On 15 October, after a six-year hiatus, the US lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret (VS) resurrected its fashion show. In the 40-minute event, live-streamed from New York on Amazon, Kate Moss and a cast of ostensibly retired models slunk down a pared-back runway while Cher belted “Believe”. Hardly the pomp and pageantry of VS’s prime, it was more like a strangely muted fever dream. Some reacted to its return with insouciance – what relevance does a brand so indelibly associated with a bygone era have in 2024? – others with revulsion at the reboot of a show whose legacy of scantily clad women sashaying under a lecherous male gaze epitomises the sexist hellscape of the Nineties and Noughties. No one, it seemed, welcomed its return. Why revive a phenomenon that should stay in the past?
VS was launched in 1977 after its founder, Roy Raymond, struggled to buy his wife underwear: “I always had a feeling the saleswomen thought I was an unwelcome intruder,” he recalled. His designs were sexy without being salacious; silk nightgowns and demure, lacy bras. VS catalogues featured models stiffly reclined on chaises longues in motel-like sets, the sort of low-budget production associated with soft porn. The brand found success because it allowed men to buy lingerie without being deemed licentious perverts, and because its catalogues allowed women to buy items they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.
Raymond died by suicide in 1993, having sold the business to Leslie Wexner in 1982. The first incarnation of the VS Fashion Show two years after his death was an understated, 17-minute affair. Over the following 23 years, the annual event grew into a multimillion-dollar extravaganza that made household names of Heidi Klum and Gisele Bündchen, and was soundtracked by performances from Sting and Taylor Swift. When the show was first streamed online in 1999, it attracted so many viewers the server broadcasting it crashed. But its success was predicated on the fetishisation of women.
The VS ideal of womanhood was reductionist: a hyper-conformist, myopic and commercialised male fantasy made manifest. The typical model – a so-called “Angel” – was 6ft and 120lb with pneumatic breasts, and coquettishly paraded about in diamanté- and feather-encrusted garb (the most expensive bra cost $15m). Adriana Lima, one of the most legendary Angels, stated in 2011 that she would endure a nine-day, all-liquid diet in the run-up to the show, and stop drinking fluids in the final 12 hours.
The idea that this was somehow female emancipation is farcical. But at the height of VS’s cultural power in the late Nineties and early Noughties, misogyny was blatant and normalised. In 1999, Victoria Beckham was forced by Chris Evans to weigh herself on TV mere weeks after giving birth. Fat-phobia permeated both real and fictitious worlds: in 2003’s Love, Actually Martine McCutcheon’s perfectly normal-sized character, Natalie, was labelled “chubby”, while Kate Winslet was dubbed “Blubber” during press for Titanic. In 2006, Russell Brand quipped he liked “them blowjobs where the mascara runs a little bit”. The next year Britney Spears shaved her head, her patent distress gobbled up as gossip fodder. This was an era when a woman’s worth was explicitly linked to her physicality.
By 2018, as the #MeToo movement built, stories of a misogynistic culture at VS were emerging. One of the company’s top execs, Ed Razek, was the subject of complaints about sexual misconduct, which led to his resignation. According to witnesses, Razek asked models to sit in his lap, or for their numbers, while they were in their underwear. At one fitting, the supermodel Bella Hadid’s outfit was so diminutive it wasn’t clear if it would pass TV broadcasting standards – or, as Razek allegedly said, if she would be allowed to walk “down the runway with those perfect titties”. (Razek denies all allegations.) The next year, VS’s reputation was damaged further after it emerged Wexner had close ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In justifying VS’s outmoded mores, Razek said in 2018 the brand was selling a “fantasy” (presumably his). The cultural tenor had changed. Within a decade, Dove had launched its “Real Beauty” campaign and Rihanna’s lingerie company Savage X Fenty was body- and trans-inclusive. VS proved tone-deaf, committing to selling a hypersexualised version of femininity. In 2017 the brand began to shut stores, closing 250 in 2020 alone. Its sales have consistently fallen, losing more than $1.5bn in annual sales since 2016. At its peak, the VS show attracted 12 million viewers; only 3 million dared stream it in 2018. With profits down and allegations of sexual misconduct up, the show was cancelled in 2018.
Today, it seems the fantasy has changed. The rebooted affair featured Tyra Banks, 50, and Carla Bruni, 56, plus-sized models Ashley Graham and Paloma Elsesser, and trans models Alex Consani and Valentina Sampaio. But its purported celebration of diversity seems a thinly veiled attempt to leverage the cultural currency of celebrity and raise the revenues of an ailing brand. The exploitation of women’s bodies is a cultural relic. No longer able to sell the priapic fantasies of old men, Victoria’s Secret has little to say. Its historical role in the entrenchment of misogyny means that even when it does speak, its words sound hollow. Announcing its comeback, the company said the show would “reflect who we are today”. What if the present is inextricably linked to the past? Can we – should we – forget what the brand once was? Some skeletons are best left in the closet.
[See also: Taking on the Treasury]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate