Last week, we reported that three U.K. students had started a petition to get Victoria's Secret to change its "Perfect Body" campaign. Now, The Independent reports that the company has renamed its campaign in response to the backlash.
The brand's new campaign trumpets, "A Body For Every Body." The Cut calls the new slogan "a gaseous clouds of meaninglessness," but since it's meant to promote VS' "Body" product line, we think it makes sense — at least, semantically speaking. But, maybe not so much visually.
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See, the new campaign uses the same pic as the old one, and features models that do not, by any stretch of the imagination, represent "every body." Unless you mean every body that belongs to a super-hot model who wears lingerie for a living. In which case, they've got all the bodies!
Maybe the 27,000 people who signed the Change.org petition will be satisfied with the new slogan. But, in some ways, the new ads' messaging is no better. If the original campaign was an insult to any woman larger than a supermodel (insofar as the term "perfect body" apparently did not apply to them), this new ad arguably makes them even more invisible. Because, even in a campaign that specifically mentions "every body," larger bodies are nowhere to be found.
While we're glad to see a brand making a change in response to customers' dissatisfaction, we think the brand's about-face would have made a much more powerful statement if it included actual body diversity, rather than just mentioning it. (The Independent)