Where Women Take the Reins—And the Spotlight

Appraising the return of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

I came of age as a teenager in the early 2010s, at the tail end of being told sex sells. Of bimbo summits. Of invasive flash by way of American Apparel ads. Sky Ferreira’s tits on the cover of her debut album. This was a terrible and violent era to be a woman. These were also some of the first things to ever turn me on.

The way the bass drops in the Skrillex song at the start of , coeds shaking their asses in the tropic zone. Emrata’s perfect body in the “Blurred Lines” video, being ogled by fully dressed men. The song “Crimewave,” by Crystal Castles, and how I wanted to kiss a boy to it. Girls not much older than me, maybe the same age as me, looking terrified on Terry Richardson’s blog. How I learned about pornography essentially from watching clips of Abel Ferrara’s , set to shitty dubstep songs. I saw all of this unfold on the family computer in my childhood home. I learned about sex from the internet. I learned how to feel uncomfortable in my growing and changing body in the changing room at the Victoria’s Secret in Crossgates Mall—a concrete slab in Albany, New York. I was convinced, in that changing room, a measuring tape around my rib cage, that I needed to buy a bombshell bra. I was 14 years old.This is the universe of Victoria’s Secret. The brand started in the late 1970s, the brainchild of a man named Roy Raymond and his wife. It was not the brand it is today. It was a series of lingerie stores, mostly on the west coast, that catered to upper middle class women and their husbands. It sold a few years later, to a man named Les Wexner, at that time famous for his success with The Limited. It was the most consequential investment he ever made. By the ’90s, Victoria’s Secret was a household name. Famous for the fantasy it sold not about sex but being sexy. It invented the concept of Angels—top models with wings. By the late ’90s, those Angels were put on the runway. Untouchable beauties. Adriana Lima, Tyra Banks, Gisele Bündchen, Heidi Klum. No one was ever meant to relate to them. It was all about the fantasy.

But at some point after the early 2010s, the fantasy cracked. There was that collective reckoning about how you can and cannot represent women in advertising. If she is going to be a sexpot, make her self-aware about it. That kind of thing. Where does Victoria’s Secret fit into this ideological rebrand? In 2019, it was revealed that Wexner was chummy with Jeffrey Epstein. He subsequently controlled Wexner’s finances, for a time. At one point Epstein obtained—from Wexner—his plane, and properties in New York and Ohio. In 2018 the brand staged its final annual fashion show. In 2021 the company announced a complete corporate facelift, with an almost entirely female board of directors, and brand ambassadors like Megan Rapinoe and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. Martin Waters, the CEO at the time, had this to say about the Angels when asked by a reporter from the : “I don’t see it as being culturally relevant.”So what is the point of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, in 2024? It is back, after a six-year hiatus, with a new CEO. Over half a decade since #MeToo. What does it mean to be sexy if your brand has historically represented women in this horribly dated way? If you ask Janie Schaffer and Sarah Sylvester, the executive producers of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the point is that “we heard it loud and clear from our customers, we’re always scrolling on social;” “to celebrate our product;” “to celebrate women.” It is to say that “the women are amazing,” that “everybody is welcome.” It is a chance to be “more inclusive and accessible” by giving viewers the opportunity to shop looks directly from the runway. If you ask Meredith Silver, director of the “creator team” at Amazon, a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2024 is all about how “Amazon creators are here, wearing Amazon Fashion and our customers can stream the show live on Prime Video and Amazon Live.” Perhaps it is an opportunity to see the show’s “all women performers,” its “first all female performance lineup.” An opportunity to celebrate what it means to be a girl. An opportunity to be fun, fierce, fresh.

