Little Vicki's Secret

Disclaimer: In this post, I make fun of infantile hyper-femininity and excessive use of the color pink. Some of you may feel the need to point out that I can also be infantile, and that I really, really like the color pink. Well, you'll just have to work that out for yourselves. Don't make me quote Whitman again, dammit!

So ladies, now that that's outta the way, lemme ask you this:
How hard is it to get a good set of underwear these days?

I didn't start going to Victoria's Secret until I was in college, because for some reason I was really committed to frump- dom as a teenager, but even I can tell the place has gone downhill in the last year. I go in there, looking for some nice, delicate-looking bras that offer enough support push 'em up to there, and instead I'm confronted with garish explosions of pink, yellow, and green, with polka dots, and stupid slogans:

I blame P.I.N.K. So does the LAist.

It's supposed to be a line of sleepwear (and sportswear?) for college-age girls, but I don't know anyone in college or just out of college that wants to wear that stuff. Judge by this room:
Is the girl that's supposed to live in this room 18 or 15? It's practically a nursery.


Also, where do these girls go to college? What are their SAT scores?

They look like they're in the eighth grade, and this is after they've been made up and styled and airbrushed out the wazoo. Which makes sense, come to think of it--whenever I go into Victoria's Secret, I see fourteen-year-olds scooping up all the P.I.N.K. crap. This stuff is really being marketed to them, but Victoria's Secret will never come out and say so (Faking Good Breeding has a great entry on this, but I swear I came to this conclusion completely independently) Ostensibly, these styles are supposed to downplay adult sexiness and encourage youthful fun, but their cutesiness, a revolting combination of the provocative and the infantile, end up sexualizing the young girls that wear them. Should a fifth-grader go to school with a thong sticking out of the top of her pants?

Also, the styles are ultra-girly, but in an annoying fake-sporty 2007 kinda way. When I lived in the dorms we called it the "sporty ho" look--there were two girls that tried to carry it off. They were blond, fake-tanned, they always wore those pajama/sweatpants. I don't think I ever saw them wear a pair of jeans or trousers, not even once. It's a look I associate with vapid Southern girls and Hollywood morons.

Vapid Southern Girl:



















Hollywood Moron:















Now at UofC, that look is not the norm--our dorm was full of nerdy girls that studied physics and wore corduroy or dressed up like it was the Renaissance Fair (guilty as charged), so the Sporty Hoes were quite a spectacle. The supercasual style of their clothes--sweatpants in the classroom?--was supposed to project, "Oh, I just rolled out of bed/walked back from the gym, I don't care what I look like," which was utter nonsense. You have to spend time figuring out which combination looks the least "put-together," and it's a feat of engineering to get your pants to hang on low enough to expose your thong, without having them drop on the floor mid-step. This "youthful" innocent cutesy look takes premeditation, and it's icky how fashion is appropriating this slutty look to turn teens and preteens into affected little minxes.

I'm also frustrated for purely selfish reasons. Victoria's Secret was the store I went to feel grown up, and now with the P.I.N.K. plague taking over, I feel like they're either dumbing me down or pushing me aside. Apparently they decided that they'd rather go after the twelve-year-olds with credit cards than the young women they used to cater to before. And one more thing has me annoyed:

If I walked around with the word "Pink"--or any word, really, unless it were a team nickname--on my ass, I'd feel like I had "Idiot" on my forehead. I got enough problems, do I really need the homeless dude on 57th street screaming, "Hey, girl, show me your PINK!" when I walk by?