Victoria’s Secret has been on a decline for several years and is in the process of trying to rebrand. Last year the New York Times ran an expose revealing the demeaning culture and widespread sexual harassment behind the scenes at the company. They’ve been rightfully called out for lack of body representation for years. In a new episode of E!’s True Hollywood Story, former VS angel, Selita Ebanks, recounts the unhealthy and unnatural standards pressed upon the models who walked the show. Selita also discusses how cutthroat it was behind the scenes. Many models she thought were friends turned against her when she was hired by Victoria’s Secret. A few highlights from E! Online:
“Modeling for Victoria’s Secret, there’s a code you have to follow,” Ebanks revealed in an exclusive sneak peek at the special. “There is expectation to maintain the size, and unfortunately, we are going against Mother Nature. It is not something that’s natural, it is not something that should happen. It’s tough.”
Psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser noted she heard that some models “back in the day” only ate an apple every 24 hours to maintain their trim physiques; such were just the beauty standards of the brand.
As Ebanks explained, the goal for every model was to become an Angel. “I’ve been on many runways, but, to be a part of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, for me, was more than just a job. It was the highlight,” Ebanks recalled.
The New York Times reporter Jessica Silver-Greenberg, whose exposé “Angels in Hell” uncovered the dark underbelly of the Victoria’s Secret empire, added that in her opinion, Angels had low self-esteem.
“It’s really hard for a lot of the Victoria’s Secret models to have the kind of self-worth that the rest of us have, because it’s all about their appearance,” she stated. “No one wants to hear what they have to say.”
I agree with Jessica Silver-Greenberg when she said that the models suffer from low self-esteem. These women are beat down emotionally, constantly having their worth connected to how they look or how skinny they are. It made me sad when Selita said that she lost friends when she got the Victoria’s Secret contract.
I used to work for Victoria’s Secret at the store level and I saw what they put the managers through. I can only imagine what the models went through. The fact that those women were only eating an apple every twenty-four hours is insanity. I also agree with Selita that the demands on these women’s bodies is unnatural. Women should not be that thin unless it is natural to them. This E! True Hollywood story looks interesting. And since the Victoria’s Secret empire is literally declining right before our eyes despite their attempt of rebranding, it’ll be interesting to learn more.
It’s not natural, and with the runways you can’t even say its photoshopping or touch ups etc. I can’t imagine what it’s like to put your body through that. Chrissy Teigen, before she was canceled for the second or third time, had some posts up about fashion week in….miami, maybe? And she was talking about not eating and it sounded MISERABLE. And I remember reading an article about Carrie Underwood – this may have been a decade ago, I can’t recall – and she was talking about her eating schedule and it was like, ice water for breakfast, fresh spinach with hard boiled egg whites for lunch, and then if she got hungry she would have a granola bar for dinner, and that was IT. It stuck with me bc I thought it sounded so awful.
I used to be a manager at Loft and Victoria’s Secret was considered the “gold standard” for that level of retail store – not a place I wanted to work but a place we liked to hire from – for one reason and one reason only – those associates and managers knew how to push credit cards on customers. The company was RUTHLESS about it. Loft cared too, but VS was so intense so we liked getting their associates bc they could rack up lots of new card openings without breaking a sweat, lol.
(PS you know what’s predatory? pushing store CCs at points of sale. I hated doing it but it was one of the ways our store was evaluated and ranked.)
I worked at a VS in college for exactly 1 day. I was completely turned off after spending 4 hours rearranging one of the underwear tables. Then the manager of the store said something completely nasty about an elderly customer who came in looking for something nice because she was about to be intimate with a partner for the first time in years since she was widowed. Then they put me outside spritzing customers with perfume. I was done and went back to my old job at SteinMart which may not have been glamorous, but at least the people were kind.
I worked at VS in college too and also did not last long because I could not deal with the store culture and aggressive sales tactics. Your story about the sweet widow wanting something nice broke my heart. I would have LOVED to help someone like that find something that made them feel good about themselves and made that night extra special! What kind a human talks down about something like that?! Argh!
