Dear Friends,

Last weekend, we got to go up to Fort Wayne to Glenbrook Mall to do some shopping.  I browsed Barnes & Noble for a while, and then ended up just walking around. I was getting really thirsty, so I set off looking for the little convenience store I had purchased a drink from last time we were there. I couldn’t find it, so I ended up going to one of the directories to look for the listing. To my dismay, the store was no longer there. I guess they put a little Asian place in where it used to be. I started to walk away, when the advertisement on the opposite side of the directory caught my eye.

I stopped. I stared. I got a little bit angry. And then I took a picture.

For the past few years, magazines have aimed to include pictures of women of all shapes and sizes—and not just the ones they label “curvy”, either.  I have seen real, average-weight women featured in fashion spreads without any mention to the fact that they were…well…normal looking!  There have been campaigns for designers and agencies to ban size-zero models. Some places have adopted this policy, while others have chosen to stick with the less-than-healthy looking girls.  Overall, though, the trend toward worshipping the super-skinny female form had been slowly eroding.

I was surprised to see this advertisement, especially from one of my favorite clothing stores, but what really ticked me off was the wording.  The ad is for skinny jeans, and so the phrase “Live in Skinny” appears over to the right of the American Eagle logo.  This just amazed me.  It seems so blatantly obvious that they purposely distorted the image so that the model appears to have tiny legs.  I wonder what the mind behind this idea was thinking.  Did they think that I would see the picture and rush in to the store to buy jeans so that my legs would look like this?  Even if I did believe that lie, once I tried on the jeans, I would certainly be disappointed by the fact that my legs did not look like the model’s.  I wonder how many girls did exactly that.  I also can’t help but be saddened by the possibility that some poor girl decided she needed to lose weight because her body did not resemble that of the model’s.

I haven’t seen anything online about this photo yet, but I hope that people speak up about it, and I really hope American Eagle decides to yank the ad.  Until then, I won’t be buying anything from them, and I will be encouraging others to cease giving them business, as well.

To end on a happy note, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous lately.  If I had to guess, I’d say it has been between 70 and 74 for the past several days.  Where I was raised, anything below 95 is unheard of in August! So praise God for the beautiful weather!  I hope you’re all enjoying it, too.  )

Love in Christ,

-Emily