Victoria’s Secret, a world-famous undergarment store, is well known for its annual fashion show. Seen as a loud, expensive, and thin celebration, time after time the show has received criticism over it’s choices regarding models, specifically the lack of diversity in regards to models size. The conversation has been brought up again with the revival of the fashion show for the first time since 2018. This year, Victoria’s Secret has decided to cast plus-sized and disabled models alongside the classic slender, tall models of years past. The question now is, is it too late?

Close your eyes, picture a Victoria’s Secret model, who do you see? Probably someone like Adriana Lima, or maybe Naomi Campbell. For many years models have been one height and one weight: 5 ’10 and a size 6, and for many years the fashion industry has been criticized for it. However, only in recent years has the industry actually tried to do something to fix the obvious diversity problems in an attempt to gain the positive opinion of a post body positivity movement society. Clearly a performative action, Victoria’s Secret got called out for it. But all this begs the question, did Victoria’s Secret actually affect teenage girls and their image of themselves?

Teenage girls go through a great deal. Hormones and the confusion that comes with it, the sudden objectification coming from men they’ve known their whole life, and the dangers of being arguably one of the most vulnerable demographics. On top of all of this, they struggle with body image. Every girl has criticized her own body at some point in her life. This of course isn’t their fault. It’s the fault of the world around them. Media, men, and other girls all play a part in how a girl sees herself. Every hour of every day, girls see hundreds of things to compare themselves to. Movies, magazines, social media, and other people in real life are more fuel to the fire that is a girl’s self hatred. To most girls growing up, models are the peak of what a girl can be, which is tall, skinny, and desirable. Much can be said about what this does to a young woman’s mind, but to put into a few words, comparing yourself to something unattainable completely destroys the way you look at yourself at the young and impressionable age of eleven. 

To see how this has affected Fairfax students, a few students have anonymously stated how they feel about their body image growing up. One student, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic, stated, “growing up with models like Victoria’s Secret definitely had somewhat of a negative impact with my body image. Personally that was minimized by how I was raised to always appreciate my body, but even so seeing this ‘ideal image’ being pushed by the media it definitely did, and still does have negative impacts. Not only because I’m comparing myself to girls around me, but these models that I see everywhere”. Another student told FairFacts, “I just don’t see the point in having a brand change like this when the damage is already done. All of us (girls) have grown up having to compare and we’ve already torn down ourselves and our image, how is Victoria’s Secret supposed to fix that?”.

Something that isn’t commonly brought up in this argument is the impact a lack of diversity has on heterosexual teenage boys, and how they view the opposite sex. In the modern age, we like to think that because of the body positivity movement, suddenly everyone is going to find larger people as desirable as skinny people. That’s just not the case at the point we are at right now. Teenagers who are attracted to women are coming into their own and are obviously going to be looking at them romantically. Years of society tunneling into our brain that “slim is beautiful, anything else isn’t” won’t end after a couple years of trying to teach something different. As a generation growing up in the middle of this transition, it’s hard for teenagers to grasp something so new. So the years and years of seeing the “perfect body” changes the way potential romantic partners are going to view girls in addition to how they view themselves. 

Victoria’s Secret’s new brand change isn’t going to do anything to change the way girls look at themselves, as hard as they try to fix the damage they’ve done. However, there is hope. The next generations will of course still deal with body image issues, but maybe this change Victoria’s Secret and other companies are making, can help soften the blow.