Oh, the great Victoria's Secret bralette debacle of 2016. Or, bralettegate, if you prefer. Unfamiliar? Let me update you. The lingerie brand introduced a line of bralettes last month, AKA delicate lacy bras with little to no support. They're encouraging women to wear them as both bras and tops—for festival season, of course. But while the bras are pretty, the brand's kind of missed the mark when it comes to marketing. Customers have noticed.

When VS declared in their campaign, "No padding needed!" it pissed off a lot of women who have big boobs. They kind of need padding—or some kind of support.

And some customers felt the brand was being a bit hypocritical. They've sold bras with padding for years—and they've sold women on the idea that va-va-voom boobs were sexy, too. They whispered it in ads of women dancing in slow motion to strange instrumental music. But now, VS window displays declare, "No Padding Is Sexy Now!" with pictures of models in the bralettes. Some people felt treated like idiots.

But let's look at the many things happening here. Did the marketing on the bralette campaign make a misstep? Yes. The language used by the brand is poorly chosen. It seems to insinuate that no padding is sexy now, and that it wasn't before, therefore making a dig at women who weren't wearing padded bras between the time the Earth was created and now. Sorry, cavewomen—you apparently weren't sexy. And by not creating bralettes with support, they don't offer women with boobs bigger than a B cup a chance to try out the trend. It's a bit exclusive.

Is the brand doing some good in their new bralette campaign? Yes. The windows of Victoria's Secret have long been filled with pictures of women with A-cup boobs pushed to new heights in padded bras all in the name of sexy. The fact that they're showing small breasts in bras with no padding is a good thing (Of course, it's still the same thin women in the windows, but that's a whole other debacle). For all the women with DDs who can't wear bralettes without padding, there's women with A-cup boobs who can't fill out a padded bra without feeling like they have two pillows on their chest. The bralettes give those ladies a chance to find something that's comfortable and pretty.

What bralettegate really teaches us is that we can't define sexy, and we can't say what all women need or don't need when it comes to a bra. Sexy is a padded bra, sexy is a bralette, sexy is a sports bra, sexy is no bra, sexy is an A-cup, sexy is a G-cup—sexy is whatever makes you feel confident, comfortable, and good in your own skin.

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