’s waist was artificially cinched still works from the assumption that these images are trying to get away with subtly misrepresenting the real world.
People have spent a very long time attacking these types of glamorous images for being unrealistic - for altering, enhancing and modifying everything down to the models’ physiology. A woman straddles her open hatchback while wrapped in string. A video features a couple of Kardashian-Jenners palpating a wall illuminated by blinking neon tube lights. In another image, a woman in a green bikini and thigh-high patent-leather boots clutches a wall as if suddenly realizing she’s had one too many. The woman in one video emerges from a Rolls-Royce wearing nothing but underwear and sunglasses, her arm draped across her bare chest.
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