Yesterday, the creative director of the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show talked to British Vogue about the casting criteria for the show’s models. Don’t drink anything before reading on, unless you’re into spit-takes.
“It’s about being show-ready,” Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou told Vogue. “It’s really like being an Olympian — they have to be in peak condition. It’s not about being thin or anything like that — it’s about being ready to perform and be the best you can be in that moment.”
In other news, college football players aren’t recruited based on their strength, speed and stats. It’s about, like, how much school spirit you have and just being the best player you can be at that moment.
It’s nice that Neophitou-Apostolou is dancing around it, but Americans aren’t idiots. Models’ jobs — at least, Victoria’s Secret models’ — entail not having any fat on their bodies. It’s a difficult job, to be sure. Prior to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, model Adriana Lima eats only steamed or grilled green vegetables and four ounces of lean protein, and she works out two hours per day. In the nine days leading up to the show, she doesn’t eat any solid food — only protein shakes. Twelve hours before the show, she will stop drinking entirely. She claimed it was possible to lose up to eight pounds from abstaining from liquid for 12 hours.
Yeah, sounds exactly like being an Olympian.
“The final decision is made by the whole team, sitting at this long table in a room with really harsh lighting,” Neophitou-Apostolou told Vogue. “They all have to do it — even the contracted girls — and it’s incredibly nerve-wracking for them.”
Sorry, but what’s the parallel between this and being an Olympic athlete? Last time I checked, Olympians eat solid food.
Look, this is America. As Ron Swanson said, “The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can. You are free to do so. To me, that is beautiful.”
On the flip side, if you want to work out two hours a day, dehydrate yourself and abstain from all that’s beautiful in the world — like pizza and burritos — you’re free to do so.
But Neophitou-Apostolou is a liar. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show sells a fantasy of what women’s bodies look like. They, along with many other advertisers, rely on images of bodies that conform to a narrow physical ideal in order to convince the population that the products they sell — their lingerie, their low-calorie vodka and their dumb low-fat yogurt — will help them fit into this narrow ideal.
Meanwhile, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, 81 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of getting fat, and almost half of girls from the fifth to 12th grade reported wanting to lose weight because of magazine pictures.
But hey — it’s not about thinness.
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 9/24/2013 under the headline "Nice try: Victoria’s Secret says it’s not about thinness"
