With the new age of modern technology, the internet is an efficient way of receiving daily information at a rapid speed, which in turn makes creating controversy all the more easy. Known for its hyper thin, statuesque models that are usually referred to as “angels,” Victoria’s Secret received excessive backlash for their “Body” bras and panties campaign in 2014. To briefly summarize the incident in which people were offended, an advertisement featuring only thin models was displayed on Victoria’s Secret’s website to promote their new line of undergarments. It was not the image, but rather the words present on the image, that rubbed people the wrong way. In big, bold letters was the phrase “the perfect body,” which was perceived as an insinuation …show more content…
One could argue advertisements with ultra thin models helps motivate those who are at an unhealthy weight, however, the measures these overweight people take to achieve a “perfect bod” are often dangerous and fatal. It is just as unhealthy to be underweight as it is to be overweight, except society tends to brush the health hazards regarding the former under the rug. Additionally, it is possible that companies, such as Victoria’s Secret, are capitalizing on American’s obsession with “the supposed desirability of thinness” by marketing a certain body type that meets a standard of glamorized thinness (Campos). Furthermore, one should not mistaken the outcry from this advertisement as skinny shamming. Due to thinness being perceived as “a kind of privilege” that stems from beauty ideals, overtly representing thinness is not required, as it already occurs frequently.
If Victoria’s Secret were to include other body types, the company could be perceived in a positive light, capitalizing on the recent trend of loving voluptuous figures (Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” and Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” are iconic videos from 2014 that praise plus-size women) as well. Take Dove for example – their campaign promotes models in various forms of size and race. In this case, if Victoria’s Secret were to follow Dove’s campaign, their audience would widen and they could truly make a statement like “the perfect
From Twiggy to Kate Moss, the fashion industry has been attached to idealizing extreme slenderness, encouraging real women to hate their bodies and at extreme, develop anorexia or bulimia. If these models are exemplars of ideal beauty, then the measure for women is that to be beautiful, starvation level is required. It appears that the media and the fashion industry would have the public believe that ultra thinness symbolizes beauty when in reality, the standard represents infertility, and premature death. The public has to realize that Twiggy is different.
Victoria’s Secret was founded by Roy Raymond because he felt deeply embarrassed going into a department store to shop for lingerie for his wife. He felt uncomfortable and felt as if the sales associates thought he looked suspicious purchasing lingerie. Because of this, Raymond opened the first Victoria’s Secret store in 1977 which would forever change the lingerie industry (Fabry). The name “Victoria’s Secret” was created because of the sensation and feel of the victorian era he wanted to afflict onto the store. The word “secret” was used for a sense and feel of privacy men would feel shopping for their spouses (Schlossberg). Raymond soon realized that a majority of the shoppers were, in fact, women and not men and noticed that making sexy mainstream was selling rapidly. Around this time Raymond sold his business for $1 Million to The Limited Brand in 1982 (Fabry). Victoria’s Secret is still part of The Limited Brands Company, which also owns Bath and Body Works, Pink, La Senza, and Henri Bendel. Victoria’s Secret takes up a majority of Limited Brands share compared to the other stores within the company. Limited Brands operates over 1,500 stores in the United States, Canada, and the UK as well as 400 stores in more than 70
Like a blueprint or instruction manual, the objective of a rhetorical analysis is to dissect a written argument, identify its many parts, and explain how all of them come together to achieve a desired effect. Susan Bordo, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, wrote “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, published in 2003 in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her essay examines how the media plays a pervasive role in how women view their bodies to the point where we live in an empire of images and there are no protective borders. In “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, Bordo not only effectively incorporates numerous facts and statistics from her own research and the research of others; she also appeals to emotional realities of anxiety and inadequacy felt by women all over the world in regards to their body image. Ultimately, her intent is to critique the influence of the media on self-confidence and body image, and to remind her audience of the overt as well as subconscious messages they are receiving on a daily basis.
