As Victoria’s Secret Models Got Thinner, American Women Got Angier

A recent study suggests that Victoria’s Secret’s SJW critics, who last year helped kill the lingerie purveyors’ annual fashion show (much to the consternation of red-blooded straight men (and maybe some gay women), might be on to something.

Offering some insight into L Brands’ recent troubles (we’re not talking about Epstein) – something that we’ve explored in-depth in the past – one recent study purportedly quantified the trend of VS angels’ shrinking waists over the years. It found that the company’s models’ midsections have shrunk by about an inch since the company launched the show, from an average of 24.7 inches in 1995, to about 23.6 in 2018, the last year that it was held. 

As one doctor who spoke to the New York Post explained, shaving an inch off one’s waist is extremely hard to do, especially when you’re already model thin. To achieve something like that, models reportedly undergo grueling prep routines that include workouts that would befit an Olympian, and crash diets that sometimes amount to just bone broth and water.

“To slim an inch off one’s waist – that’s very hard to do,” Dr. Neelam Vashi, the lead author of the research paper, told WBUR.

The company’s merchandise has been criticized for not reflecting the true physical proportions of most American women. And as analysts have pointed out time and time again, VS’s sizing has often deliberately excluded millions of American women, often to the detriment of sales growth.

Because how can a company sell more bras if the underwear they’re making are getting smaller, while the people who are supposed to be wearing it are getting bigger.

To underscore this point, the New York Post approached some shoppers at the VS flagship store near Herald Square on Sunday to ask about their experience.

Several shoppers coming out of the Victoria’s Secret near Herald Square on Sunday said their trip to the store was a bust – because everything was too small.

“I only got one bra because most of the stuff doesn’t fit women like us,” said 37-year-old Amy De La Cruz of herself and her daughters.

Another shopper said she only sometimes stops by VS for “perfume and lipgloss” because none of the clothes fit her.

A 47-year-old woman who would only give her first name, Andrea, said: “I mostly go for lipgloss and fragrances because I know they don’t have anything that fits me there.”

Many interpreted VS’s decision to cancel the fashion show as a harbinger of a more “woke” VS. Sales have apparently gotten to such a crisis point, that some of salespeople at VS retail locations have embraced the hard sell: encouraging customers to go lose some weight, then come back.

And 27-year-old Manhattanite Amy Issa called the study’s results “disappointing” and “devastating.”

“Even the people that work here they push you to lose weight they would say things like, ‘oh you can’t fit in this maybe next month if you lose a few pounds it’ll fit you,'” Issa said.

The clothing brand has already taken its first tentative steps toward embracing the body-positive movement by hiring its first size 14 model. We expect its next collection will move even further toward selling women “reality” instead of “fantasy.”