“We start with some nice deep breaths.” The Teutonic embodiment of nineties feminine perfection and I bend at the knees and arc our hands above our heads. Behind her, the aquamarine water of St. Barts, or terracotta rooftops of Prague, depending on the day of filming. Video cameras crane to capture her every lunge and squat. I mimic her from my parents’ basement den, her moving image beamed to me from a wood-paneled eighties television that hides the sump-pump hole in the concrete floor. Behind me, sticky seventies photo albums of camera-flash red-eyed babies, long-forgotten Atari cartridges. We are on two sides of a mirror..
Claudia Schiffer: Perfectly Fit is the name of the video series. There are four tapes. (Yes, tapes—VHS, fed with a satisfying tactile thunk into the flapping mouth of a VCR, a machine that whirs and churns the slick film.) Each tape is named for a segment of the body singled out for focus: Legs, Abs, Buns, Arms. This is the strict order I keep, one workout per night, spacing out Legs and Buns because they work many of the same muscles. My husband helped me digitize the workouts, so they now live as icons on my laptop (plus a back-up thumb drive; they’re precious, and no factory on Earth produces the tapes anymore). But I still have the VHS cassettes in their pastel slip-on cases, stacked under my bed in their proper sequence.
For two separate years of my life, I completed three hundred and sixty-five of these workouts within the year, doubling up if I missed a day or planned to miss a day due to a road trip, say, or sickness. Two entire years of wall calendars displaying one of these four words pencil-scrawled in the upper-left corner for each day: Legs, Abs, Buns, Arms. My gym-rat friends and my power-lifter dad have lectured me about the importance of ‘rest days.’ I believe in this, the scientific soundness of giving your muscles a time-out to avoid injury and allow them to mend stronger, but I never took rest days, even when I hurt. I needed the ritual.
Legs, Abs, Buns, Arms—like a prayer, for thirty years now.
By this point Claudia feels to me like a friend. The Claudia in the tapes, I mean. She’s been there with me, in my parents’ basement den, in my teenage years and during my post-layoff spell when I was back home again at thirty. But also in every apartment I’ve lived in as an adult. We’ve synchronized-crunched together through that era I now refer to as the ‘Bachelorette Christie’ days—days (mostly nights) of too much clubbing and drinking, of men who wanted to hook up but did not want a girlfriend, or did not want me as their girlfriend. She’s been with me in both of the townhouses I’ve lived in with my now-husband, and on a vacation we took in the Rockies to distract us from how sad we were to not have a baby.
“These really burn, but they’re very effective,” Claudia says during the mat portion of the Legs tape, about a type of sideways leg lift that feels unnatural but will ultimately sculpt our hamstrings and glutes. We burn together.
I know these tapes—I’ve now quoted Claudia twice without having to refer to the tapes even once to make sure I’m correct. I know the FBI anti-piracy warning at the beginning, followed by the commercial that implores you to buy all four tapes in the series “and work to perfection.” I know the part you’re supposed to fast-forward once you’ve watched it once—the intro from Claudia’s trainer, Kathy Kaehler, about how Claudia wanted a workout she could take with her “when she’s running from hotel to hotel.” They say this as if Claudia is James Bond, or a U.N. ambassador. The series was filmed when Claudia was a hot commodity, the Guess jeans girl, the recipient of Wayne and Garth’s crotchal “scha-wing!” salute.
Perhaps surprisingly, what keeps me coming back to the tapes is not the unattainable, genetic, nothing-to-do-with-these-exercises ‘perfection’ that Claudia was born into. Until middle age, I was a naturally slim ‘ectomorph,’ and more or less OK with the body I had. Also perhaps surprisingly—to Americans, at least—is Claudia’s blue-eyed blonde, button-nose looks, the kind we associate with the popular girl in any high-school movie out of Hollywood, paired with an endearing-to-me soft-spokenness. Claudia is German, and it’s her trainer who does most of the talking, in the firm, authoritative voice we’ve come to expect from fitness gurus.
When Claudia speaks, it’s to offer a few simple words of encouragement. “OK, you did it!” she says at the end of one tape, unscripted and earnest, before the cool-down. The rest of the time, she’s going through the motions—which are really her trainer’s motions, her trainer’s prescription for keeping a Victoria’s Secret bod in million-dollar shape—in subdued silence. At a time when Cindy Crawford and a lot of other Swimsuit Issue models were releasing similar tapes, exemplifying fitness ideals as well as Type A personalities, I find Claudia’s passivity (possibly attributed, at least somewhat, to a language barrier between her and American audiences) both relatable and charming. I don’t think I would keep doing these tapes if she were peppy or brash.
