That the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was incepted into existence at the height of the anorexic glamor (1995) of what it meant to be a model is telling of just how difficult is to shake one’s “origins,” rooted as they are in not eating. And while yes, of course, models should represent the very best of what a garment or lingerie piece might look like should you be able to resist stuffing your face with as much determination as these paid to make the rest of us feel bad modelle, in these ever-shifting toward us all wearing paper bags and not acknowledging gender times, it all seems utterly anachronistic. The last vestige of a bygone era in which women were “made” to be visually appealing to men.
In this regard, it appeared as though the editors and directors of the televised special saw fit to package, as best as they could despite unavoidable hypocrisy, the women and their pristine aesthetics as something empowering as opposed to servile, with comments like, “[We want to] be sexy for ourselves and for who we want to be, not because a man says you have to be–it was never about that in the first place,” attempting to fit in with the post-#MeToo era of being “given” the imprimatur to be oneself without worrying how it might, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie phrased it, “upset the man.”
But there would be nothing upsetting to any man about the show last night, the one that tried its best to exude a sense of being at one with “the future” while still blatantly being trapped in the aesthetic past (complete with an overly extended homage to the florals and paisleys one associates with the part of the 1970s where divorce still wasn’t quite as paraded without shame). Then again, how could such a vision at odds with past versus present not make itself evident in the annual fashion show with a man like Ed Razek lambasting any potential notion of the type of “inclusivity” that most major brands have at least vaguely attempted to implement as the twenty-first century makes itself known as the century for one’s corporeal body being an illusion? Commenting on why the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show chooses not to include trans (or at least plus size) models, Razek stated in an interview with Vogue, “If you’re asking if we’ve considered putting a transgender model in the show or looked at putting a plus size model in the show, we have,” ultimately concluding, “No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy. It’s a 42-minute entertainment special. That’s what it is.” So, in short, no fantasy (least of all of heaven) could possibly include any fatties or trannies because, when catering to the “hetero” male fantasy, it must be strictly in keeping with what a Trump supporter would want (or at least feign wanting when, in truth, we all know there is something decidedly “the lady doth protest too much” among a community of red state types that prattle on and on about hating gay men so much when, clearly, they must have nothing but gay porn in their internet search history).
Even Halsey reveled in the hypocrisy of the event by suddenly reneging on her fairly blatant support of it by showing up to perform on the runway as little cookie cutter women passed her by and she sang a heteronormative single (“Without Me”) about being the jilted party in a relationship with the worst possible representation of a “progressive” straight man, G-Eazy (who somehow consistently manages to serve as muse to heartache).
And while Kris Jenner is usually adept at deflecting from relatively par fare (just as she did in the video for “thank u, next“), even her continued sendup of Regina George’s mom as she filmed Kendall cannot distract from what the VS Fashion Show is: in the midst of an identity crisis. Nor could Kris upstage the camera panning to The Weeknd skulking in the crowd no doubt waiting to bang his current on-again obsession, Bella Hadid (poor Selena Gomez loses again). So while the editor cobbling together sound bites that tried their best to sound “woke” amid a time that has become so fundamentally sexless it’s difficult to even imagine a future where people bother investing in fuck clothes (a.k.a. lingerie), the show just doesn’t work anymore. And maybe the most telling of all in terms of the fashion powerhouse’s inability to grasp its own offensiveness is a “decrepit” Adriana Lima receiving her requisite goodbye tribute section. Sure, she claims she has to leave in order to focus more on, ironically, projects geared toward female empowerment, but as we all know, thirty-seven is crypt keeper status in the model world.
Through all the decidedly “Lady Marmalade” looks, the most touted was the Millennium Bra as the brand’s most coveted must-have of the season–making one wonder if perhaps Victoria’s Secret will forever be stuck somewhere just before the year 2000 in its approach and sense of denial about how much the world and its ideals have changed (even if the current ruling leader of the U.S. would appear to suggest otherwise).
Still, the models do their best to attempt reconciling being “hot” with the present popularity of being “ugly” by hollowly offering, “Being a woman is hard, and other women know that.” Yet another bizarrely dichotomous statement at war with a show that seems to seek only to make other women feel bad about themselves, not just because of how superior their resistance to food is, but because most women will never be able to finagle the kind of boyfriend that can afford them VS lingerie, let alone the cheapo shit from H&M. Because if we’re going by the VS mentality, it’s clearly only a man that could possibly want to make this kind of investment in a brand that seeks to set feminism back roughly sixty years. And no, this isn’t to say you can’t be attractive and a feminist (as is the commonly held belief of derisive males), but it is to say that walking the plank of a catwalk for an institution that demands you to kill your credibility in supporting ideas that have no relevancy in the present landscape is decidedly hideous.
