This season, American Eagle’s lingerie line, aerie, is taking a major step towards promoting a healthier body type. The company is abandoning the use of Photoshop and other means of digital altering to embrace a more natural style and physique.

aerie

(Media Credit/John Urbano)

The aerie Real campaign, launched for their spring collection, features young women of various shapes and sizes modeling their line of undergarments and lingerie. As stated on the company’s website, “Time to get real. Time to think real. No supermodels. No retouching.”

As a brand aimed towards college girls, aerie’s goal is to appeal to a younger generation, and by launching the aerie Real campaign, its message is loud and clear: “The real you is sexy!”

“We’ve left everything, beauty marks, tattoos,” said Jenny Altman, aerie’s fashion editor, in an interview with ABC News. “What you see is really what you get with our campaign.” Altman, the newly designated style and fit expert for the campaign, will give advice and tips to girls across the country. “In an industry that promotes an unrealistic fantasy about women’s bodies, I have joined aerie for an incredible campaign that celebrates the power and beauty of real women,” she said.

Aerie isn’t alone in featuring unaltered models. In 2012, Seventeen magazine vowed to stop airbrushing models after an eighth-grade girl created a petition to protest the magazine’s use of Photoshop.

This change is refreshing, considering the recent controversy over Vogue’s retouched photoshoot with “Girls” actress Lena Dunham. While this campaign may not repair self-esteem issues in young girls, it is certainly a step in the right direction. Maybe now other companies will follow suit and feature models that show women, as cheesy as it is true, that they’re beautiful just the way they are.

About The Author

Corlyn Voorhees is a Blast Correspondent and a Northeastern University journalism student

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