If Icarus wore lingerie
A historical dive into Victoria's Secret, ahead of the lingerie giant's catwalk show tonight
Almost a decade ago, I put on my sexiest dress (a Gucci leather mini dress bought from a sample sale for 1/20th of the RRP) and headed to the least sexy area in London (Earls Court)1 for the UK’s first ever Victoria’s Secret show. At the time, I was a fashion columnist and editor at The Sunday Times Style. It was a job that granted me access to moments like this. Everyone wanted a ticket to the VS show - it was like getting your hands on a proof of Intermezzo2 - even though most of us didn’t know much about VS, beyond the fact that all the new Insta girls were Angels.
Victoria’s Secret was a distinctly American brand - and unlike Abercrombie, it had never really translated into the shopping habits of British millennials. I’d shopped there once, as a 19-year-old on my own in New York3, but none of my friends wore any of their underwear to my knowledge and PINK was too cutesy (or we were too grimey). I imagine the show in London was designed to change all that. But as these optics-led marketing extravaganzas usually are, it was about as exciting as a fart trapped under a duvet.
In its defence, VS is not alone in this. I have found a strange truth in life, that the sexier a party looks, the more of a snoozefest it tends to be. A couple of years ago, I interviewed a young actor who told me (off the record, sigh) that she was shocked by how dull The Met Gala was: nobody ate, nobody chatted, they were just all just on their phones, she said, incredulous. It’s nothing like the pictures! I thought back to when I used to attend The Fashion Awards (then known as The British Fashion Awards) and I could never believe how little food there was (how bad it was!) and how only about five tables - those with the naughtiest celebs - looked like they were having fun.4
The Victoria’s Secret show was just like that - it was for the pictures. It wasn’t a fashion show, it was an advert. All the big model names of the day were walking, like Adriana Lima, Joan Smalls, Jourdan Dunn, Lily Aldridge and Alessandra Ambrosio and they looked extraordinary, of course, with their long, thick manes, tautly rippling and deeply tanned flesh. (The outfits were weird, they’re always weird.) But even with the live performances from Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Hozier (the budgets on this thing), it was strangely vibe-less. I can’t pretend I was powered by feminist outrage, or anything like that. It was just boring. “This is like watching paint dry” said a very funny, older, male colleague who normally loved all things tarty and camp.
The most fascinating part came after the show, when they attempted to turn the enormous Earls Court Exhibition Centre into an after-party - after-parties are meant to be sexy and intimate; this was cavernous and draughty, like an Amazon warehouse - where the models were sectioned into playpens, which were placed around the periphery of the party, like elegant hands on a clock face. I noticed that they were not served the canapes we were served, although they were brought drinks.
I thought they were being kept cordoned off to prevent wandering hands. The interest in VS models at that time was at its apex (influencers had just become a thing and these models were it) and it was a big event, with lots of corporate invites (tickets rumouredly £20,000 a pop) which meant a lot of be-suited men who might be inclined to treat the show like their own petting zoo. (Post-MeToo, it all seems entirely sensical to me.)
I later realised the pods were designed not only to keep the girls safe, but to protect the brand. The girls were not allowed to utter a single word without pre-approval from the publicity team. Sometimes people would come over to the rope and ask them a question and the security guard would fend the journalist or be-suited chimp off, reminding them that all questions had to go through approved press channels. A beauty director told me afterwards, that when she was interviewing the models backstage (which happens at all major catwalk shows), she realised that they all had little cue cards with their brand values on them and they did.not.deviate. If they were asked something that did not relate to beauty, fitness, or Victoria’s Secret, they would not answer.
In a way, they were just saying the quiet part out loud: models are marketing tools. They are designed to sell a product, a brand, a lifestyle. But I’ve never seen it laid out quite so cynically before. It was almost admirable.
After a six year hiatus, the Victoria’s Secret show returns to TV tonight, in their third (?) attempt to re-cast the brand as a feminist, progressive purveyor of pants, after more than a few scandals: in 2019, former CMO Ed Razek - the face of the brand, in situ since 1983 - was fired, after dozens of claims of harassment and misogyny were made against him; in 2021, billionaire founder Les Wexner stepped away, after years of scrutiny over his close relationship with his financial advisor, Jeffrey Epstein (whose seven-storey townhouse, once the largest private residence in Manhattan, was rumouredly a gift from Wexner); also in 2021, multiple models complained of the extraordinary demands the brand placed upon their bodies, leaving them deeply unwell.
Honestly, I didn’t even realise Victoria’s Secret was still a thing. But like a phoenix rising from the ashes - or a battered Icarus, pritt-sticking his burnt wings back on for the 90th time - this brand does not give up. And tonight, a notably more diverse roster of models, including Paloma Elsesser and Ashley Graham, will be attempting to convince you that the brand has moved into a new era. (But, like, actually this time.)