In every magazine and on every page there is another source of depression, another reason to skip a meal or two or a reason to be self-conscious. In present society people are overly focused and determined on the perfect body that both the fashion and advertising industry portray and promote. Through diction, pictures and celebrities presented they are trying to convey a message to their viewers that is “suppose” to be used as a source of motivation and determination. The message they are truly conveying is self-conscious thoughts, depression, and the promotion of eating disorders. It is estimated that millions of people struggle with depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem; concentrated on dissatisfaction with their body image (Ballaro). The advertisement and fashion industry are conveying a message that creates an internal battle for their viewers, though they should be creating a fire in their viewers that provides motivation to be healthier, take better care of themselves and a source of inspiration for style.
From the moment we wake up in the morning media is at our finger tips. As our day goes on we cannot escape all the visual media. One image after another a person’s self-confidence is either boosted or destroyed. Through the use of Photoshop a picture can be altered to get the perfect figure, skin, and hair, but when is the line drawn, when has it gone too far. Hailey Magee takes a stand when it comes to the ethics behind Photoshop in the world of beauty, “In this “Ethical Inquiry” we explore the ethics of digitally altering photos of individuals so as to make the subjects appear “more beautiful” in alignment with cultural standards of beauty”. Shiela Reaves, Jacqueline Bush Hitchon, Sung–Yeon parks, and Gi Woong Yun agree with Hailey Magee in the discussion of photo manipulation in beauty and fashion. “This study is concerned with the moral dilemma that stems from the digital manipulation of magazine ads to render models thinner. Exposure to the “thin ideal” has been linked to such damaging psychological responses as body dissatisfaction, loss of self-esteem, and to eating disorders”. Women and men are constantly affected by exposure to models that achieve the unrealistic beauty outcome of the media. Using the theories of social comparison and cultivation/ media literacy we are able to explain why photo manipulation makes women take on the thin-ideal. In the media driven world photo manipulation has become an accepted practice since it increases sales and fulfils the “thin ideal”, but the emotional and physical damage it has on women is catastrophic.
The marketing mix refers to the set of actions, or tactics, that a company uses to promote its brand of products in the market. Price, Product, Promotion and Place, are known as the 4Ps that make up a typical marketing mix. As marketing evolves, there are additional Ps that can also be included in the marketing mix, however, focusing on the 4 core Ps of the marketing mix, price, place, promotion and Product, taking an in-depth look at the aspects of Victoria’s Secret in general and in terms of the selected product. All the elements of the marketing mix influence each other. They contribute to the business plan for a company and if managed correctly, can give it a great success. In order to successfully master marketing mix, it needs understanding,
Advertisers use women that are abnormally thin, and even airbrush them to make them appear thinner. These advertisers promote a body image that is completely unrealistic and impossible to achieve (Dohnt & Tiggemann, 2006b). It has been instilled in these advertisers’ minds that a thinner model will sell more (Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2003). Media has a direc...
You can see in the media in almost all occasions women being sexualized. From beer to burger commercials women in the media are portrayed as sexual beings. If they are thin and meet society’s standards of beautiful they are considered marketable. Over the...
The most fashionable, sought after magazines in any local store are saturated with beautiful, thin women acting as a sexy ornament on the cover. Commercials on TV feature lean, tall women promoting unlimited things from new clothes to as simple as a toothbrush. The media presents an unrealistic body type for girls to look up to, not images we can relate to in everyday life. When walking around in the city, very few people look like the women in commercials, some thin, but nothing similar to the cat walk model. As often as we see these flawless images float across the TV screen or in magazines, it ...
