12 December 2016 | Maygan Eugenie Forbes
Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show: the models advertised as “Sexy Little Things”, the underwear advertised for “The Perfect Body”, and their yearly revenue estimated to gross up to $7.6 billion. Introduced to mainstream media in 1995, the Show is a mass-marketing extraordinaire. From the beautiful models wearing wings and diamonds to the pop star heavyweights who perform, there’s no denying that this blockbuster extravaganza (the “Super Bowl of fashion,” according to CBS) has an astronomical amount of pulling power — so much so that influential publications all over the Internet are lambasting the Show’s “largely unattainable image of perfection.” However, is the question of attainability really the problem here? Or, is it rather a problem that, whether attainable for some or not, the Show directly reflects and reinforces a wider pool of homogenized, and ultimately oppressive, standards of beauty that are elevated so far as to become an “ideal”?