What are women’s intimates brands my fellow celeb*tches like? I like a padded bra to help make up with breastfeeding my children took away. Any suggestions? Thanks friends.
omg, that’s so terrible! I hope that woman left happy and had a great time after.
I thought this was common knowledge for a while. I remember Adriana Lima admitting that for 1-2 weeks before the show, she just stopped eating. Like, no solids, period. She would only do liquids for an extended stretch before the show to meet the standards.
It is sad, because if these women, who are all stunning and lovely, cannot meet the standards set by one company, what chance is there for the rest of us? And the fact that there were men at the top who thought this was in any way acceptable goes to show you how out of touch some men are with the reality of women’s bodies in general.
VS was never about the realities of having a female body. I only realized a while ago that they have never produced maternity or nursing bras, bras suitable for masectomies, ect. They even resisted selling sports bras for years out of a belief that sports bras are not “sexy.” They were never about outfitting breasts for the things breasts actually do or need. It was always for men only.
So true. I remember going to the big flagship store in London with two friends and while one was actually finding stuff (she had AA cups and difficulties in other stores) the other friend and I were mostly taking the piss out of the bright pink, intricate polyester fetish wear they were selling there. Neither of us was heavy by any means, with my 34C bra size I’m arguably the desired ideal even (they’re great, they just sit lower than what the fashion industry dictates), yet nothing fit, everything was so uncomfortable and basically screamed yeast infection.
I am an ample 36C and I was put off permanently by the company after I went to one and the salesperson tried to sell me on the “bombshell” pushup, which had enough padding to make you look “2 cups sizes larger.” I tried it on as a lark and was SO uncomfortable – enough padding my make me look like a 36DD and jack my breasts up to my chin. My shirt was straining to cover the extra bulk – I looked like a cartoon character. They had such an insistence that that’s what bras should be – lots of padding, gotta make them look bigger, higher, etc. I cannot imagine that any woman can feel real comfort wearing such a thing. That just furthers my belief that it was never for the comfort or enjoyment of women.
The catalogue is basically mainstreamed p * r n selling impossible standards to men and women while pretending to be pro women.
Sam the pink
I remember the Lima comments too.
She said she went on a week Juicing cleanse with “water pills” aka laxatives. And the last 48 hours preshow was nothing, but working out constantly with 2 protein shakes at the start of the 48.
Women have been expected to be malnurished for too many decades. I have long wondered what it does to our brains and psyche to not feed our bodies and brains the nutrients it needs.
It’s like society want us to be weak and hungry…
I hope the next generation of women will be smarter, not taking crap from anyone, ia believing they should starve themselves for other people’s aesthetics.
“Fun fact”: my niece’s teacher sent a memo to parents advising that girls should not be wearing shorts shorter than knee length because… it is focusing too much attention on them. She is EIGHT! I am livid and thankfully many parents are too. Policing women’s bodies starts early, what we are allowed to wear, what we are allowed to eat, how we should look… I love to hear models admitting how insane their diets are because people need to see that this promoted body size is unattainable.
I used to have a lovely, older teacher when I was 16 and this lady did so much good to my teenage self esteem by simply saying: look around you, do you see those perfect people in you school? on the bus? no? that’s because they exist only in magazines.
@Anna
What?! That is insane! Sounds like the teacher is an evangical, but I hope your family doesn’t give in to that bullshit!!
I went to school with a girl who later became a medium famous model (she doesn’t have mainstream household name recognition but she steadily worked major runways and campaigns for more than a decade) and even she didn’t *look* like a model walking the halls of our high school – she was just naturally very extremely thin. Seeing her transformation was really eye-opening about the disconnect between reality and the runway and I don’t mean this with any shade – she’s lovely in real life too but it’s just a totally different thing.