Fashion models don’t need to be thin, they need to be diverse and healthy at whatever weight that is. Not everyone is supposed to be thin, some women are big boned and curvy, others are naturally slim and small boned, some are tall, others are short, some are light skinned and others are darker. So many diverse looks exist in the world today and the fashion industry need to change their perception of perfect. Body image in our society is out of control. We have young men and women comparing themselves to unrealistic models and images in the media and feeling bad about the way their own bodies look because they somehow don’t measure up. (Dunham, 2011) The struggle for models to be thin has led to models becoming anorexic or bulimic, untimely deaths, and inferiority complexes. Even worse is the fact that they influence a whole generation of young women who look up to these models and think “thin” is how they are supposed to be. They influence what we buy, how we eat and what we wear. Why has this specific group captured our attention so much? Why do we seem to be so fascinated in their lives, to the point where we try to look and act just like them? The media is largely to be blamed for this, many people believe the media has forced the notion that everything supermodels do is ideal. Others believe that the society is to be blamed because we have created a fascination with their lives. There are many opinions, and I agree with both of these specific opinions. We allow ourselves to be captivated by these people's lives, and the media portrayal of their lives seem to also enthrall us. (Customessaymeister, 2013) Despite the severe risks of forcing models to become too thin, designers, fashion editors, fashion brands and agencies still ...
In modern society there is more and more digital editing without the knowledge of consumers. Currently there are various reasons for why women develop negative body image, low-self-esteem and eating disorders. According to Naomi Wolf in her novel “Beauty Myth”, one of the many reasons women obtain concerns with their bodies is due to the universal images of young female bodies presented through advertisements in fashion magazines. Advertisements in magazines are altering and shaping the desires of men and women. Magazines sell viewers images of beautiful, skinny, flawless confident young women. When people are constantly antagonized with the magazine industry’s ideal of “perfect beauty” the viewer’s then, subconsciously believe these images to be true and begin to form biases about what they themselves should look like and what other people must also look like. People who view magazines get mislead by advertisers because they are unaware that all the images displayed are digitally altered through Photoshop and airbrushing. Today’s magazines are formed completely on false ideals of flawless beauty and unattainable body images, to prevent women and men from falling victim to the magazine’s deceitful images we as a society need to become aware and educate ourselves.
So do plus size models pose the opposite argument? That maybe, promoting women to flaunt thicker bodies in desirable clothing encourages obesity? An article written by Damian Sofsian shares current obesity statistics reporting
The advertising involved targets young teenage women and features models that portray desirable items, and the “norm” is for these women to be slender and beautiful (Vonderen & Kinnally, 2012). Research has been done to prove that the media’s pressure on being thin causes women to be depressive and have negative feelings about themselves. Women’s views are skewed and perceived incorrectly of what the typical female body should be (Haas, Pawlow, Pettibone & Segrist, 2012). Body image for women has always been stressed for them to look a certain way and to try to obtain “physical perfection.” But due to the pressure on women to be this certain way, it is common for the mass media to be destructive to the young, impressionable girl.
Firstly, Sarah Murdoch, the representative of Bonds underwear, is of the opinion that fashion industry encourages “unhealthy body images” (Dunkerley, 2008) that is thought to be unrealistic and unhealthy for most women and girls. Besides, the fact that most designers prefer to choose thin models than bigger size ones (Bolger, 2007) shows us an astonishing phenomena that there are series of clothes from size 0 to size 4 seen not only in the fashion shows but also even on the sale markets because they think that there will be “stigma attached” when doing something for “plus-size people” (Stevens, 2010). Naomi Crafti representing Eating Disorders Victoria thinks that teenagers are becoming obsessed with “the very skinny models on the catwalk” in the fashion shows (Stevens, 2010) which gradually leads to “eating disorders, mental health” and “negative body image on young people” (Stevens, 2010). Fashion industry skinny trend seems to poison young women’s attitude towards their appearance.
Victoria’s Secret represents the idea of sex sells as their main type of advertisement. When most people think about Victoria’s Secret they think bra’s but the product line varies it offers bra’s, panties, sleepwear, fragrances, swimsuits, clothing and shoes. Victoria’s Secret is an inspirational brand with sexy supermodels, top of the line photographers and aggressive advertising. Victoria’s Secret made buying lingerie not only an enjoyment but a must.