Who Can Define “The Perfect Body”

Who can define which body is perfect? Definitely it’s not Victoria’s Secret’s call. VS’s recent campaign provoked quite a lot people, and many of them used to be VS’s loyal customers.

This is the picture VS posted for “perfect body campaign”:

Although it also talks about different kinds of beauty, but it’s all aiming at bra types: push, perfect coverage, demi… All those models in the pictures are all the same: skinny, tall, not to mention their beautiful faces.

Actually, this is already not the first time that Victoria’s Secret provoked female consumers. In 2013, there was a campaign called “love my body”:

Models in the picture are also the same type they choose for this year’s campaign. Although they also invites some full-figured models to help promote this campaign, but we all know that the skinny girls are VS’s favorite choice as always. When this campaign is over, all the girls in the ads still fall into the traditional type of beauty, or skinny, so to speak.

When this campaign was first launched last year, criticism followed very naturally. Many people tweets their disappointment in VS’s campaign: “I will definitely love my body…when I’m skinny as those VS angels”, “ why do I have to look the same as those models?”

Maybe Victoria’s Secret could argue that they are only doing this according to the hegemony, maybe they are only doing this out of the expectation the society has for woman. But the fact is, few women can have the “perfect body” VS defines, and they are still rewarded by the society somehow. With the rise of feminism, woman wants to get control of her own body, not to let others judge if her body is perfect or not.

On the other hand, Dove is doing all it can to help build woman’s self-esteem through consistent real beauty campaign. We’ve already saw the video in class that Dove invites a few woman to describe their appearances to a sketch artist who cannot see them before the sketch is finished. They also require strangers to describe their looks to the artist and it turns out the same people can have two totally different sketches based on self-report and other-report.

Dove is always trying to provoke woman’s awareness of their real beauty and boost their self-esteem. They are trying to spread the idea that size doesn’t matter that much. This is really important in developing potential consumers, but also helpful for spreading the ideology of self-confidence and real beauty.