Love Your Body Campaign



Recently, Victoria's Secret launched a "Love Your Body" campaign in order to advertise their newest line of Body lingerie. However, by using their own idealistic models as the models in their campaign, Victoria's Secret caused a controversy among women in America who do not agree with the discourse that the lingerie store promotes with its images in advertising. In order to view an example of one of the Love Your Body commercials by Victoria's Secret, click the link below: Victoria's Secret Love Your Body

A common reaction to this commercial might include something along the lines of, "Of course they love their bodies--they're perfect," and this would not be far from the truth. In fact, this has enraged some viewers because it can be interpreted as a mockery of the recent Dove campaign similarly titled, Love Your Body. To view the Dove commercial, click the link below: Dove Love Your Body

While Dove was attempting to enforce ideas of a healthy body image, Victoria's Secret may have taken down Dove's ammunition by turning it into an advertising slogan. By using such positive text and auditory to anchor the images in the Victoria's Secret commercial, the lingerie store was able to associate a positive idea with their unattainable standards for the female body. The following photos are also an integral part of the Love Your Body campaign by Victoria's Secret.

The first image of the single Victoria's Secret model on the white rug is a prime site for psychoanalytic analysis. The model has placed her hands between her legs, perhaps hiding her lack of phallus, and she is using her arms to push forward her breasts in order to portray what her best feature is to her audience. Her body is placed in the typical arched back manner, and her eyes are directly contacting the viewers'. However, her facial expression is less sexual than the models' faces in many of the other Victoria's Secret advertisements. As a result, the audience is told to view the model as a woman who is being encouraged to love her body as well, leveling the playing field and interpellating the viewers in that manner. By doing so, the model is selling the product that she is wearing without blatantly modeling the lingerie itself.
This second image is probably the most powerful image of the Love Your Body campaign by Victoria's Secret. All seven of the models featured in this image are positioned in unnatural feminized poses with hair flowing and all wearing the same lingerie in black and nude. When a viewer scans across the entire photo, it is virtually impossible to distinguish the differences between the seven bodies besides the varying colors of skin. As a result, this image is perpetuating the notion that all women's bodies should look the same, and all women's body should look like this, however unattainable this may be.




Homepage Psychoanalysis Discourse Analysis Audience Studies Interpellating

Men/Women

Works Cited
Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: W. W. Norton &, 1985. Print.

Modleski, Tania. "Femininity By Design." The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. By Tania Modleski. New York: Methuen, 1988. 87-100. Print.

Illustrations

Figure 1 and 3: http://www.stylelist.com/2010/03/01/victorias-secret-launches-love-your-body-campaign-with-three-new-body-by-victoria-bras/

Figure 2: http://quirkymartini.com/?p=3724

http://www.victoriassecret.com/

Elizabeth Wong

May 2, 2011