After becoming a TikTok star, singer/songwriter Jax has her first big radio hit, “Victoria’s Secret.” She was inspired to write the song after Chelsea, the girl she babysits, was told by a friend that she looked “too fat and too flat” in a Victoria’s Secret bikini. Jax says she felt writing the song was a “responsibility” — but didn’t think it would be a “movement.”
“I had Victoria’s Secret, the concept, in my notes for ever, and I … could never find the right words, so I just gave up on it,” she tells ABC Audio. She says she didn’t feel she was in a place to preach body positivity: I’m not, even now, in a place where I’m feeling super body positive.”
But Jax says Chelsea’s story “made my blood boil.”
“This was the first time I felt like it was more a responsibility to Chelsea and her friends and kids that age to talk about it, now that I have a platform,” Jax notes. She especially didn’t want Chelsea to have the body issues she had at that age.
“My friends and I were racing for the thigh gap. We would eat ice cubes to see [if] you could lose 5 pounds quicker,” Jax admits. So, she says, “Not only for mental health reasons, but for physical health, like, I could not watch her start that.”
The success of the song, however, has taken her by surprise.
“I didn’t expect it to turn into people of all ages, shape, sizes telling their own backstory about their own body issues, and self-love and dysmorphia, eating disorders and all this stuff,” she says. “So we kind of, in our own little funny relationship, started a movement!”
Jax is currently working on her debut album.
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