"I stood there in silence": Young woman "size shamed" by Victoria's Secret staff.

A young woman has penned a powerful open letter to Victoria’s Secret claiming she was body-shamed by a sales assistant at a store in Cardiff, Wales.

Abbie Walsh-Greenfield, 20, said she was just browsing the store’s lingerie with a friend when an encounter with a sales assistant left her feeling shamed.

The UK woman said she wasn’t expecting necessarily to find items to fit her plus-sized frame, but had picked out a pair of “stunning” shorts she thought about trying on.

She quickly changed her mind after the sales assistant questioned her on her size.

Abbie said she was standing with her friend, shorts in hand, when a “very important looking and tall” sales assistant approached, stopping about 2m away.

“Hi.. Are you aware of the sizing in this store?” the sales assistant asked Abbie.

Describing the incident on her blog named ‘Dream0Graphy’, Abbie said she “stood there in silence for about 10 seconds” before responding she was aware and then “shuffled away, with my tail between my legs”.

“She smiled, and it just all of a sudden looked so fake. And she had a headset on that made her look so important, and the way she stood about a metre or two away from me, made me feel like she didn’t genuinely want to help me,” Abbie wrote.

"I didn’t even want to hold the shorts anymore... walking back over to the rail that I picked up the cutest bed shorts ever from, and I put them back down," she recalled.

Abbie said she chose not to make a complaint, but the incident had "ruined" her friend's experience at the store.

However, she was not about to let the interaction stop her from lingerie shopping.

Much like a modern equivalent to the scene in Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts' character goes back into the store than wouldn't serve her, Abbie said she visited a rival store where she had a better experience. She then told Victoria's Secret about it online.

Mamamia Out Loud wasn’t happy when Victoria’s Secret tried to pass this model off as ‘diverse’.

"They were helpful and informative and actually did what they could to help. They made me feel comfortable."

Abbie said she could only assume the staff member's comment was a suggestion that nothing in the store would fit a woman of her size.

"I don’t actually know what the sales assistant meant by her comment, but surely there are no two ways about it. I can’t even imagine another sentence that she could have tried to say," she said.

She worried that the comment could have hurt someone with less confidence than herself.

"I just think that it’s important that it happened to me and not anyone else."

"Who knows what could have happened if this passing comment from her, had been said to someone with extremely low self-esteem, someone who couldn’t handle it?"

Victoria Secret responded to Abbie with a comment on her blog, asking her to call or email their customer service team.

"We sincerely apologise for your experience in our Cardiff store. We would like the opportunity to speak with you," the comment read.

You can read Abbie's entire open letter here.