Bits #11
Things to read, watch, listen to, mull over
I’m going to keep things quick and spicy1 after Tuesday’s 4,000 word chunker (do I miss my 1500 newspaper word count? I do NOT!) but in answer to some of the excellent e-mails I received re: Victoria’s Secret:2
I haven’t had time to watch Tuesday’s show (this, by Selling Sexy co-author Chantal Fernandez, is good), but I have perused the pictures and I don’t think the show’s lack of oomph was about budgets (they booked Kate and Lila Moss - that’s an expensive double act) but rather, the by-product of an attempt at undone chic, c/o a new stylist, former French Vogue editor Emmanuelle Alt who is known for her artless, dishabille aesthetic. I don’t think it landed, but I think catwalk shows are a massive waste of money (and with all the flights to get the guests in, the carbon) so I’m a tough market in that area.
I don’t think VS has “gone woke gone broke” - god bless The Daily Mail and its achingly terrible business writers who don’t seem to know anything about business - if that was the case, Skims (diverse! progressive!) would be bombing, instead of going like the clappers. I think VS is selling less underwear simply because it has lost relevance in the same way a lot of brands which were once The Shit have lost relevance: Gap, Miss Sixty3, Juicy Couture, Abercrombie & Fitch, Jack Wills.4 You blow up, you flame out, it’s the way the market goes. Very few brands consistently remain market leaders. It’s nothing to do with Epstein, or Wexner, or Razek, imho, or because four of the catwalk models were curvier; it’s because the product just isn’t the most interesting product anymore. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s going to go bust. It’s still turning over more than a billion, I see no reason it won’t carry on.
I know we live in story-telling times - I love story-telling times! - but I don’t know if I think VS - or any brand - needs a female gaze to survive. I think it will always come down to how good the product is. I buy M&S bras because they are the most reliable, cost-efficient bras, not because I think there’s any type of gaze. Sometimes people don’t give a shit about the ‘brand story’, they just want a bra for under £20, y’know?
I have also received some very good entries for least sexy place in London and now demand to know your most sexy place in London. Tell me tell me tell me! One rule: you can’t choose Soho. It’s too easy.
I held off watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives because ever since I made Unreal I have been battling perma low-level reality fatigue.5 But then I caved and hit play on that eerie-as-fuck opener and watched the whole thing agog. Don’t mistake it for a Real Housewives/ Kardashians - this hits new notes. It’s about a group of 20-something Mormon influencers in Utah known loosely as ‘Mom Tok’, who made headlines a few years ago, when one of them revealed she had been ‘soft swinging’6. Naturally, a reality series was commissioned.
The embodied tension of being a young Mormon woman in 2024 and the seeming illogicality of church doctrine is fascinating. For example, alcohol and caffeine are forbidden, but plastic surgery is fine - as long as the nipping and tucking adheres to trad beauty standards - because the Mormon church is famously image conscious. Accordingly, most of the castmates have botox, fillers, lip jobs, swathes of hair extensions etc. Visually, it’s not unlike your regular reality show.
Exactly half of the castmates are divorced by their mid-20s, (for eg Layla, 22, newly divorced, has 2 children after she got married at 19), because most of them were ‘strongly encouraged’ to get married as teenagers, once their parents realised they were sexually active (pre-marital sex being verboten in the church). As part of its laws of chastity, sex education in the church is abstinence-only, aka non-existent, resulting in a lot of teenage pregnancies (for eg Mikaela, 23, mother of 3, gave birth to her first child aged 16.)
I wondered how the producers felt filming this, because you could make enough bunting to decorate the whole of Utah out of the red flags on this show. Like many religions, Mormonism is patriarchal and the young men on the show frequently refer to religious texts to bolster controlling, verging on abusive, behaviour. Taylor’s chaotic attempts for agency are treated as ‘acting out’, rather than a desperate attempt to make her own decisions about her own life. “Zac is very controlling, but I’ve never met anyone who loves me this much”, says Jen, 24, mother of two. It’s giving Spencer and Heidi Pratt. I hope the aftercare is in place.
I kept thinking about that roman empire meme while reading this profile of Paul Mescal by Gabriella Paiella for GQ, which is a very good piece of writing (“so many young men have adopted his style and haircut that the world is now filled with Mescal doppelgängers… At a tortilla restaurant in Madrid last year, I saw a whole gang of Paul Mescals walk in together”), very possibly trumped by the accompanying fetish fashion shoot. What in the jesus mary and joseph is the poor dude wearing?
One of mine and my husband’s favourite micro-hobbies in the mid 2010s was to go into Zara Men and put together the most batshit outfits for him we could find. I think the offering is probably quite good now, but a decade ago the aesthetic was sort of italianate military sex party. Reading GQ, I am frequently reminded of that. It’s like £900 patent hoof sandals, £4,000 diamante vests and £69,000 alligator toothbrush holders7 - wildly impractical fashion for readers who mostly just need a decent wool jumper and a nice peacoat. I love it.
This piece by Kate McCusker on how an objectively small country become a literary powerhouse is so interesting (and also quite lol). It turns out the only people who aren’t surprised by Ireland’s disproportionately large contribution to literature, are the Irish.
“It has contributed four Nobel literature laureates and six Booker prize winners; its capital was the fourth Unesco City of Literature in 2010; and it’s home to a booming network of magazines, publishers, bookshops, festivals and (whisper it) decently funded libraries. But Ireland’s outsize output of brilliant writing is less of a surprise to the people who live and work here than it is to those across the water who are trying to parse its overrepresentation on prize lists or the cultural dominance of Sally Rooney.”
Some reasons for its cultural heft include:
Irish people love to tell stories/ entertain
the arts council cares about literature and invests heavily in bursaries for young writers
writers are finally free to write about the issues that were considered taboo for many years (this made me think of Claire Keegan’s novella about the laundries)
a small industry of excellent literary magazines like The Stinging Fly (which Sally Rooney used to edit)
unlike in the UK, as I’m constantly wanging on about furiously, Ireland’s public libraries are not being closed at the rate of knots, which means more people are reading (and readers make writers)
“we all read like hell!” - Antony Farrel, publisher of The Lilliput Press
In 1999, Tiger Electronics sold over 14 million Furbies. I begged for one for my 12th birthday (surely too old for an animatronic toy) and when I took it to boarding school, it cried its weird little Furbish cry all night long. My roommate (now my son’s godmother) and I were bereft. And exhausted. Eventually, the nun who sat at the end of the landing (yes, it was the 1920s, thank you for asking), insisted on removing its batteries. After cruelly disembowelling my furry friend, I promptly lost interest.
