Victoria Secret's Love Your Body Campaign

In Victoria Secret’s “Love your body campaign,” very skinny, tall models show off their bras and underwear. In this specific ad, it says “A Body for Every Body” (Mullins) while every model is the same size: extremely skinny. This ad is selling bras by telling consumers that they produce a bra for everybody, while the models have only one body type. They are all standing seductively and are smiling. What the ad doesn’t show are models with different body types, making it seem like their body is the only body there should be. After this ad was published, Dove also made an ad similar, but with many different body types. Even though there were different body types, every model was on the heavier set spectrum of weight. Both ads set standards of …show more content…
Images on ads, social media, and magazines show models that are sickeningly skinny with big boobs, big butts, and thin faces plastered with words like “perfect” and “sexy”. Males see these images and then make up what their partner should look like, which most of the time, is not healthy, natural, or possible. They usually want a skinny girl, a big butt, and breasts and have their own definition of skinny and big. Girls then try to live up to these standards by exercising, not eating, and getting plastic surgery. In Kilbourne’s essay she gives an example of how these standards are harming girls. She says, “In our work with young women, we have countless accounts of this contempt being expressed by their male peers: the girls who do not want to walk down a certain hallway in their high school because they are afraid of being publicly rated on a scale of one to ten…” (506). This mentality can lead to many health and mental issues. Anxiety, anorexia, and stress disorders are just some examples. Ads can help fix this by not focusing on bodies, and more on the product themselves. Instead of putting “perfect” models in sexy bras and saying that there’s a perfect bra for everybody, the bra could be shown by itself or even on a plastic display still advertising that it will make you feel sexy without body shaming and setting standards. Most girls believe they have to look like the model in order to feel sexy like the model looks. If the model was plastic or not shown, girls wouldn’t think they have to look a certain way to feel beautiful. This would also help guys not be so judgmental and not have such a high standard on what they want their partner to look like. We have the mentality that we should change our looks based on what society thinks is beautiful, sexy, and perfect. This thought process is triggered by what we see in ads calling their models perfect and sexy, when in