Why would these models want to touch a brand so famously toxic? I imagine for the same reason women have always modelled for Victoria’s Secret.5 But also, I think in fairness, because Graham spent years trying to get on to the VS catwalk. (She made a video in 2016, asking the brand to widen their horizons.) For her, and fellow top plus-size model, Paloma Elsesser, who has been modelling for the brand for the last few years, to be walking in the VS show is not just a personal triumph, it helps re-set a cultural needle. It tells girls watching at home, who are a size 16, that they deserve to enjoy lingerie, and their bodies, too. That they might finally be welcome at Victoria’s Secret.
The first ever Victoria’s Secret show was held in August 1995, at The Plaza Hotel. The audience was made up of cigar-smoking bankers, who hooted and cheered from the front row, write fashion business writers Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez in their brilliant new book, Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and The Unravelling of An American Icon. A fashion show, this was not. But by 1997, VS was starting to build its top model association, casting Helena Christensen, Stephanie Seymour and Tyra Banks amongst others, in a new campaign. And by 2000, Victoria’s Secret was a bonafide pop-culture phenomenon, with catwalk show wunderkind Alexandre de Betak sending a branded Concorde into Cannes, whereupon 40 models strutted out, all clad in baby pink VS leather jackets. At the show that evening, in accordance to industry hierarchy, “the least known models were the most exposed on the runway.”
(A brief aside on model industry hierarchy: the better known girls tend to be the most protected/ better clothed - the reason being that they had a voice and were more likely to complain - and the lesser known (typically also the youngest) treated as the most disposable/ sheathed in the least clothes. Although, the writers note, there are always exemptions to this hierarchy: Linda Evangelista, a hugely successful supermodel, was sexually assaulted by her husband, the model agent Gerald Marie, who was accused of multiple counts of sexual abuse by multiple models.)
The show in Cannes was a major press event. Travelling aboard the VS Concorde and writing for The Sunday Times, journalist Simon Mills devoted two entire paragraphs to the models asses, which he described as “dinky little orbs of steely flesh and bone when their owners are standing still, a brace of cantaloupes getting jiggy in a denim tote bag when they are on the move.”
It’s hard to defend my profession, at times.
The other major thing that happened in 2000, is that the brand signed up 19-year-old Gisele Bündchen as an Angel6 - she opened the Cannes show clad in a teal squinned cape. (Sherman and Fernandez are particularly fascinating on the shifts in model casting over the last few decades: for instance, the wave of Brazilian models in the early 00s all came from the south of the country, they write,“where waves of German immigration since the 1880s had yielded unusually tall women”.)
Gisele Bündchen was VS’s highest paid and longest-serving Angel. (The highest paid model in the world for 15 years straight and with a net worth of $400 million, she is arguably the most successful model of all time.) One of the most riveting nuggets in Selling Sexy (a book stuffed full of them), is that Bündchen was introduced to Tom Brady by Ed Razek - he wanted the Angels to date celebrity bachelors, to keep the brand in the public eye. It ended up backfiring on Razek, as once Bündchen had children with Brady, she fatigued of the one-note style of the lingerie giant - “Give me a tail, a cape, wings - please, anything to cover me up a little!” she wrote in her memoir - and quit.
The combo of Cannes + Gisele + savvy fashion hires like de Betak and stylist Charlotte Stockdale, meant that VS was becoming properly, culturally, fahshun. As a result, the casting begun to shift. VS had once been the antithesis of heroin chic. Their models were golden, apple-cheeked, bouncy haired and clad in bright, sparkly lingerie - Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks. Gorgeous, but not waifs. But over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, the body demands on models became more and more restrictive. They still needed to be golden, apple-cheeked, bouncy haired and clad in bright, sparkly lingerie, but they needed to be thin. A UK 4-6 at most. And as we found out later, some models near killed themselves trying.
By 2014, and while it may have been slightly lost on this writer, the VS fantasy was in full throttle. The London show featured not one but two $2 million diamond-encrusted Fantasy bras.7 Before the show, several VS models had shared their diet and exercise routines with the press. The subject matter was such because the brand needed key press, but they didn’t want the models going off message. The focus on models’ bodies made sense for VS. Their bodies were the brand.
Instagram was at its apex, influencer culture was building momentum, the whole ‘day in the life’ video thing was taking off. Wellness had just become a thing. Restricted eating was re-branded as eating clean and compulsive exercise was now being strong. In a workout video with Cosmoplitan, Dutch model Romee Strijd revealed that she worked out twice a day. “I'm sure there are some girls who have good genes, and it's easier for them to stay skinny or in shape," said Strijd.