Am I the only one that finds it a bit frustrating now she is coming out when, for years, she helped promote, and profited immensely by representing, this image that all girls my age strived for because that was what we “should” look like, while knowing it was extremely and dangerously unhealthy and virtually unattainable?
No, @ Lisa, you are not. I find it disheartening and highly suspicious that she is only speaking out now after she was an active VS model for all of those years, after having achieved this level of status, as well as the $$$, and the ongoing contracts and ability to secure a more financial and secure future. It would have been much more impactful and sincere had she come out during her time at VS! No one could view their bodies and find any comfort in identifying with them, yet alone young girls as they grew up.
Nope, it irritated me too. I can’t stand how these models and actresses frame themselves as the biggest victims in an industry that made them millions. I used to cry at 16 because I was convinced my stomach and I were unworthy of love. I still sometimes feel that way at 31 and I know I’m far from the only one. These models should just own up to what they attributed to. That would also make me far more willing to listen to how it affected them.
Many of them have owned up to that, and awknowledged that their images led other women to feel bad about themselves. Just remember that these women are really young, teenagers when they get started. They are being praised in the exact way that girls are conditioned to desire. Who wouldn’t want the validation they get? Who would say no to it? But then they learn that that validation comes at a high cost, but they are conditioned to please and to seek affirmation from others, so they pay the cost, and pay, and pay. Then they grow up and realize that they were duped, mislead, abused, and that they caused harm to other people. There are models out there talking about the terrible images they perpetuated. Just remember that they had no power. Our anger should be directed toward the people with the power. The models were just interchangeable bodies. If it wasn’t them, it would have been another. They had no workplace protection, not even for personal safety. One horrific story I heard was a model at a photo shoot where the photographer used an ultraviolet light in her face and temporarily blinded her–she went straight to the hospital and was there for a few days. Turned out she was the second model the agency sent to this photographer after he blinded the first one. And models have no health insurance, and most of them are basically indentured servants in debt to their agencies. Almost blinded, and now in debt to the agency for the hospital bills.
@Lane I totally agree. I have a friend who worked in fashion as a photographer. One of the reasons they’d get hired was that them and their business partner were only white photographers (in their country) who knew how to photograph BIPOC models. And capture the radiance of the model instead of making the image look dull and flat. Which is beyond ridiculous because they come from an African country.
One of the main reasons they quit fashion photography was the toxicity of the fashion industry and their frustration with how poorly workers like models were treated. They did their best to create a welcoming set. They mentored young black photographers who now have successful careers in the industry. But at the end of the day you can only do so much in a free lance industry which is inherently hard to unionise.
Even Andre Leon Talley, (an editor and fashion editor who did some modelling) was fat shamed by Anna Wintour. To the point that she held at least two ‘interventions’ about his weight gain.
The way underage girls are treated in the fashion industry makes me mad. They’re pressured into helping normalise toxic beauty standards at the cost of their physical and psychological well being.
Many models start off extremely young. Kimora Lee Simmons started at 13, and walked Chanel. I don’t think it’s up to a teenager to have the ethics and morals to distinguish between the work they do and how women all over are affected by it. And by the time they are in their 20’s they’ve been so abused by the system they have suffered ED’s for years trying to maintain the weight they’ve had as their teens.
The blame should be on the adults, mostly men, who dictate these beauty ideals.
This. Lots of these women start in this field when they’re literal children and have the thin, low fat bodies of children, which they maintain by continuing to be children.
I fault the people who defend this adult body type as achievable and healthy. If it requires not eating solid food for two weeks it’s neither achievable nor healthy.
I absolutely agree with this. So many of these models are very young and very alone in a country far from home.
As much as we want them to recognize the abuse and bring down the patriarchy, it’s unlikely to come from a 17 year old girl from eastern Europe just trying to pay rent on a one bedroom apartment she shares with five other people.
it’s fair to both feel annoyed at women who made their money working the patriarchy at the expense of other women AND feel empathy for them as victims of the same machine
ultimately tho, i reserve most of my frustration for the adult men and women in positions of power who used and abused these (usually underage) models as tools to sell us crap
I don’t believe her when she says the predatory stuff didn’t happen to her. It happens to everyone except those with real power, and if your body is all you have to sell you don’t have real power.
