About Us

Welcome to our blog! Thanks for visiting! We are three female undergraduate students at the University of Maryland studying rhetoric in our English 101S class. After researching fashion of the 1960’s and comparing it to modern fashion, we are ecstatic to share our blog on 1960’s and modern women’s lingerie advertisements. As young women, we are exposed to these advertisements and ideal body images daily. We are all affected by body-shaming and idealistic body praising. The advertisements affect not only us, but the women around us. They even change the way men view women. To prove that body-shaming and idealistic bodies aren’t anything new, we researched the idealistic body of the 1960’s and what women did to achieve these bodies. From the 1960’s to today, women are persuaded to look one way more than another created by advertisements to sell certain products to achieve these appearances.

The text we have chosen are both picture advertisements; a Warner’s 1960’s corselette and Victoria’s Secret lingerie ad. Warner’s ad portrays a woman wearing their corselette with an hourglass figure holding an empty bird cage as the bird flies away to promote freedom, control, and confidence. Victoria’s Secret models have the same slim figures promoting “a body for everybody.” Together these advertisements show how companies pushed for idealistic bodies of these time periods to sell their product. Both Warner’s 1960s Corselette ad and Victoria’s Secret’s 2014 “A Body for Every Body” ad, demonstrate changing but ever-prevalent perceptions of female body image in American society.

The push of idealistic bodies and body-shaming has become highly unacceptable, but it also has become popular in American society. Especially with the increased use of social media, body-shamers are everywhere and have become extremely prevalent. Each time period has had their “set beauty standards”, and in today’s world, many people are trying to get rid of it. Within recent years, many companies have changed their advertising ways to promote a message of body equality and to tear down the “set beauty standards” within society.

We introduced and ended our blog with logos to show the illusion the ads were trying to create while targeting the audiences. The readers of this blog should be aware of the deceptive marketing schemes that are out there. We then went into the stasis theory and audience analyses of both ads so viewers of our blog would have a general understanding of what these ads were about, and who was being targeted. Finishing off the bulk of our blog was introducing the ethos, kairos, and pathos, respectively, while alternating the ads. This allows the viewers to know all the rhetorical elements in an interesting, unique, and intriguing pattern.

We hope that all readers of this blog of all views and genders can see how advertisers take advantage of their power and cause harm to the image of women by promoting these idealistic bodies and bought confidence.