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Health & Fitness

'Victoria's Secret' Not So Secretive: PINK and the Party Girl

A quick glance at Victoria's Secret PINK merchandise portrays a hidden message


Last month, while perusing the windows of Garden City’s shopping center, I happened to casually walk by Victoria’s Secret. Upon entering the store, I was instantaneously bombarded with a barrage of bright colors and headless models wearing tank tops and sweatshirts boasting messages like “Love Pink” and “Girls Love Pink.”  Seemingly innocuous, right? Wrong. A mere shift in my glance produced a bright pink top with the words “Study Less, Party More” in large, block print. I stood there, mouth agape, and flipped to the top behind it. “Party All Night...”  “I Never Kiss and Tell...”  Really?  You can imagine my face when the young saleswoman approached me and asked if I was “finding everything I needed.” Indeed.

VS’s marketing technique is loud and clear: big, bright colors gain the instantaneous attention of the young, female consumer; large lettered “texts” on merchandise, however overt they may be, reveal a more subliminal message.  Such clandestine messages unfortunately reflect what our society deems as provocative for females. As a mother of a little girl and a professor to the young women VS’s Pink line targets, I took offense to the harmful messages this company boasts. Messages such as “Study Less, Party More” and “Party All Night” reinforce the notion that girls will be noticed when they act explosive and derogatory. It is not what they are intellectually capable of, but rather if they can hold their liquor like the big boys. In what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has termed “an alarming trend” among young people ages 12 to 22 years old, the percentage of girls who drink alcohol is increasing at a much faster rate than is the rate among boys (“Alcohol Consumption Increasing Among Young Girls and Women”).  Moreover, “many high school and college students are also under pressure to be sexy and to indulge in casual sexual encounters.”  According to Professor Jean Kilborne of the Wellesley Center for Women, “One reason girls are drinking so much is that it is pretty hard to have these kinds of relationships sober. It's easier to have meaningless sex when you're drunk” (Alcohol Consumption).  Another study found that underaged girls see 40 percent more liquor advertisements than boys do. An ad for Cuervo rum, appearing in magazines such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan, reads “Bad girls are good company,” and a cognac ad includes the direction “Be at least capable of bad” (Alcohol Consumption).

We live in a society that values signs. We see the red bull’s eye and instantaneously think of Target. The yellow, golden arches bring forth the image of McDonald’s. The impact that media has on these signs greatly increases our dependence on them. For young adults who are still trying to find their identity in the world, reasons for self-acceptance become based on cultural norms: if the signs all point to A you better not mold to B. VS’s PINK line, founded in 2004, is marketed toward late-teen and college-age women. According to VS’s parent company, Sun Capital Marketers, the line is marketed to be “fun, playful, and flirtatious,” but I wonder if they realize that such marketing devalues these girls in such a way that they become a walking sign themselves: “Party Girls Rule the World!”  

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In hindsight, what I should have told the young saleswoman eager to help me when she asked, “Are you finding everything you need?” is, “No.  I don’t need this. And YOU don’t either.”  

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