A Saleslady Told a Teen She Needed Spanx. Her Mother’s Response Is Epic.

Lexi Harris posing in a Dillard’s changing room. (Photo: Megan Naramore Harris/Facebook)

There’s a pretty archetypical experience for when mothers and daughters shop together: eye-rolls, embarrassment, begging, and, eventually (fingers crossed!), bags of new clothes. But when Megan Naramore Harris went to the mall recently with her teenager Lexi, they got a lot more than they bargained for.

On the hunt for a gown for a formal in May, the pair went to Dillard’s at the Towne East Mall in Wichita, Kan. Megan found a red number with a bling-encrusted neckline, crisscross ruching on the chest, and a high leg slit, and although Lexi insisted it wasn’t her style, she tried it on anyway to make her parent happy. “I told her how grown up it made her look, and she smiled and told me this made her look too old but still, she let me take a picture,” Megan shared on Facebook in an open letter to the store alongside a photo of the teen posing with a hand on her hip.

While Lexi was smiling in the shot, things quickly took a turn. As Megan describes, a saleslady entered the changing room right after it was taken and insisted that the high school student needed to wear shapewear in order to pull off the dress. Megan then told her kid to change into her own clothes and “she was just fine without Spanx.” Meanwhile, the salesperson continued to argue as the mother-daughter duo made their way out of the store.

“I wish I had told you how many girls suffer from poor self image, and telling them they need something to make them perfect can be very damaging,” Megan retrospectively wrote to the salesperson. “My daughter is tall, she swims, runs, dances, and does yoga. She’s fit. She’s beautiful. She did not need you telling her that she is not perfect.” Megan composed the open letter in hopes of it getting shared and that her thoughts and feelings would get back to the offender so she would know for next time that she “should not say something like that to a girl ever again. You never know what negative or positive thoughts they are thinking about themselves.”

Since she shared the post to Facebook last week, it has been liked more than 320,000 times and shared to more than 50,000 users. The comments section of the post has also sparked a meaningful conversation about body image and a show of support for Lexi (Stormie Lynn Roberts even suggested that the saleslady “needs Spanx around her mouth to keep all that negative shenanigans in”).

Megan made assurances that while her post has gone viral, it was shared with her daughter’s permission, and Lexi is not embarrassed — she’s empowered.

Due to the overwhelming response, Dillard’s issued a statement saying that part of the store’s mission is to “help people feel good about themselves by enhancing the natural beauty found in all of us.” A representative for the company said, “We train our sales associates with the goal of creating a completely positive experience with each visit. It is certainly never our intent to offend our customers.” The company has also reached out to Megan and Lexi.

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