Victoria’s Secret has just released its new advertising campaign, “Bright Young Things,” and it has already received serious backlash from those who think it targets young teen groups.
The models in the ad campaign appear much younger than the target age of Victoria’s Secret’s consumers. The fact that the models are on Spring Break reinforces this contention. The company has its wildly successful PINK collection that is focused on college-age women, but the clothing in the line is more causal, whereas the “Bright Young Things” clothing line features skimpy bikinis.
Miss Representation, an online organization that “believes all people should be equally represented in our media, our voices should be heard and we should all be valued for our talents, capacity as leaders and ability to contribute to the world at large,” strongly objects to the ad campaign. The organization’s focus is on women’s negative or sexualized portrayal in the media and the damage this portrayal is doing to a generation of young women — the exact generation VS targets in its new ads.
Miss Representation’s view is that Justin Bieber’s appearance at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which was viewed by millions of people, sparked the new-found focus on young girls. The chief financial officer of VS commented that teen girls wish to be older, so they are naturally going to want to purchase what college-age girls would buy, thus the motivating factors behind VS’s new ad campaign.
However, such logic is simply a typical pop-culture excuse to target vulnerable girls. It is consumption-focused, not message-focused, and therein lies its real danger: it encourages young girls to be consumers at the expense of self-image and self-respect.
Miss Representation is not offended by the skimpy clothing, per se, but the message it sends to young girls — namely, that their value lies in their being young — sexy and beautiful.
Corporate responsibility is always the resulting conversation to be had. But I want to focus on how parents, teachers and those close to young teens can use this particular ad as a teaching moment.
The first step is communicating. Mentors of teens need to socialize kids to more substantive values, such as education, health and well-being. We love to focus on beauty and sexualization, but we forget intelligence is the real key to success.
Government action is next. Spain, for instance, reacted to a model who passed out during a fashion week event by setting a standard that every model had to be within her proper body mass index (BMI).
The idea was that health should be the focus of models, not unattainable and unrealistic images. Fashion Week 2006 in Madrid saw medics checking all models’ BMI index — 30 percent of female models were reportedly turned away.
Social media is a wonderful technological advance, too. It has proved extremely useful in promoting various human rights issues. A simple solution would be to utilize this technology to force the fashion industry and corporations that prey on young girls to change.
Miss Representation boasts that since the start of its Twitter campaign against VS, the fashion company is slowly removing its ads, claiming the intention never was to target lingerie to the young teenage group.
This action is reassuring, but more needs to be done to counter VS’s destructive ad campaign.