Like anything, it helps to have context.
It was the year we learned what a “Macarena” was. Friends was sweeping the nation (the first time). Perfectly respectable people stopped washing their hair and started wearing plaid flannel shirts. A cup of coffee cost roughly a dollar and didn’t take a paragraph to order. Amazon sold its first book.
That’s what 1995 looked like in case you weren’t there. It was also the year that Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie store you knew from your local mall, had its first runway show. Looking back now, that first show was, in a word, quaint. The models wore cardigans over their demure bustiers and push-up bras. No pageantry. No spectacle. It was like stepping into the mind’s eye of a 14-year-old boy on the days he had a hot substitute teacher. Sexy, but wholesome. Maybe even a touch…boring.
Then someone somewhere had an idea that roughly went like this: Make this show so bonkers and superlative that it changes the whole game—and ditch the cardigans. Over the next few years, the Victoria’s Secret runway show became the Met Ball of the disrobed. It moved all over the world. It made careers. It turned models into phenoms. They wore wings—sometimes twelve feet tall and forty pounds heavy. By some accounts, there were over 800,000 real feathers used to build those wings. In case the metaphor was lost on the audience, the models were no longer even models. They were called Angels. Just patronizingly floating above the rest of us in their size 00 glory. Alas, they couldn’t actually fly so they also got their own (pink) plane. The show was a blur of enormous headgear and an extravaganza of cultural fetishization and appropriation (of Chinese culture and indigenous people culture and pretty much any other culture you can think of). And very much pageantry. Very much spectacle. The actual clothes were the least of it. Quite literally.
It was in this moment of maximum Angel—around 2000 and 2001 (I remember because I thought no president could be worse than George W. Bush)—that I entered the world of shimmery vanilla body spray. I was a young beauty journalist and it was hard to describe how important people thought the Angels were back then. The first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show ever streamed online actually crashed servers. And I was tasked with covering it all (at least the hair and makeup). I probably could have written “self-tanner, body glitter, ooh gross so many bags of extensions” and no fact-checkers would have touched me. But I have to admit that I was seduced by the breathlessness of it all. If I couldn’t be in the show—and there was really never a chance of that—proximity to it was a close second. It was a cultural moment. Maybe not Swiftie level but still a big deal. And, to mix a metaphor, a backstage pass felt like a ticket to the front row of the moment.
Thinking about it now, it’s hard to imagine that I thought it was the epitome of importance—beauty, fashion, power, women, New York. Who cares that it ticked every box of cheesy and exclusive at the same time. But there must be a myth about the dangers of mortals engaging with angels. It wouldn’t end well for the mortal. And in my case, covering those shows usually ended in: Huh. Now I feel bad about myself. I hope Sex and the City is on.
I guess I wasn’t the only one.
Twenty-three years after it started, the show was canceled—in every way. It was 2018. People understood disordered eating. Pussy hats had marched on Washington. And time was up for a whole generation of abusers. Suddenly, exploiting women’s bodies for entertainment didn’t feel so good. The moment was over. The Angels were locked in a glass box to be put on a bookshelf and marveled at once in a while. Holy shit can you believe the crap we used to do? Scandal, controversy, and the world marching inexorably towards body acceptance all coalesced. If Victoria actually had a secret we didn’t care what it was anymore.
Those of us trying to raise young women would sooner leave our daughter alone in a dressing room with Donald Trump than let them watch a Victoria’s Secret runway show.
There really was no danger of that—until last night.
My daughter Frankie was nine when they went off the air. Now she’s 15, and if I was going to watch the return of the Angels with anyone it was going to be her. The minute she came home from school, I grabbed her.
“Mom, please. I have so much homework.”
“Sorry. This is more important than homework. This is a cultural moment.”
I ignored her side eye slash eye roll and turned up the volume.
“I wonder if they’re only going to do skinny models,” she said. I was proud that she was disappointed at the thought of it.
So here’s the spoiler: They didn’t only “do skinny models.” But the models weren’t exactly a cross section of America, either.
The only things that caught my daughter’s attention were the musical performances.
“Who is that?” (Me.)
“It’s Lisa.” (Frankie.)
“…” (Me again.)
“Remember when I loved Blackpink in seventh grade? She was in that band.” (Frankie said in a way that was much less condescending than you’d think.)
When Tyla came on—this was around the black and gold colored lingerie and wing portion of the evening—Frankie stopped noticing the models altogether and wanted to see if Tyla was going to do something “super inappropriate” called the Tyla Dance. (She didn’t.)
“I’m impressed they got Tyla and Lisa.”
“OK, but is this good for women? The whole show, I mean.”
“Are you insane?” (She said this with love, I’m sure.) “Obviously, this isn’t good for women. They would never put on a show like this of basically naked men.”
“But it’s good to have women of all sizes, isn’t it?”
“Mom, you know that’s bullshit, right?” Usually she doesn’t swear. I swear. “They’re not celebrating women’s bodies. They have a few models who aren’t stick-thin and they’re pretending they’re body positive. It’s tokenism. It’s bullshit.”
So there you have it, in a bra cup: The 2024 Victoria’s Secret runway show was a parade of Kate Moss, Tyra Banks, Carla Bruni, skinny models, not quite as skinny models, and a bunch of people you thought were really retired. The runway looked like it was in an abandoned airplane hangar, or maybe a really big high school gym. Despite the towering wings (there were still wings), the models seemed dwarfed. I might be projecting but they looked really uncomfortable.
By the end of the show, when Cher came on, I had to ask myself: Is it worth it to explain who Sonny was? Or how this woman is the same age as grandma? Or what an incredible film Moonstruck was? I never even got the chance.
“Sorry, Mom. I can’t watch anymore. I have a chem test tomorrow.”
ABOUT THE WRITER:
Danielle Pergament is a contributing editor for Allure, where she previously served as the publication’s executive editor and editor at large, going on to lead Goop as its editor in chief. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, and Marie Claire.
Credit: This article was previously published in Allure
