How One Blogger Pulled Down Victoria's Secret Geisha Lingerie

- September 26, 2012

Victoria's Secret Geisha Lingerie with fan.

How One Blogger Pulled Down Victoria's Secret Geisha Lingerie

Nina Jacinto has made Victoria Secret to pull what has taken hundreds of employees, thousands of hours and millions of dollars to launch? The controversial Geisha Lingerie. Why?

Jacinto, a 26-year-old Bay Area blogger recalled that two weeks ago she saw a link to Victoria's Secret's Go East line on the blog, Angry Asian Man.
"Hooray for exotic orientalist bull----," Jacinto posted with a link to the "Asian-inspired" lingerie line's centerpiece: "The Sexy Little Geisha," a mesh teddy that comes with an obi belt, chopsticks and a fan. She found it offensive and promptly criticized it.

"It's the kind of overt racism masked behind claims of inspired fashion and exploring sexual fantasy that makes my skin crawl," she wrote in her article published September 6 on the blog Racialicious, a site for commentary on the intersection of culture and race.

"There's a long-standing trend to represent Asian women as hypersexualized objects of fantasy," wrote Jacinto.

Within two weeks, the lingerie disappeared from Victoria's Secret as the feminist website Bust checked and a Victoria's Secret rep lied that the teddy had simply "sold out". The Frisky's Jessica Wakemen and Huffington Post also picked up the story and the Daily Mail noted that the teddy and the Go East line in its entirety had been removed from the company website and replaced with the main product page.

"I never thought they would pull the Geisha outfit off the market," Nina Jacinto told Piper Weiss of Yahoo! Shine.

"I imagine there were a number of factors that went into that decision."
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