Web series pokes fun at Victoria's Secret Angels to make a serious point
Women don't come in one size only, so why does the Victoria's Secret show still cling to an outdated, impossible 'ideal'? asks Bella Younger, co-creator of the mockumentary series 'Stella Gets Her Wings'
Image: Gallo/Getty
For all of its faults, 2017 has at least been a good year for body positivity. Plus-size models continue to make waves in mainstream fashion. Body-positive bloggers are inspiring young people to love their figures as they are. Even Nike has accepted that women of all shapes deserve fashion-forward sportswear, because they want to look great while they work out, too.
That's why the arrival of the Victoria's Secret show this week - and the models it has chosen, like Bella Hadid and Karlie Kloss - seems out of sync.
This is the most famous lingerie fashion extravaganza in the world, which this year is taking place in Shanghai. It is watched by 800 million people worldwide and features a small number of women, known as "angels", who take to the catwalk as sexy, lingerie-clad - often culturally inappropriate, like the time they dressed in Native American costume - clichés. These women are selected by a man, of course - casting director John Pfeiffer.
The concept seems as outdated as Miss World and the spectacle couldn't scream "male gaze" more loudly if it tried. But even beauty pageants encourage women to speak.
It is impossible to talk about Victoria's Secret without turning to shape. I have no desire to skinny shame these women - and they are women, in spite of their CEO's insistence on calling them "girls". Women come in all shapes and sizes, big and small, and my quarrel isn't with the body type, it's with the uniformity of that body type.
You see, this year - perhaps naively - I thought the lingerie brand might finally put different body shapes on its catwalk. With so many plus-sized models killing it and fashion weeks increasingly using a more diverse range of models, they cannot argue they haven't been spoilt for choice.
But angels' bodies are marketed as aspirational - with videos offering to help you train and eat like them. There is no mention of liquid-only diets or plain old-fashioned genetics. Victoria's Secret veteran Adriana Lima apparently forgoes liquids in the 12 hours leading up to the show in a bid to shift kilos.
As a woman old enough to have hung up my wings for at least five years, I can see that to eat and train like an angel would be futile. But for young girls, the message they take home is that these women are perfect - and if they don't look like them, they aren't good enough.
I might know that the reason there are only 50 Victoria's Secret models in the world is because only 50 women in the world can look like that - but it can be easy to think otherwise when such a narrow body type is heralded as the ideal on a global platform.
This doesn't seem to be of huge concern for the brand, which released an ad campaign in 2014 called "the perfect body", featuring only models of the aforementioned body type.
After mass outrage and a petition that was signed more than 33,000 times, it changed the message to "a body for everybody". But with the brand's bras only going up to a DD, it would seem there's a body for only every body that looks like theirs.
It was this stubborn refusal to drag itself out of the dark ages that inspired director Emilia Reid, producer Hannah Bilverstone and me to make a parody web series: Stella Gets Her Wings.
The mockumentary series, which launches this week, features Instagram influencer - and my character - Deliciously Stella, an improbably average-looking woman who lands an audition to become an angel and follows her on her quest to get her wings as she learns how to eat, train, and walk. Through various twists of fate she somehow makes it to show day, wearing the infamous Victoria's Secret fantasy bra. But will she get her wings?
WATCH | Episode 1 of Stella Gets Her Wings
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How do you satirise Victoria's Secret? How can you make a fashion show that features a bra made of diamonds any more ridiculous? You recreate that bra out of iced gems and you put your "model" on a raw food diet - well, roar food, where she shouts at sandwiches. We hope to make a serious point in a silly way.
Because no matter how much you might try to train, eat, walk and look like an angel, you probably won't get to be one. And that's fine - there are other ways for a woman to get her wings, after all. - The Telegraph