Intimate fashion brand Aerie has launched a new campaign, featuring models with various disabilities, medical conditions, and experiences showing off their natural beauty while modeling the brand’s undergarments.
Aerie has been working hard for years to make its name synonymous with self-love. In 2014, the brand launched #aerieREAL, announcing it would no longer be airbrushing or editing the pictures of their models. It also now has a section on its site featuring Instagram posts with the #aerieREAL hashtag from regular customers wearing its clothes.
In the past four years, its campaign to show real bodies in its advertising has expanded as well. Aerie’s website features models of many shapes, sizes, and colors. Many proudly bare scars, stretch marks, freckles, uneven skin tones, and cellulite, all things that would be unacceptable for many other retailers.
Diversity in modeling isn’t just about size, skin color, and blemishes, however. It’s also about illnesses, disabilities, and life experiences. The latest move by Aerie to support self-love is a swath of new models who are beautifully living with and displaying their various medical conditions and devices. Many people with insulin pumps or wheelchairs never see their bodies represented in fashion modeling, and they are overjoyed by Aerie’s campaign.
People took to Twitter to share not just their own stories, but also the stories of nieces and daughters with disabilities, who will now have these models to look up to.
https://twitter.com/_madelynn101/status/1016914981441474560
https://twitter.com/Mizz_j_smith/status/1016868719794978821
I know!!!!!!!!! this makes me want to go out in a bikini! or just feel normal♥️
— tea (@tayngy) July 11, 2018
Some of the models in the new campaign are also reacting online, sharing how proud they are to be part of it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BlEutdOjJ9Z/
A common thread in all these stories is pride and determination. Some of the models described their own struggle with insecurity, and thanked not just Aerie, but also the audience response to the campaign, for helping them make the world a more accepting place.