I don’t blame her for what these people did, but I also don’t think she’s being honest with herself let alone the public.
I find it… irritating?… that we get reassured on the comments on threads about very, very thin women like this are just naturally that way, no special eating or exercise regimen that way and how dare you imply that there’s any degree of disordered behavior in maintaining 12% body fat with big boobs on a 5’11” body (or maintaining that level of body fat on any female body past about 25).
I get that there *are* women who do remain naturally very thin throughout their lives and that they don’t need disordered eating or habits to do it, but I think we need to let go of the cultural expectation that that’s a common body type. When models – those women famed for being in great shape (or at least having great bodies) – have to stop eating, I think it’s time to pull the plug on that as being an ideal. Women should be allowed to eat.
yes – i’ve known several women who are naturally extremely thin, but they are subject to the same pressures as the rest of us and have bouts of disordered eating like most women do.
the thing I’ve come to realize is that disordered eating usually has no relationship to body size – thin women just get more flack for their food issues because they’re already thin but if they were a bit bigger the exact same behaviour would be praised as healthy.
so sometimes i question how much dieting even makes a difference in the first place when literally almost every woman i know of every size has some issues with food.
Maintenance Phase had an excellent podcast about this – it really emphasized that many fat people (I am fat, I prefer this term) in fact have eating disorders, but they are seldom caught because they don’t meet the low weight threshold and in fact their disordered eating is praised as they are losing weight and “getting healthy”. We really need to stop equating body size to health. Or really holding up “healthy” as the standard we all should be striving for, as it’s so much more complicated than we laypeople can understand.
Being a model can be as rigorous as being an olympic level athlete. The stress on the body is insane.
But this isn’t rigorous. This describes self-abuse. This isn’t to attain some new feat of personal strength, this is just to look as thin and “hot” as possible.
No Olympian is eating only one apple a day.
There isn’t Olympic fasting. What a weird comment.
You’re getting some flak for this comment, but I agree. It is taxing, mentally and physically, if not in exactly the same way as Olympic training is. Both are driven by competitive and perfectionistic mindsets, and there are specific physical requirements for both. They’re also very youth-centric and are two jobs that you quickly age out of.
Women pressured to abuse themselves just to sell stuff in a way to make the rest of women feel bad about themselves. Oh the joys of the patriarchy.
I remember Heidi Klum, Tyra Banks, and others having healthier figures in the 90s/early 2000s. The company seemed to go in the direction of extreme thinness and muscle tone which combined with skeletal bodies, does not look good on lingerie models imo. I didn’t know who they were marketing towards anymore since no one looked like that.
I remember those amazing but less crazy bodies. I was never going to attain Tyra Banks or Linda Evangelista’s body, but they more or less seemed naturally occurring. I don’t know why that’s the breaking point for me, that someone doesn’t need to do crazy things to keep a body, but it is.
I’ll never forget going into the Pink store when I was younger and being told they don’t carry XL sizing, when the reason I asked for it in the first place was because their clothes were cut so small.
I just had a conversation with my husband about lingerie companies (as I was cursing, flipping through the rack at TJ Maxx—mine seems to only carry mismatched stuff I might have worn when I was 18…I know, it’s TJ Maxx, but it used to be better!). I could think of so few companies (that have stores)—Agent Provo, La Perla, VS (the only “affordable” one in my mind). I live in Central Virginia, nowhere near “good” shopping (no decent department stores in a 1-hr range), so I’m wondering where do women buy matching, comfortable but pretty, affordable lingerie? I’ve always refused to shop VS because of how I feel about their attitudes and quality of goods, and am at a point in my life where I’m finally able and willing to buy some lovely things and I don’t know where to look! Anyone have suggestions?
