Victoria’s Secret Yorkdale: musings from big pink

Posted August 28th, 2010 by Brock Cumpston No Comments »


Despite our better judgments, the lure of the US lingerie empire — which opened its Toronto outlet this week — still proves irresistible

Have you ever washed your hair with fruity shampoo while camping in bug country in August? Yes. Well, then you know how it feels to walk through a mall, densely populated with females, sporting a particular stripe of pink bag.

You hear the buzz, the whispers, the curious swarm hovering nearer and nearer until smack! A pair of heavily lashed girl-eyes lands on the bag, and then another, and another, until it’s barnacled with longing.

Then there are glossy girl-mouths attached to the girl-eyes, and the mouths ask questions, or they emit faint shrieks that might be questions. At Zara. At Sephora. At the magazine stand looking for W. The girls ask, they shriek: “Is that… Victoria’s Secret? Open? Now?!”

No. Not “now” as in “then” — I was coming from the media preview on Tuesday; the store opened to the public Thursday. And if you didn’t make it out yesterday, then you missed your chance to get a bra or breast signed by one of the Angels (Adriana Lima, Chanel Iman, Erin Heatherton) in attendance. I would say that I’m sorry but I’m not.

Nor am I happy to admit the honey-power a fluffy pink monster like Victoria’s Secret has over my gender. But I can’t ignore it, like I can’t ignore Eat, Pray, Ugh or wedding horror-shows or roses or any number of things marketed to women on the sole basis of their being women, as though that’s the only characteristic required, with nothing distinguishing beyond it. We are still the biggest minority in the world.

And worse, Victoria’s Secret markets the ideal of us to men, dangling above us these Angels with their devil-sexy bods. They’ve spun the Madonna/whore complex into an empire.

When I was a teenage innocent, my good Christian family and I would go outlet-tripping in Michigan, buying discounted Benetton and Nike and whatever. Victoria’s Secret was my promised land. Like, I thought if I drank all that milk, I’d someday look all honey. Like Tyra or Gisele, Heidi Klum or Stephanie Seymour (pre-Brant) or Adriana Lima (then and now). Like fornication incarnate. My mother disabused me of this notion, disapproved violently — as did feminists, but don’t tell her that — of the unrealistic body types and unholy lacy things. About the bodies, maybe she was right. They were Barbies come larger than life.

And now the Angel-devils are praised as healthy, even realistic, in comparison to their clothes-hanger counterparts. It’s more sad than ironic. And that’s what I’m thinking as I strolled into VS Yorkdale on Tuesday, feeling all blasé and blue about girlworld, in adamant contrast to the pink. (All that pink. So much. You can’t imagine.)

Then I turned a corner and saw it. There. On shelves lined with moisturizers and creams and lotions and butters — ’cause, yes, you need all four — there it was. The smell of my favourite body products ever — the only things I was allowed to buy from this verboten city of Angels, the bottles I kept in the most special drawer of my dresser, and one of which, I’m not lying, I kept for years and years, through six moves and three leaps into adulthood, and which my boyfriend only threw out two months ago, having no idea. The smell of grapefruit, I thought (even though now the bottle says cherry blossom and peach), and of champagne, although I’d never tasted champagne. The smell of virginhood and wishing.

Love Spell. I shrieked. I fluttered like a bug around it. Like a girl in air-quotes. I know, I know, but listen: you can fight The Man, or The Woman, but you can’t fight memories. So I bought three different-shaped bottles of more or less the same thing with the smell — the same smell! After all these years! I still don’t believe it — for $25. You could buy five for $34. Just don’t buy mine.

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