The day I ‘stripped off ’ for a pop video
I’d spent my life believing a ‘perfect’ body was all I had to offer the world
Acouple of months ago, I received a message that was entirely unexpected. It wasn’t “would you be free to take the job of Brexit secretary” unexpected, but in the grand scheme of things – things being messages that mostly involve invitations to school coffee mornings, cervical screenings and to buy three tubs of Rachel’s Organic Yogurt for the price of two on Ocado – it was unexpected.
“We are starting a campaign around a track for Little Mix, and creating a video around it. They’d love you to be in it … the video will be shot by Rankin. Would you be free to join them?”
I read this message several times, in an attempt to process it. Once I had ascertained that it was not a practical joke, and that the sender did indeed work for Little Mix, I started to wonder why on earth they would want me in one of their music videos. Little Mix, for those of you who would rather listen to Radio 4 than Radio 1, are one of the biggest pop groups on the planet, the Spice Girls of their generation, quadruple platinum and also very popular on the other side of the Atlantic.
The band – Jesy Nelson, 27, Leigh-anne Pinnock, 27, Jade
Thirlwall, 25 and Perrie Edwards, 25 – won The X Factor in 2011, and last year were named by Debrett’s as some of the most influential people in the UK. My eight-year-old niece is obsessed with them. Obsessed. I assumed that their music videos would be in the same vein as the majority of music videos: glossy, sexy, slick and a little bit dispiriting for normal women like me.
But it was explained to me that Little Mix were keen to buck the trend. They wanted to write a track based on their own insecurities and body confidence issues; and they wanted the video of the song to include women who were working to empower other women. Which is where I came in, in my capacity, I suppose, as someone who has run a marathon in her underwear (have I mentioned that?) and talks about her experiences with mental illness.
So off I went on the appointed date to a cavernous studio in west London, where I found myself experiencing the unusual sensation of sitting in hair and make-up, having my make-up taken off me, and my hair left exactly as it was – washed that morning, brushed, but certainly not blow-dried, because who really has the time? I was bundled off to “wardrobe”, who handed me a very plain grey dress. And that was it. There were no painful heels, no false eyelashes, no uncomfortable frocks designed to appeal to the male gaze.
Strip – for that is the name of the song – was not going to feature the girls twirling round poles and removing items of clothing in a provocative manner, as you might come to expect from a 21stcentury pop band. Instead, it is a track about peeling back all the layers that women are expected to apply to themselves in order to fit societal norms. The chorus – which we would be singing with them – sums up the sentiment of the song: “Take off all my make-up, cos I love what’s under it / Rub off all your words, don’t give a uh I’m over it / Jiggle all this weight, yeah, you know I love all of this / Finally love me naked, sexiest when I’m confident”.
I was one of about 15 women who had been invited to take part in the video. There was Nimco Ali, the founder of Daughters Of Eve, which campaigns against female genital mutilation; Kris Hallenga, who has been living with terminal cancer for almost a decade and created the charity Coppafeel!, which encourages young people to check their breasts; Felicity Hayward, a plus size model and founder of the Self Love Movement; Maxim Magnus, a trans model who campaigns for the LGBTQ+ community; Jane Kenyon, a fiftysomething entrepreneur and founder of Girls Out Loud, a social enterprise to help raise aspirations of teenage girls; Janey Du Sauzay, a young detective constable; Nia the Light, an Insta star who helps women to find their inner power; and Megan Jayne Crabbe, a survivor of anorexia who has become a body positive campaigner, amassing over a million followers on Instagram along the way. The band’s mums were also there to take part.
The cynical among us might view this as a group manufactured by Simon Cowell exploiting the ever-growing trend for authenticity. In reality, the girls – who I must remember to call women, for that is what they are – are challenging the normal narrative. Having recently left Cowell’s record label, Syco, they are subverting expectations. Chatting to the band, it became clear that this desire to scrub off make-up had come from deep within themselves, and not some marketing men above them pulling their strings. They have grown up with filters, they have come of age in a sidebar of shame world, and they don’t want to play that game anymore. And so the video begins, almost poignantly, with the four women sitting together, some of the words they have been called online painted on their naked, unairbrushed bodies: fat, ugly, common, slutty, tart, flabby, bossy, insignificant, and so on and so on.
Megan Crabbe put it perfectly when she emailed me the reason it meant so much for her to be in the video: “I remember being 16 and idolising the women in music videos. There was one video in particular that had the most impossibly beautiful girl in it, wearing tiny denim shorts and a string bikini top. I was only about a year into my recovery from anorexia then, and I spent the next few months engaging in all kinds of disordered eating and obsessive exercise because I genuinely felt like I had to look like this girl.
“I’d spent my whole life believing that a ‘perfect’ body was all I had to offer the world, so she became the goal. And after her there was another, then another, along with all kinds of punishment towards my own body for not matching up. I never would have believed you if you told me that one day I would make it into a music video for one of the biggest groups in the world, wearing a size 16, and loving every part of my soft, jiggling body. The thought that maybe another 16-year-old will see the video and get the message they are already worthy of being celebrated as they are, is beyond words.”
The rise of social media and apps such as Facetune have made it a frightening time to be a young woman. But as I watched the video and all the different female bodies contained within it, I realised that it is also a tremendously exciting one. I am proud to be a part of it. And I am hopeful that one day, music videos like this will not be the exception, but the norm.