The New York City skyline—done up all in pink. She’s a girl on a motorcycle. Little leather jacket, leather pants. You can’t see her face behind her helmet, but she’s bold, fearless. Cut to Adriana Lima, winking. Cut to a sound stage, a runway set, the motorcycle mounted, a set piece. The skyline becomes a digitized slime. The girl gets off the bike. It’s Lisa, of BLACKPINK, shaking her hips in chain mail panties. It’s dancers in thongs, asses in the air as the beat drops. “Baby,” she sings, brushing the hair out of her eyes, “I’m a .” Then, barely one breath later, coming out of the ground, it’s Gigi Hadid. It’s Gigi in her big pink wings. It’s Gigi and her perfect body, blowing you, the viewer, a kiss. This is the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, she seems to say. Girls are here, and they want to have fun! In 2024, being an Angel is about being sexy .Angels in 2024 aren’t just like us, but that’s OK. They’re living in a fantasy, but it’s a really good one. A fantasy made for women. It’s giving camp! It’s giving the movie! The Angels are strutting their stuff in lacey thongs and balconette bras. They’re giving the camera a smile and a wink to a bleeped-out version of Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon,” while their feathery angel wings blow in the artificial breeze. They’re Charli XCX “365” party girls minus getting keyed up and hitting your head in the bathroom from being too wasted. Liu Wen in a low-cut bridal robe and a baby-soft pink bralette. Alex Consani in wings that look cut from a duvet cover. Taylor Hill with her big and beautiful smile—an all-American girl. More Chappell Roan. More girl power. All of it is rendered as sexy, not sexual. Like: The fantasy is that girls can run around in their underwear just for themselves. That it can actually be to wear a G-string. It doesn’t have to be for the male gaze. It doesn’t have to be about anything other than the theatrics of it all.None of this, if it isn’t clear to you at this point, is particularly interesting to me. I am not interested in the delusion that women wear lingerie to . I do not believe for a second that a solution to the Angels problem is to just be self-aware about it. That a supportive bra is the same thing as supporting women (women! women! women!). I do not believe there is any other sort of ulterior motive to Victoria’s Secret other than the “accessibility” of shopping on Amazon Prime “at home.” It is morally dubious, the impulse to thin k that women’s sexuality is best defined by the way it uplifts other women. If we are going to put the most beautiful women in the world in underwear and have them prance around in it, let it be to “Believe,” by Cher. Let it be in the name of feminism.

This year’s show seems to say: Let us do this in the name of empowering women. We can do it. Watch us! What I saw, from the comfort of my kitchen table, was something much more sinister. A retrograde body politic, but not in a subversive way. A desperate appeal for relevance from a brand that has not been relevant, for a very, very long time. It is hard not to feel cynical about Victoria’s Secret’s decision to be more inclusive in its casting decisions. That suddenly after everything we are made to believe that the brand cares about fat women, women of color, trans women. I don’t particularly feel empowered by the constant reminder that the show is a shopping experience: With the click of a button, the fantasy could be mine. When I watched the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show I thought the whole time: None of this is sexy. Because sexiness implies that someone, someone out there in the midst of it all, is fucking.And sex, more often than not, is dangerous. No one is an angel when they are having sex. Sex is disgusting, especially when it is good. A music critic I know once wrote what we truly find sexy is what once repulsed us as children. A man I once knew told me he liked fucking me best when I was wearing my cheap Hanes briefs and had forgotten to shave. Not because I looked more natural. Not because I looked more like a real woman. But because I looked surprised. Like I did not know we would be fucking. Like he had power over me. If I ever wear a G-string, it is never because I find it empowering. It is because I like the way it makes my ass look. It reminds me of a time I had sex. I don’t know why other women wear lingerie. Maybe there is an earnest, empowering way to do it. I just know that when I am wearing underwear that is really fancy, I am always haunted by the gaze of someone else. It might be the gaze of another woman. But there is always a gaze, one that I want. Badly.

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion show, at its best, is some kind of #MeToo realpolitik. Like, we have to do these terrible things because it will save the state, to perpetuate a fantasy about how everyone is doing so much better now.But it is a grand delusion to think that this course correction, turning the gaze back at ourselves, has really accomplished anything. That we should feel safe or happy or anything close to it. That when I watched Kate Moss and Tyra Banks looking gorgeous and powerful in their push-up bras I could stop thinking about the fact that I was a consumer, being told what to buy and how to feel about my body. A spectacle of irrelevancy. When I think about Victoria’s Secret and how it all relates to #MeToo, I think about how charming and naive it is to think that corporate rebranding can make us think we’ve moved past the sexual violence of the last few decades. That girls are empowered, that we can move on, that we can heal together, our past traumas made null by the power of buying shit. By becoming .

Paradise Logic, Paris Review, Granta, Vogue, Pitchfork.