This was nothing on Brazilian model Adriana Lima’s revelations in 2020. Lima told The Telegraph that she stopped eating solids 9 days before a show and would forego liquid entirely for the 12 hours before. This is a body-builder hack: dehydration makes muscles pop, and, Lima noted, you could lose 8 pounds in a day, just from shedding water weight. The Brazilian model later apologised for her comments, noting that her approach was “intense”, like an “athlete” and that no-one should try and copy her.
Lima, who first modelled for Victoria’s Secret aged 15 - striding down the catwalk in a thong bodysuit, her agent having lied about her age - is still modelling for the brand. But many models felt destroyed by the impossible demands on their bodies. In the 2021 podcast series, Fallen Angel, Australian model Bridget Malcolm says that she never felt as unsexy as when she modelled for the lingerie brand, predicated on - obsessed with - sexiness. Malcolm - who has a great voice for podcasting; I hope she does more - recently found her bra, from the last year she walked the VS catwalk, in 2016. “It was a 30A” she says incredulously. “I didn’t even know they made bras that small.”
Fallen Angel is a juicy, well-written investigative podcast by journalists and podcasters Vanessa Grigoriadis (who I will always associate with a brilliant and brutal 2008 Rolling Stone cover story on Britney Spears) and Justine Harman, released in 2021, the same year Victoria’s Secret did an ‘empowerment pivot’, which worked so well that I… didn’t know it had happened.8
On the podcast, Malcolm explains how modelling for VS caused her to disassociate from her body. She did not have a period in years. “I didn’t feel present at all. I was not there.” In 2017, Malcolm’s bust grew to a 30B. She was told she was too big to walk the show.
“I’m one of countless women, not just models, but women all around the globe who have been damaged by the story that they put out… And I know among models, it has hurt so many of us,… I have diagnosed PTSD, complex PTSD. I have had really bad panic attacks and I’ve had some really, really serious mental health struggles that weren’t in my life prior to Victoria’s Secret and modelling.”
Former Angel, Erin Heatherton, was one of the names in the early 2010s, at a time when VS favoured flaxen-haired, golden-skinned models almost exclusively. A girlfriend of Leonardo di Caprio, the American model was never pictured without a wide smile across her face. She tells the hosts of Fallen Angel that in order to comply with the required body measurements at VS, she was prescribed an appetite suppressant called phentermine. (Her therapist later calls the drug - which is FDA approved - “bathwater meth”.)
Victoria’s Secret was all about boobs. They sold way more bras than knickers. The problem they had was that very thin girls do not typically have boobs. Boobs being mostly made of fat and all. Gisele, “the boobs from Brazil” was an anomaly, who, through no fault of her own, set an almost impossible precedent for the bodies that came after her.
So why did they all do it? Why did Heatherton drink bathwater meth? Duh! Money. “I was just like, ‘Let me Lance Armstrong this because I’m renovating my condo’” said Heatherton, candidly. The hosts suggest - the industry suggested - that modelling for VS was all about the kudos. But in modelling, kudos cannot be separated from money. More kudos, more contracts, more money. (Catwalks pay peanuts; it’s the contracts that pay money.) These girls were young. For a teenager - hell, for any age! - the money was life-changing. Not just for how well-paid the gig itself was, but because every single casting director was now looking at the VS catwalk. VS models were cast in Prada, Chanel, Miu Miu campaigns and more. Australian model Miranda Kerr was resigned to commercial jobs like Billabong before she became an Angel. Afterwards, she was cast in an advert for Balenciaga. It had become an unexpected high fashion incubator, of sorts.
The reason the story of Victoria’s Secret is such an interesting phenomenon to analyse - and both Selling Sexy and Falling Angel do it so well - is because of what was happening in pop-culture and entertainment at that time. As entertainment and fashion became increasingly pornified (to use a term coined by Ariel Levy) a chasm opened up between what was sexy and being sexual. Only last week, I recalled the words of Paris Hilton - the actual voice of a generation - in 2004: “My boyfriends say I am sexy. Sexy, but not sexual.” Sexiness was nothing to do with sex. It wasn’t about intimacy, it was about performance. And it was hard to communicate SEXY when you were starving.
As pop-culture shifted to embrace all things overtly sexy (low-rise jeans, thongs, diamante baby tees - all the things you will find at Urban Outfitters now, thanks to the Y2K revival9) thus ended the days when being a lingerie model was tacky. What made Victoria’s Secret even more desirous, is that the casting was so famously hard to read. The brand turned down Irina Shayk eight times! And up until Razek left in 2019, no-one transgender or plus-size10 was considered. Stylist Sophia Neophitou, who famously turned down Kate Upton for being too basic (“she has a face anyone can buy”) recently left and the new VS is keen to distance itself from its old casting: Ashley Graham, who made a video in 2016 about how VS would not hire her because she was plus-size, will be walking in tonight’s show.
