#TrainLikeAnAngel: You Better Shape Up
I’ve been obsessed with models since I was a little girl. This is what happens when your mother spent ages 18 through 32 modeling. It’s what happens when you grow up seeing glamorous pictures of her, thinking she is more famous than everyone else dining at the Fields Ertel Olive Garden in Cincinnati, Ohio, when you’re 8 years old and innocently eating endless breadsticks.
My earliest memory of having any kind of interest in models dates back to when I was 3 and spent hours flipping through the Sears catalog (I know, very fashionable, but I was in it for the pictures). Over the years, that Sears was replaced with Vogue, Glamour, W, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. I pored over every advertisement, every editorial and every article. I was as obsessed with the clothing as I was the models’ glamour, elegance and grace. For fun, I would challenge myself to name the designer and the model without looking at the description.
It only made sense that my fascination with models led me to watch the Victoria’s Secret Runway Show religiously every year since I can remember. Tyra stomping down the runway, to me, was the epitome of womanhood and confidence. Heidi glowed with health and happiness. Naomi vibrated strength and power with every stride. Karolina, Gisele, Laetitia…I looked up to all of them as the effortlessly beautiful women they appeared to be (and typically most bodacious of any models I’d seen anywhere else).
It’s this decades-long obsession with models in general that makes me feel like enough of an authority to have an opinion on what we’re seeing currently with the Victoria’s Secret Runway Show.
Next week, millions of viewers will tune in to watch the 2014 version of beauty, health and glamour traipse down the runway in outlandish lingerie costumes. Like every year before, I will also tune in. But I’m scared.
I’m scared to see 2014's idea of healthy and sexy walk down that runway. If Victoria’s Secret’s and the models’ Instagrams are any indication, I’m in for something frightening.
In the months leading up to the show, the models’ processes of preparing for the show were trackable via the hashtag #TrainLikeAnAngel. Victoria’s Secret took control of the message that I believe to be the truth: That already stick-thin women have to diet and train their asses off (literally) to look Victoria’s Secret “good” on television. Instead of having the models reveal their preparation rituals of undereating and overexercising, a brilliant marketing or social media manager created the #TrainLikeAnAngel hashtag to normalize their activity. The models were going to post videos of their endless workouts anyway— better take control and make it seem healthy and normal. It wasn’t working out. It wasn’t killing themselves. It wasn’t overexercising. It was “training.” They were simply training— how could that be unhealthy?
Sure, maybe the hashtag encouraged some fans to get into the action themselves and add a few workouts to their routine as they head into the holidays. But the connection people make between #TrainLikeAnAngel and looking “good” by outrageous standards once they see these impossibly ripped, impossibly thin models walk down a glittering runway? The idea of the connection that will be made terrifies me. “Well these girls trained for months and look so good— good enough to be mostly naked on TV! If I’m just as dedicated, I too can achieve this. I too can bring all the boys to the yard with abs and toned thighs.”
The reality of what we’re going to see next week is this: Jutting collar bones. Hip bones as sharp as a table’s corners. Rib cages. Thighs that are inches apart from touching. Thousands of dollars of hair extensions, spray tans, whitened teeth, makeup and body makeup all in an effort to give the illusion of sun-kissed yet lit-from-within health.
The reality of who is watching: Preteens. Teenagers. Young women. Women. Women who want to look like what they’re seeing on screen but shrug it off and don’t really care to go after it. Women who want to look like what they’re seeing on screen and will do anything to achieve it. Women who want to look like what they’re seeing on screen but won’t no matter what they do. Women who feel like a failure because they don’t look like what 2014 thinks is beautiful. Women who, after years of dreaming, trying, striving, wanting, know that they’ll never look like that so they force themselves to joke about it.
I don’t want the Victoria’s Secret show to stop. I want it to change. I want women who haven’t trained for months to be up there. I want women who have even just a little bit of cellulite to be on that screen. I want women who don’t fit into child-sized costumes to be stomping down the runway. I want women who don’t have to wear the Bombshell bra in order to have cleavage showing America what it’s like to have a woman’s body. I want women who don’t have cleavage and who can wear a dainty lace bra with zero padding and pushing showing America what it’s like to have a woman’s body. I want thighs that not only touch but jiggle supporting the weight of those wings.
What I really want is for the idea of women’s beauty not to have to be manufactured. What if beauty really was effortless? What if we showed that on the only runway that millions of people watch?
I don’t hold Victoria’s Secret responsible for creating this false sense of beauty, but I do believe they have the greatest platform to affect change. And I desperately, firmly believe that women need change. Instead of using over 9 million viewers to buy into an overexercised, overbleached, overtanned idea of beauty, how about have 9 million viewers buy into believing in themselves? Put women on the runway who we can truly identify with and you will not only have our money, you will have our hearts and our loyalty. Don’t do it as a stunt, either. Do it subtly, without announcement or a fitting hashtag, and stick to it, year after year.
In the years I’ve watched the show, I’ve witnessed what feels like a devolution of womanhood. Goodbye curves, goodbye bodies and goodbye to anything that isn’t distinctly bone or muscle.
Would someone with a 1997–2005 Tyra body ever have been cast for the 2014 show? I don’t think so. And I don’t think she could #TrainLikeAnAngel to get there, either. I wouldn’t want her to.
