Erin Heatherton: I was told I had to lose weight for Victorias Secret shows

Publish date: 2024-05-12

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This ^^ is a photo of Erin Heatherton walking the runway for the 2013 Victoria’s Secret show in New York. Erin was one of Victoria’s Secret’s go-to models for several years. I always associate Erin with the brand because of her ill-fated relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio – he does tend to pick out the 20-something blondes from the Victoria’s Secret catalogues or runways. Anyway, Erin has been done with VS for a few years, which I didn’t realize. Erin spoke to Motto about her decision to walk away from VS because… they kept telling her she needed to lose weight. Look at that header photo again.

Erin Heatherton might be a model, but that doesn’t mean she’s immune to feeling bad about herself—particularly when, a few years into her modeling career, Heatherton says she started facing pressure from others to drop pounds.

“My last two Victoria’s Secret shows, I was told I had to lose weight,” she says. “I look back like, ‘Really?’” (Victoria’s Secret didn’t respond to our requests for comment on this.)

Heatherton says she initially worked hard trying to please the people she was working for by eating healthy and exercising twice a day. But while preparing for her last Victoria’s Secret show in 2013, her body “just wouldn’t do it,” she says. “I was really depressed because I was working so hard and I felt like my body was resisting me. And I got to a point where one night I got home from a workout and I remember staring at my food and thinking maybe I should just not eat.”

Shortly after that show, Heatherton parted ways with Victoria’s Secret. She says she went through a lot of self-questioning, wondering what was next for her. She also took that time to really focus on listening to her body.

“I realized I couldn’t go out into the world—parading my body and myself in front of all these women who look up to me—and tell them that this is easy and simple and everyone can do this. I’m willing to sacrifice my pride, in a sense, and my privacy because I know that if I don’t speak about it, I could be withholding information that would really help women,” she says. “It hurts too much to keep it in, and that’s why I’m not keeping it in now.”

[From Motto]

Is it just me or do we keep finding out more and more about Victoria’s Secret being sort of shady? Remember the Jourdan Dunn mess last year? And in 2014-15, Doutzen Kroes, Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevingne quit working with VS too. Anyway, I think it’s really awful, gross and disgusting that Victoria’s Secret executives or organizers were telling Erin Heatherton to lose weight. You know they’ve said that to other women too. It just… sucks.

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Photos courtesy of WENN.

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