Question for you: who do you think the Victoria of Victoria’s Secret, is? I’d always imagined she was a 20-year-old college student, who liked to wear bright thongs under her PINK sweatpants. I would not imagine that the titular Victoria was a 36-year-old mother of two, living in London, married to a barrister, who started Victoria’s Secret after her French mother leaves her a large inheritance. This is so wildly off base, I cannot help but laugh. A French mother dies, leaving her a fortune? Is the Frenchness meant to lend elegance??
‘Victoria’ has changed a few times since then, as different people were brought into the business: I think her most recent iteration is, in fact, a college girl. But the original Victoria is closest to the original intentions of Victoria’s Secret, as set out by retail billionaire Les Wexner, who bought the 5-year-old brand off Ray Raymond for $1m in 1982. Victoria’s Secret was a classy shop, Wexner would say in interviews, for the ladies. It was not a mahoghany-pannelled lingerie emporium for men.
The irony is that Wexner’s right-hand man and major hire, Ed Razek, in 1983 was all about the male gaze. Wexner had nothing to do with the models at VS, whereas Razek was a key figure, attending all the parties and with the power to make or break your career. As CMO, Razek’s job was nothing to do with the casting, but he was a key part of casting every single model, in charge of breaking the good news to each model that made it into the show that year. After they burst into tears, they would totter over and hug him - them in a bikini and heels, him in a suit. I can’t find a video of this, but for a time, there were dozens of them - I remember one of Gigi Hadid, in particular - but here’s one of the 2013 casting. Note the obsession on working out.
In the last few years, a lot has happened at VS, not least a plummet in sales and the closure of several key categories (if you’re interested in retail, Selling Sexy goes deep into the business side): Ed Razek was sacked for being a perve, Les Wexner stepped down due to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, tons of models came forward and revealed that they had almost killed themselves to maintain their bodies, and the brand itself fell off the map of what is cool and aspirational. (As Sherman and Fernandez pointed out, the girlies just want to shop at Skims, now.) Victoria’s Secret has become a dirty word. But she’s not ready to hang up her wings just yet.
Tonight’s show features top models including Gigi Hadid, Taylor Hill and Emily Ratajkowski. I can’t understand why, but maybe being part of a pop-culture moment trumps everything else. Maybe they believe in the idea of feminist reclamation.
I don’t want to get too revisionist on the whole thing. There is a danger in saying, what happened then would not happen now. Plenty of things that used to happen, still happen! Yes, the whole orthorexia moment in the early 2010s was grim, and yes, things happened in casting that I hope would not happen now - but I think our current Ozempic era might turn out to be just as pernicious, however diverse the catwalk looks tonight.
With Razek and Wexner gone and as of 2022, a female CEO Amy Hauk in place, VS has another chance to reinvent - should declining sales not get in the way. I think it’s entirely possible that Victoria’s Secret will live to survive another era. But I don’t think it will be able to ever tell us as much about retail, pop-culture and misogyny as its previous three decades could. And for that, we should be grateful.
very keen to hear other people’s least sexy place in London
one for the lit girlies
my god that was a lonely trip - I was staying in a hostel with bars over the window and one 4000000 lumen bulb hanging bare from the ceiling
although the year Vivienne Westwood - an iconoclast who hated the business of fashion as much as she loved the creativity of it - monologued for 15 mins straight while accepting an award (2018) was very entertaining.
money, honey
only a handful of models who walked/ worked for VS were made Angels, and only Angels received contracts from VS. The contracts started at $350,000 and required a minimum of 48 days modelling a year (that’s a lot). If you are so interested, here’s a list of every Angel ever
no-one has ever bought one
the show passed me by at the time (there doesn’t seem to have been any British press on it) but it’s very good: a pacey, quippy investigative podcast about the intersection of pop-culture, fashion, feminism and scandal
I bought my 6 year old daughter an XS women’s t-shirt from Urban Outfitters the other day because it had a cartoon on the front I thought she’d like. It is madness that a woman’s t-shirt can fit a 6 years old
I hate this term, but I am using it because it’s industry language and it describes how models are categorised. Hopefully that will change at some point
Absolutely SUPERB. I would have expected to have seen something this good first published by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, or NYT. Well done.
Pandora, this article was brilliant! Kept me engaged my whole commute home on the bus and it brought back memories of being younger and the energy that surrounded VS... selling sexy to a young generation - I remember very rarely shopping there as a teen but when I did, it felt like the height of cool. To be honest, I have to confess, I still have my VS Pink sweatpants that my friend bought me for my 15th birthday because I desperately wanted to fit in with everyone at school... they're 17 years old now & I still wear them around the house occasionally! In retrospect now, I wish I hadn't ever been under the brands spell, so much of the 00's & 10's pop culture was dystopian in its messaging. But anyways, excellent writing and it makes me wonder what clothing brands of this era we will look back at and shudder?