If you’re a costume store and have both misses’ and plus-sized tights and leggings to sell, there are two things you could do. You could hire models who fit into each respective product line, and take photos of their legs in each item. Or you could take pictures of a misses’ size model wearing the tights, then stretch out the images to create the illusion of a plus-size model. Party City did one of these.

Those are the pictures that tipster Angela sent us. We explored the catalog and found some examples of our own.

In this photo, they move the legs closer together to eliminate the model’s thigh gap.

The purple tights show us that hiring a plus-size model does not always result in a superior result. Or…wait, what’s with the flat shoes on an adult women’s item? There aren’t any other adult tights like that. Is this the children’s tights photo really, really stretched out?

It certainly looks that way, once you fill the right knee and thigh in a bit by cloning the purple stripes. It’s obvious that the different colors are swapped in later.

We contacted Party City to see whether they had anything to say about their roster of models, but haven’t heard back yet. We don’t find this bad or necessarily misleading, just funny, and it’s one of those things you can’t un-see once you notice it.

Does this method work for other types of clothing? Let’s find out. Here’s a dress that I have my eye on at Macy’s, but the model isn’t even close to my body type.

Here it is made about 1/3 wider:

That’s closer to how it would look on me, so maybe this method works. Normally we hear about post-processing making models thinner, not fatter, so it’s interesting to see the technique employed in the other direction. “I can’t decide whether this is hilarious or offensive or both,” wrote tipster Angela.

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