Inaugural TGIF episode!

Today I’m writing about one of my favorite topics. The original TGIF I had planned for today ended up getting just a little too heavy. I’ll keep it on the back burner for a future episode. Maybe.

Today’s TGIF, therefore, is inspired by this tweet:

Click here for an article by Kit Steinkellner about the original ad or here for an article by Samantha Allen about the slogan change, both from my new favorite site hellogiggles.com.

Did any of you know about this? Victoria’s Secret had an ad campaign in the UK featuring 10 airbrushed, so-called “perfect” models called the “Perfect Body”. You can see an image of the original ad in the article I handily linked for you above. the authors of both those articles say all the things I would have liked to have said first, but much better than I would have said them. You get it.

I don’t have much to add here that wasn’t already said in either of those articles, or in the Dear Kate response. Mostly I just wanted to tell you about it.

I mean, we all know that the majority if not all of the Victoria’s Secret models are not representations of your average “real” women. We do know that, right guys? They’re not real, at least not looking like that.

Yet somehow, the people that approve these marketing ads or whatever at Victoria’s Secret didn’t see anything wrong with green-lighting an ad with these models on there and calling it, in whatever sideways fashion, the “perfect body”.

They have since changed the slogan to “A Body for Every Body”. Huh?

I’m pretty sure that several of those styles wouldn’t come anywhere near to successfully holding up or covering up my private bits, even if they did carry something in my size. Which, in case you were wondering, they don’t. Or at least, not in the four or five products I clicked on to make sure I wasn’t talking out my ass.

So already we’ve disproved the “body for every body” slogan.

Image from here

As the author of the article so eloquently points out, this new ad is the same set of models. Just different words. I don’t know if I really expect anything different from Victoria’s Secret, but I feel validated in not having purchased anything from them in a very long while.

What is cool though, is that I found a bunch of sites in my google today that do offer cute lingerie in my size (and beyond), such as Hips And Curves, Dear Kate (the one mentioned in the article, and you have to love their primary ad) and the old standby, Torrid. What I like about those sites is that the plus size lingerie is not actually modeled by less-than-plus-size models.

Not that plus-size is the only non-“perfect” body type out there. It just happens to be my body type. I’m glad to see companies like Dear Kate and others that are deciding to celebrate the variety of shapes and sizes that women come in, instead of throwing this out there at us as the “standard”.

So what I’m saying is…Victoria’s Secret can suck it. Basically.