If I needed the routine, I also needed Claudia’s muted softness. I needed a quiet space to open in my mind while I went through motions that were not mine.
*
I have done these tapes a lot. I have done these tapes too much.
Legs, Abs, Buns, Arms.
Recently I had to stop. (We’re only “taking a break,” Claudia and I; this is what I tell myself.) My bones started to hurt. My hips ached so bad at night that I had to sleep with a hard cushion between my knees. It was from all those repetitive movements, or so medical articles on the internet tell me. Lifting my legs in exactly the same way, three sets of ten on each side, per leg-lift style (some on the mat, some standing), every other night for years. No variation or novelty in the movements. Grim routine. Blessed routine.
I stopped doing the tapes. My bones got better.
I’ve now moved the desktop icons—my digitized versions of the tapes—into a folder where I keep other less-used items. The cassettes under my bed continue to accrue dust. These days for exercise I mostly just walk. It’d be foolish to start the tapes up again, now that the pain is gone. I know that. Plus—news flash—there are other kinds of workouts. Non-Claudia ones.
But of course, I miss them. I miss Claudia. I miss knowing exactly what was coming next. Maybe I’ll get my joints replaced with titanium, like my mom with her knees. Metal hips, metal knees. Maybe I’ll let the future in, at last.
Although that’s another aspect of the tapes that binds me to them: they’re a time capsule. While bearing a production date of 1995, the tapes are themselves a throwback, in aesthetic and vibe, to the early 1990s, a special pocket of time before the nineties began in earnest, before the nineties had figured themselves out, before grunge even. You can hear this in the tapes’ house-heavy soundtrack (think C+C Music Factory, “Here We Go”), full of chipper and unironic use of synthesizers and their now-hackneyed effects. This music has a cushioned softness, like the puffy white high-tops Claudia wears in some of the tapes, because in many ways the early nineties were still the late eighties.
The nineties feel like home to me. I started junior high in 1990 and graduated from college in 2000, so all my most pivotal and angst-drippy years, as well as the music and pop culture that shaped me, are bookended within that decade. The first love of my young life took place in the summer and fall of 1992. I always felt that I’d wrecked it, that I lost that sensitive boy, with his sad blue-green eyes and guitar-playing fingers and headbanger trench coat, when I began to freeze up around him, in fear of saying the wrong thing and losing him, which is how I lost him.
So more than the Zen of repetition or finding a kindred spirit in Claudia’s quiet ways, maybe it comes down to this: I can’t let go of a certain time in my life. I’ve bought old magazines—Seventeen, YM—from this period on eBay. To this day my uniform is Converse chucks and flannel.
The tapes are a portal. Sometimes during a workout I’d think: Wow, look at that, the sun is shining in St. Barts, on the rooftops of Prague. That big white star was casting its glow on Claudia, and also on me, wherever I was on that day, pulling harmless pranks with my flannel-clad friends, or going out to dinner with my family, or asleep in my childhood room. The news of the world that reached Claudia, in a rolled-up newspaper thunked at the foot of her hotel-room door, possibly gossiped about by the hairstylists and make-up artists who worked on her, was the same news that would reach me on that day, in my dad’s breakfast copy of the Washington Post, blaring from the TV after he got home from work that night. I was alive, somewhere out there, living my little life.
*
Push in the tape and press Play. Breathe. It’s the nineties, and your high-school friends are still your friends, and there’s a chance you might get your boyfriend back. You see your parents every day, go to dinner-and-a-movie with them on Fridays. It’s a routine. Your childhood bedroom is still your childhood bedroom, only thinly disguised with your magazine cut-outs and Oxy astringent pads and ironic teenage kitsch. The worst things you will ever do in your life haven’t happened yet. Go through the motions; you know exactly what’s coming. And when it’s all over, rewind and do it again. Ignore your aging bones.
-Christie Chapman
Christie Chapman is a writer and mom in Springfield, VA. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Lascaux Review, Ghost Parachute, ARTWIFE, and elsewhere, and was nominated for the Best Microfiction anthology. Her flash fiction appears in the 2026 Ghost Parachute anthology and The Lascaux Prize anthology.
“We start with some nice deep breaths.” The Teutonic embodiment of nineties feminine perfection and I bend at the knees and arc our hands above our heads. Behind her, the aquamarine water of St. Barts, or terracotta rooftops of Prague, depending on the day of filming. Video cameras crane to capture her every lunge and squat. I mimic her from my parents’ basement den, her moving image beamed to me from a wood-paneled eighties television that hides the sump-pump hole in the concrete floor. Behind me, sticky seventies photo albums of camera-flash red-eyed babies, long-forgotten Atari cartridges. We are on two sides of a mirror..