In the 2014 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, there is a quiet moment before the models walk the runway in their costume lingerie: The women huddle around the corporate executive Ed Razek, a man instrumental in choosing them for the final lineup. He is in his 60s, graying, with a rich person’s tan; the women glow with body shimmer and would tower over him if he were not standing on a low stage. “This is simply the most special runway in the world,” he tells them, “and it has no equivalent.”
In 2012, the casting director John Pfeiffer made participation in the show seem like women’s collective daydream. “You have no idea,” he insisted. “Every girl wants to do this. Even if they pretend they don’t want to do it, everybody wants it.” Earlier he explained that there were only a select few who would ever meet the company’s standards — women who were “just perfect.”
Did every girl want to be a Victoria’s Secret model? It was almost an accusation, or a pre-emptive challenge to people who might consider themselves above the spectacle. The brand understood that while sex appeal can be dynamic, conventional beauty is flat and conclusive. Victoria’s Secret leaned into traditional beauty standards, exploiting them to the apex. For a while, this investment paid off.
The company started as a single store in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1970s and was acquired by the retail magnate Leslie Wexner in 1982. By the 1990s, after Wexner changed the marketing scheme to sell to the women who would be wearing the goods and not their husbands, Victoria’s Secret was America’s most successful lingerie retailer. Its first show, an attempt to rub shoulders with the fashion world, was a modest presentation at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1995, where models wore chic lingerie and high heels, mostly under robes and cardigans. A commercial introduced in 1996 for the “Angels” underwear collection played so well that the company doubled down on the theme, contracting a small number of women to be exclusive models for the brand. From the beginning, these Victoria’s Secret Angels were meant to be more otherworldly than aspirational.
It’s hard to reconcile the earlier events with what the show eventually became: a showcase for multimillion-dollar jewel-encrusted “Fantasy Bras,” increasingly impractical slip-on wings and high-production performances from ultrafamous musical acts. From its first televised event in 2001, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show became appointment viewing for a significant number of Americans, peaking in 2011 with an audience of more than 10 million. In its most popular years, the show coded its models’ thinness in the language of fitness-speak. The brand invited women to “train like an Angel,” even as the fantasy was about being born into an effortless body.
In 2018, during the height of the #MeToo movement, Victoria’s Secret was in a defensive position, managing declining sales and hamstrung by its own legacy. “The show is a fantasy,” Razek told Vogue, defending the brand for its decision not to cast plus-size or transgender models. In the course of two years, Wexner was investigated internally for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and left the company, Razek retired, the show was canceled and years of sexual harassment claims against Razek were revealed (which he denied). Models like Erin Heatherton and Bridget Malcolm, meanwhile, spoke to the high personal cost of participating in the show and the mental toll of never being seen as thin or angelic enough. In 2021, the chief executive admitted that the company had “lost relevance with the modern woman.”
This fall, the show returned to screens after its spectacular fall from grace. Victoria’s Secret seemed to be figuring out how to market to women all over again. The resulting show raised the question: Which fantasies are still permissible?
From the beginning, Victoria’s Secret Angels were meant to be more otherworldly than aspirational.
The return of the show marked a critical step in the company’s broader rebranding, announced in 2021. At first, the Angels were replaced with the “VS Collective,” a diverse group of athletes, activists, actors and models. Ad campaigns bordered on apologetic. The rollout was panned as a business and marketing failure, too late to register as anything but desperation. Fans pleaded to bring back the Angels, and the company agreed to a both/and solution. The show would come back, but it would be inclusive, it said, by which it meant “celebrating and supporting all women” — i.e., broadening its cast to include different kinds of models.
Throughout the fashion and beauty industries, there has been a sluggish march toward representation — or expanding depictions of attractiveness in advertising and media — since Dove launched its 2005 “real beauty” campaign, which drew on company research that showed that only 4 percent of women considered themselves beautiful. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition had Ashley Graham, a plus-size model, on one of its three covers in 2016 and continues to feature models who deviate from the magazine’s norm. Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty lingerie brand, which was introduced in 2018, has now produced three televised runway shows, earning praise for casting men, transgender models, pregnant models and models with disabilities. The brand resonates with young consumers; Victoria’s Secret recently poached Savage x Fenty’s chief executive, in part to expand its “cultural influence.”
Gigi Hadid, whom Razek and his team first cast in 2015 when she was 20, is the first to walk in the new Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, dressed in a small romper, wraparound stilettos and an enormous pair of pink wings. The wings, the heels, the nicks on the catwalk that are visible from the aerial shots — it all looks, well, cheap. As it goes on, there are a small handful of women who are plus-size, although almost all of them are recognizable supermodels like Graham and Paloma Elsesser.
It’s hard to miss that none of these women are in the hallmark lingerie. Elsesser has a large bow tied around her midsection; a different model is taken out of the underwear section altogether and put into a pair of leggings. Both the sense of self-consciousness about what it’s doing and the inability to invest millions of dollars into a glamorous production has more in common with the first show than the last.
When Tyra Banks pops out of the floor in a catsuit, throwing her arms out like a victor as confetti rains down, the questions I had before the show — about whether the company could address its sources of pain while keeping its business imperative intact — started to seem beside the point. Never mind that Banks herself has received criticism for the toxic culture of “America’s Next Top Model.” This new show was less of a reboot than a commemorative lap, like watching an old band indulge in a reunion tour, sounding slightly off-pitch and looking a little confused.
For a moment, it felt as if Victoria’s Secret had indeed aged out of relevance and dragged its statistically anomalous vision of a beautiful woman with it. It was embarrassing, more a sign of imminent death than of insensitivity. But the show triggered something in my social media algorithm, and I started to get floods of content from women and girls: mood boards of a bygone bubble-gum era #vsangel, tutorials on how to put on the old “bombshell” makeup, teenagers wistful for not having grown up in the 2000s to experience the Angels — the real Angels, not whatever this was. The idea that there were perfect women out there, a group so beautiful that they floated above the tediousness of cultural discourse and aesthetic trends, was intoxicating enough to keep alive.
Scout Brobst is an American writer living in England, currently earning a master’s degree in philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Dazed Magazine and The Baffler, among others.
Source photographs for illustration above: Landon Nordeman for The New York Times; Evan Agostini/Getty Images; Angela Weiss/AFP, via Getty Images.
The post The Weird Persistence of the Victoria’s Secret ‘Angel’ appeared first on New York Times.
