Victoria's Secret model's backbend on the side of a cliff called 'totally reckless, foolish, irresponsible'
A Victoria’s Secret model’s back-bending Instagram stunt is making her followers a bit queasy.
On Thursday, Swedish model Kelly Gale posted a dramatic Instagram photo that depicted her, wearing a red sports bra and leggings, in a backbend — near the brink of a desert cliff. “Casual stretching on the edge,” she wrote to her 1.4M followers.
Most people said the shot, which has more than 24,000 likes, was stunning and “amazing,” scattering the post with likes and applause emojis. But some warned that the model, balancing close to the edge, was careless. “Be careful, people fall from there,” one person wrote. Another shared that a family member had fallen to their death in a similar situation and someone wrote, “Totally reckless, foolish, irresponsible, and a poor example of others.”
Gale, who, in addition to working for the lingerie brand has posed for Vogue Australia and V magazine, did not immediately respond to Yahoo Entertainment’s request for comment, nor did her representation.
Instagram is host to death-defying theatrics favored by travel bloggers and influencers, many of whom are criticized for endangering their lives for the sake of a photo.
Last year, Belgian travel influencers Camille Demyttenaere and Jean Hock, who run the Instagram page BackpackDiariez, posted a photo of themselves kissing while hanging out a moving train in Ella, Sri Lanka. “One of our wildest kisses,” they wrote in the caption, crediting “blind trust in each other” and their fun streak as motivation.
The image was called “utterly fake, a badly composited Photoshop” and critics claimed the couple was setting a poor example. The two later told Insider that the train ride from Ella to Kandy is famous for photo ops.
"We had seen many pictures on the internet of people hanging out of the doors so we were excited to try this and prepared for it in advance,” Demyttenaere told the outlet, adding that the train had been moving slowly, “at a walking speed.” She said the image was “a bit of an optical illusion” due to how the train was turning and the angle of the photographer.
Months earlier, travel bloggers Raquel and Miguel, who run explorerssaurus_ on Instagram, posed for the same type of photo, on the edge of an open train door and along the same route.
In another incident, according to the Washington Post, married travel bloggers Vishnu Viswanath, 29, and Meenakshi “Minaxi” Moorthy, 30, fell to their deaths in Yosemite National Park from Taft Point, which overlooks the Yosemite Valley. The couple fell about 800 feet “in an area with very steep terrain,” noted a National Park Service press release.
Raj Katta, a friend of the couple, told the Post that it was likely they were taking photos at the time of their death.
“They’re adventurous, but they always were thoughtful,” he said. “They know what they’re doing, they always had, but one instance changed everything.”
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
