Every year, fans all over the world, as well as the models chosen to be part of the show, count down the days till the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. To this day, I am still one of those fans. I love the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and the entertainment that it provides. I personally think the outfits are cute and would kill to have the angel’s wings.
For the last couple of years, there has been a lot of hostility towards the show because people believe that the show should be more inclusive of other sizes, as well as LGBTQ+ community. I agree that the directors of the show should include models that represent different sizes as well as transgender women, so that girls who aren’t like the current angels can feel like they are represented in important events such as this. However, I do not hold resentment towards the models in the show. I follow the models on Instagram, and I can see that they work out for multiple hours of their days and stick to a very restricted diet. They do not just wake up every day with perfect bodies. Society should not be judging Victoria’s Secret models for being thin. They are very transparent about the fact that they diet and workout a lot. They don’t pretend to be perfect.
A lot of people think the show is a poor example of the standards for women, but nobody ever said that the show was the way women needed to look. Although Ed Razek, Senior Creative at Victoria’s Secret, made very disrespectful comments towards the LGBTQ+ community that I do not respect or agree with, he also made the point in a Vogue interview stating, “The show is a fantasy. It’s a 42-minute entertainment special. That’s what it is.” The show has a long way to go before they can be as iconic as the Fenty lingerie fashion show, but their choice to have Winnie Harlow, a model with vitiligo, is a ray of hope that the show will only continue to be more inclusive from now on.
I myself am not a size 0. If anything, I am far from it, but instead of focusing on how the models might be too thin or how they don’t represent real beauty standards, I look at the bigger picture. Victoria’s Secret models, more often than not, aren’t skeletons walking around. Models like Behati Prinsloo and Adriana Lima have children and constantly post videos of themselves working out to gain back the bodies they had before the pregnancy. I don’t have a personal trainer that can sculpt my body to look like theirs, but I also don’t feel like I need to look like them. If the last couple of years have taught us anything, it’s that all sizes are beautiful, and everyone should try to uplift each other instead of bringing each other down.
Yes, Victoria’s Secret has a lot more issues than other brands, but the show itself and the women in it should not be put down. If anything, people should be aiming their concerns towards those that run the show. The more that the public voices their opinion for what they want, the harder it will be for the people in charge to ignore it.