Perplexed about what to get the seven-year-old in your life who has it all?
Why, a heavily padded push-up bikini bra, natch!
Normally, “padded push-up bra” and “seven-year-old” only converge in the same sentence if accompanied by “Child Protective Services” or “Toddler and Tiaras.”
But Abercrombie & Fitch, purveyor of all things preppy and pricey, has done the impossible and once again cross the line of bad taste (their infamous catalogues have widely been regarded as “soft-core porn“).
The retailer recently unveiled a spring line of bikinis featuring “the push-up triangle” bra marketed to girls as young as seven.
If you listen closely, you can actually hear the sound of parents tearing their hair out.
Abercrombie’s first reaction to the obvious outrage and backlash was to change the description on their website from “push-up” to “padded.”
Because the illusion of disproportionately large breasts on a seven-year-old is less offensive than the illusion of entirely inappropriate cleavage on a seven-year-old?
The swimsuit disappeared from the company’s website on Tuesday, and while I’d love to think it was because Abercrombie realized the horrific error of their ways, I’m guessing it was more likely their publicity stunt was just less profitable than they’d hoped.
What more is there to say? The idea was disgusting, deplorable, and contributed just a bit more to the countless ways in which young (make that very young) girls are constantly being sexualized.
Newsflash, Abercrombie: Children’s retail should not operate under the philosophy of “sex sells.”
–Michelle Konstantinovsky is a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and an avid admirer of shiny objects and preteen entertainment. It would be nice if you visited her website: www.michellekmedia.com. Also, she may learn to use Twitter more effectively if you follow her @michelley415.
Seven-year-old girls don’t even have anything to pad or push up, unless somewhere out there the World’s Worst Parents have given their child implants.
But then, I have heard of children being injected with Botox, so that idea isn’t too far-fetched…. *vomits*
What we are talking about here is not the root of the problem.
Indeed the latter is the fact that women and girls, from 5 to 10 years old and little over, go to this shop to see, and get photographed with, the bare chested male model. Being a shop women feel justified in watching and getting close to that male model, and the very young gilrs learn from their mothers. It’s them creating the initial problem, not the firm. The firm, knowing how mouthwatering these women become, and how they would do anything to get even closer to those guys, the firm, again, just follow their most animalistic feelings. They sexualise everything. It’s all about sex, not clothing. I bet they would not stand with their daugthers next to an anknown man bare chested and beautiful in the middle of a street. We are afraid of pedophiles, but in fact they just make their dauthers ready for sexual world, like the one the pedophiles like.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that women aren’t satisfied unless their body looks like a curvier version of the way it did when they were seven.