The 2011 Victoria Secret Fashion Show



By Bridgett Rex


The 2011 Victoria Secret fashion show was filled with glitter, glam and dazzling models. Now that the glitter has settled and our hearts have settled down from the excitement let’s review what happened. This year’s overall theme was “Club Pink”, and performers such as Kanye West and Nicki Minaj pumped up the audience and the angels as they graced the runway. The individual themes this year provided something for everyone. For the extra girly girl, the show opened with a sweet look that included bo-peep styled lingerie with ruffles and pastels. Next, for the nerdy gals, the angels wore capes and helium balloon lined lingerie. Following was an underwater themed collection in which the ever so admired Miranda Kerr was as pretty as a pearl with shell-inspired wings and an expensive 2.5 million dollar jewel-encrusted bra. The show was a fantastic spectacle, something so incredible that it cannot be simulated in real life. Pushing aside the diamond crusted bra, delightfully distracting wings, pretty panties and buckets of glitter, we find that Victoria Secret has a dirty secret (not the sexy kind either).

Each year in an interview with the envied angels, someone will be essentially guaranteed to desperately ask the same question “how did you achieve your body and how do you maintain it?” hoping to be let in on some amazing secret. Angels have to go on a strict diet months prior to the show and work out up to two times a day! The show is their life and they treat it as a 24/7 job giving their body to the company. Adriana Lima stated in an interview with E! Canada, that she is on a protein-heavy-liquids-only diet for nine days prior to the main event. The day before Lima won’t drink anything at all. Put in plain words Lima stated, “no liquid at all so you dry out, sometimes you can lose up to eight pounds just from that.” The angel’s dedication to their job is admirable but hardly healthy and is not realistically maintainable for the average girl. Imagine never drinking liquids and working out! If being an angel is the ultimate, priorities and realistic goals need to be reevaluated. It reminds me of end of Black Swan when Nina Sayers weakly whispers that she is “perfect now” at the end of her performance breaths away from death. Exhausting and depriving the body for any reason aside from medical issues is not attractive but I do understand the importance of wanting to be fit.

Almost instantaneously after watching the show, my Facebook newsfeed had girls of all ages commenting on how the show had essentially left them feeling that their body was not fine as it stands.

We can all benefit from healthy eating adjustments but theVictoria’s Secret Fashion show should not make women undermine their own bodies. It should encourage women to love the parts that make them a female. Breasts and butt are what the lingerie is adorning after all. No amount of dieting or even eating healthy will mold any of the viewer bodies into Adriana Lima’s body or Miranda Kerr’s. If each body was stripped down to bare bones with no muscles, skeletons would never match in both height and shape. As cliché as it sounds, everybody is unique and beautiful in their own way. If we don’t truly believe that, we will never be contented with ourselves.

When I step back and think about being visibly overweight, I know it is because of unhealthy eating choices. Gaining weight visibly shows where you have faltered on your own person. That doesn’t make you a bad person. Everyone has their flaws. Some people lie, some people have little patience and some people just aren’t as nice as they should be sometimes. Eating too much is a visible struggle and everyone should be sensitive to other people’s flaws (especially their own) and know that these angels they envy are hardly real angels. They are real people with flaws and struggles. In fact, their extreme bodies may also be seen as a struggle. Not only women, but men also need to understand the importance of healthy bodies and not perpetuate the twisted ideals this show and the American visual culture seems to support.

Becoming an angel requires real women to restrain from solid foods and for the performance ingestion of all liquids. Although the show is artistically something beautiful to behold, to all my friends on Facebook and girls everywhere-

you are beautiful as you are.

Please do not try this at home.

-Bridgett R.R.

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