Barbie Rekha: Is there such a thing as optimal airbrushing?

"I was born with an instinct for the perseverance of beauty," Rekha said in an interview to Vogue Arabia.

In the interview accompanying her new Vogue Arabia cover shoot, iconic Bollywood actress Rekha says that from her mother Pushpavalli, she inherited a “sense of adoration for the aesthete”. The interview doesn’t particularly dwell on this aspect of her stardom, the need to look a certain age and present oneself with a certain mystery-soaked aura of fussed-over, touched-up, high-glamour femininity, but she does say, “I was born with an instinct for the perseverance of beauty.” It reminds me of a dialogue in the HBO mini-series The White Lotus, when the character played by Jennifer Coolidge, an heiress on vacation in Sicily with her Gen-Z personal assistant, tells her gay vacation buddy, in a moment of mulled-over self-assessment, looking far into the blue-green ocean, “I live for beauty.”

AI-morphed Barbie Rekha

Rekha explains Rekha best. Nothing else can better explain the life-force behind Rekha’s inveterate poseur and the allure in it, except that she has the natural gift and instinct to persevere for "beauty.” If you know Rekha’s journey—from actress to star-actress, from being called “chubby” in her early Bollywood films to being aspirational as a svelte, symmetrical diva acing some sassy roles—you know that she transformed several times over, and finally with yoga and frugal eating, she perfected the body and posture she wanted. Her transformation was as much physical as it was deep-seated—from a traumatized childhood, several unsuccessful relationships and braving labels like “chubby” and later, “witch” and “home-breaker”, the reclusive diva persona became her signature. She became Madam X. Most fashion photographers who have shot with her say she is obsessive down to the minutest detail of airbrushing. Among male stars, Dev Anand was known to be as vainglorious about his swag.

After the Vogue Arabia cover acquired enough viral force, Myntra put out an AI-mediated image of Rekha as Barbie—Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming film Barbie has created enough buzz. AI-morphed Barbie Rekha looks like she could be straight out of a 1980s’ Bollywood film opposite 19-year-old Rishi Kapoor as Ken.

The extreme photoshopping in these new portraits only reveal that she can still channel the mystique she and those who have worked with her and around her have carefully crafted and nurtured for so many years now. And nothing of the fact that the actress is going to turn 70 next year, and certainly nothing of her evolution as a woman, actress or star.

This is the age of body-positivity—ironically, Rekha was once a champion of eating right and perhaps yoga’s sexiest Indian ambassador as early as the 1970s—and posing as we are. Actresses and stars are getting lead roles at 60-plus even in India; Hollywood is paving the way for women posing with grey hair, neck sags and crowfeet, and leading conversations around racism and sexism. British actress Helen Mirren, now 77, said, “Ageing is a requirement of life: You either grow old or die young.” Rekha represents a contrarian sentiment: You either grow old with filters or don’t engage with the world at all. It corresponds to another era when stardom was about channelling a persona and maintaining that persona, come hell or high water. Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Rekha.

Rekha on the Vogue Arabia cover

As the high priestess of Oriental glamour, the Vogue images will likely mesmerize people of all generations. Despite all the wokeness around us—a lot of which, in my view, is humanity’s course-correction—technology has given us some magical filters, and most of the world is under some filter or the other on their social media feeds.

But it’s certainly not the zeitgeist. In countries around the world, legislators and regulators are even beginning to take action against “unnatural”; laws are being passed, like the Photoshop Law in Israel, which requires models to be 18.5 BMI and for advertisers to label re-touched images. In France, a law that went into effect in October 2017 requires a “photographie retouchée” label on photos that have been digitally altered to make a model's silhouette narrower or wider; it also requires an-every-other-year health exam for models, to medically certify they are healthy enough to work. In response, Getty Images banned, in their own words, “any creative content depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger.”

Rekha is an outlier in this sense. The unmissable irony here is that in the age of AI, being an imagined, aspirational version of oneself with the help of an easy-to-use filter for the sake of vanity, is also politically incorrect. In this age, messaging has become far more important than momentary, fake feel-good. Rekha’s message is: A photo is forever, might as well look the best I can and make the world stare, instead of showing the world who I have become.