Sales at herroom for me.
I like Soma bras. They are comfy and pretty, and you can get matching panties (thongs or bikinis or hip huggers or high rise).
Fleur du Mal. I’m petite but am 34f in bra size, and FDM has the most comfortable fuller cup sexy bras in existence. Totally worth the price. I literally wear the lily embroidery lace bras on the daily basis, and the convertible silk bra lifts these babies up when the occasion arises. Agent Provocateur is not worth the money, in my opinion. It looks good but is very uncomfortable. Maybe their size guidance was wrong, but that’s just my own experience.
For years I only bought bras and underwear at VS. I went in recently and asked if they had any bras that are wider in the back (so that they don’t cut in and form a sort of “back fat” demarcation). The sales rep said something like “we had a specialist come once who told us that we don’t really carry bras for your issue”.
Umm, maybe don’t call it “my issue”? If it’s something I’ve noticed, I’m probably not the only one.
Wtf. A lot of people have that “issue,” regardless of weight. Such an inappropriate comment from her!
I think the main problem at VS is that their whole strategy is aimed at pleasing men rather than the women that are supposed to wear the stuff. We are not all skinny A cups ready to get yeast infections and body image complexes from the cheap polyester crap that VS shills. I buy most of my lingerie from Fleur du Mal. It’s expensive but totally worth it. Designed by a woman for women (she actually used to design at VS, and she cites the anti-woman culture as part of the reason she left VS), and their sexiest designs also come in fuller sizes.
If girls that are this objectively pretty have low self esteem, how tf am I supposed to feel?! That’s so sad!
While I think it’s important to call out body shaming and concern trolling, it’s also important to allow dialogue about actual disordered eating. I have lived in NYC for 20 years and know many models. MOST do not take in enough calories. Extreme caloric restriction is very common. Most adult women cannot be 5’10” 110 lbs without extreme behavior. I knew one model who drank 5 or 6 skim milk cappuccinos a day. Each time she felt hungry, she drank a skim cappuccino with barely any milk added, mostly just foam. Another drank only hot water with lemon for days before a Wonder Bra go see. Another ate one meal a day, like a hamburger with no bun. Another bought a container of prepared curried cauliflower at Whole Foods around noon and picked at it throughout the day. Another who did “juice fasts” for weeks each month to “cleanse”. And this brings me to clean eating, which is the claim each of them makes, but honestly it is caloric restriction.
There is a VS outlet near me, but I never wear their bras any more. They are so damned uncomfortable, at least for me, since I’m not small up top. I was a 34B for years but after two kids I went up to a C or D cup and stayed there. I buy my bras at TJ Maxx or Marshalls or Ross, no underwire, the kind that have support on the sides and give good coverage and are comfortable. Whatever smushes them together and makes them look smaller!
Eating only an apple for 24 hours is nuts. I fast every year on Yom Kippur and by the end of the 24 hour period I’m practically hallucinating. That is not healthy and sounds miserable. How can they even function?
selita ebanks is grateful for all the publicity she got for her VS job and now she is ready to kick it for good … ahhh publicity it is
I was wondering if that was a sort of pull quote and there would be more. Maybe there will be in the actual show. Like, it was the ultimate goal and an honour at the time but did not come without a price.
Why are people all of a sudden surprised that models have to starve themselves to be thin. I’ve known this since I was a kid. I can understand that someone who is in a third works country without any other choices to have to go through this to have a better life for themselves and for their families but if you’re not then it is all due to vanity. These models signed up for this just to be on the cover of a fashion magazine and to do runways. They know what they signed up for. They could’ve chosen another career that didn’t require this but they chose it because they are vain and want people to fawn over them. My parents wanted me to play piano but I dysthymia so it’s not always the parents pushed them to model excuse. They chose it. Hard to feel sorry people that chose this lifestyle then call out the lifestyle while they were promoting it.