An Open Letter To American Eagle Outfitters

See this post on The Oydessey here!

Dear American Eagle Outfitters,

My name is Margaret Anderle, and I’ve shopped at your stores for 10 years. Clad in your fluorescent polos and plaid bermuda shorts, I weathered the rocky graduation from elementary school to middle school. In sixth grade, I finally convinced my mom that my essentially flat chest just had to have a bra, and where did I go? Aerie of course. Time passed, and I graduated from the lightly lined A-cup years to the ever so slightly bigger B-cups, now enhanced by an Aerie push-up bra, which made me feel like I was one of the “cool” eighth graders. When high school hit, and I no longer needed to pretend my chest was bigger than it was, Aerie was there to provide me with bras that fit, were affordable, and were comfortable. Why the anecdote of my life told through Aerie bras? Well, I wanted to start off by saying that I think that you have a great products, and I’ve truly enjoyed wearing them over the past ten years. In general, you seem like a great company.

Last summer, I was excited to see that you were launching a new campaign, “Aerie Real”. Walking around the mall seeing girls with bags that said “This girl is not photoshopped", I was intrigued. When I got to the store, I looked around the walls at the large photos of scantily clad young 20 something models on the walls touting slogans like “the real you is beautiful” or “this girl is not retouched”, and something didn’t sit right with me. Yes, these photos didn’t necessarily look photoshopped, but how could I really tell, all of the girls had washboard abs and skinny long limbs. To my dismay, the website is pretty much the same. Even though you boast on your site that you now offer sizes AA-DDD, you don’t show girls with different sized bodies. Sure, some of your models are bustier than others, but the common denominator is that they are all skinny. And not even a little skinny, they are like seriously thin. And if that’s what those girls look like without being retouched, that is awesome for them. Kudos to them for having the body of the ideal woman as set by societal standards, but that just isn’t what most girls look like.

I admire the idea behind your campaign. I think it is fantastic, but I’ve been watching it play out for a year now, and I am still remarkably underwhelmed. Having a skinny model sit in a position that lets her cute little stomach have a few wrinkles doesn’t make it a campaign that champions girls of different sizes. And yes, some of your models, if you really delve into the website, aren’t rail thin. They are by no means chubby though, barely even average, and they aren’t the models on the main pages of the site—you actually have to put in your bra size, and only by putting in the larger sizes, did I find any girls that started to look more normal. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t let skinny people model your bras, you should. What I’m saying, is that as someone that has shopped at your store for a really long time, it’d be nice to see people that looked less like figurines and more like me. All body types should be represented, especially now that you’ve got so many more fun sizes to display.

So American Eagle, I leave you with this. If you’re going to take an initiative as a company, don’t half-ass it. Don’t tout how your size-0 models aren’t retouched when you don’t include any models that are bigger than a size 6. I’m obviously estimating here, but I know what size I am, and it’s definitely not the size of most of those models. It doesn’t make sense to take initiative in making things more realistic when your models aren’t realistic to begin with. Make your idea matter, and show some young impressionable girls buying their first bras that it’s okay to look how they do, instead of giving them some unattainable standard of “natural” to aspire to. I used to be one of those girls, and now I’m speaking for my 11-year-old self, the girl that dragged her mom to your store at the mall to buy her first bra, and for myself now, a girl who still buys bras from you—all women are beautiful, no matter what their bra size or body type is, so don’t just show me a homogenous group of size 2’s who perpetuate a skinny centric culture that tells girls they aren’t good enough, and reinforce that standard by telling me that they aren’t photoshopped.

Sincerely,

Margaret Erin Anderle, A Concerned Customer