Tales from the Back Row

by Amy Odell

  He asked me why I liked them, and I said I liked to wear them and something like, “I remember Vena Cava’s last show—they were doing so many interesting things with safety pins.” This was a terrible answer.

  “But why else do you like them aside from the fact that you like to wear them?” he pressed.

  Oh. God. I did not know. I didn’t think about clothes in this way—I thought about the industry that makes the clothes more than about the clothes themselves. Because when the industry is ruled by the papal-like force of eccentricity that is Anna, it’s hard not to be. This was when I tried to bullshit—always my plan Z—and did a terrible job of it.

  And again, to my horror, he asked if I went to museums. So that’s why he disappeared—to find out what I was deficient in that he should ask me about again. I gave him the same answer I gave Anna—of course, I do that sometimes, like, totally I do!

  “What was the last thing you saw?” he asked.

  I think I said some fashion thing, because he then prodded me to name something that wasn’t fashion. And I couldn’t even think of anything. I could think of nothing at all that was going on around town that I could lie about having seen. So I just said, to my shame to this day, “I can’t remember.”

  Fail.

  After Mark, I interviewed with another features editor at the magazine, whose office had windows and whose manner wasn’t particularly warm though she did offer me a tiny bottle of Perrier. She asked me more hard questions about what I’d like to see done with the magazine, and I had no idea what to say. She also seemed like she didn’t want to be talking to me, which made it feel so much worse to be talking to her.

  The interviewing took more than two hours. I’ve had breakups with men I actually liked that took less out of me emotionally. When it all ended, I was incredibly relieved. I felt like I’d accomplished something by trying as hard as I could to get the job. It was like getting off a roller coaster you’re really scared to ride but your friends claim to really genuinely want to go on.

  A couple of days later, at around 6:50 a.m., Condé Nast HR sent me a rejection email saying that I wasn’t quite experienced enough for the position. They were right. I had neither enough professional experience in fashion writing nor enough everyday experience in dressing like not-garbage. If they had hired me, I would have done it well, I’m sure of that, but it would have been an enormous struggle, and I’d have gone on Valium just deciding what to wear every day.

  • • •

  Now I can look back on my Vogue flirtation fondly. I got a great story out of it, I met one of my idols, and I didn’t end up drugging myself to get through the scariness of a job that wasn’t right for me. I was reminded that the world’s best editors are true experts and in some cases practically scholars in the things that they cover, not just ornaments on the sidelines of runway shows. Not that I didn’t enjoy seeing what front-row people look like in their daily lives (still like they belong on street-style blogs). Also, I can go to museums as I see fit, rather than as Anna Wintour sees fit. Not getting hired at Vogue led me to Cosmopolitan.com, which I love and feel like I am good at. No one wants me to write earnestly about the merits of asymmetrical hemlines at Cosmo, which is fantastic. If I rolled into work there wearing my House of Deréon T-shirt, my coworkers would nod in approval and ask me where I got it.

  6

  Models

  adventures at the victoria’s secret fashion show

  Three hundred and sixty-four days out of the year, mail is nothing more to me than desk herpes. Impervious to treatment, it piles up, causing people who walk past my workstation to fear for my hygiene. Only one day out of the year does the mail become something much, much more—carrier of a rare golden ticket to a fantastical fabled thing that will amaze you, change you, and, mostly, make you feel really, really fat: the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show!

  The VS show is independent from Fashion Week, and the invite is not just any invite. The metallic rectangle is practically lacquered. It’s made of such heavy foam-board-like paper stock that once you finish with it, you can reuse it as a cheese board.

  When my first-ever invite arrived I RSVP’d immediately. Then I G-chatted my friend Justin.

  “i have the golden ticket!!” I wrote.

  “i hate u get me one,” he replied.

  “can’t! admits one. bla bla. should i start dieting now or forever hold onto my breakfast pastries.”

  “go barf in the bathroom IMMEDIATELY.”

  . . .

  “jk jk!”

  Roughly 70 percent of the thrill of receiving the invite is the same as that of any other fashion show: just knowing you are Important Enough to be invited. She who goes to the VS show can say:

  “I saw Jay Z live, but not the whole concert, just his set at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.”

  “No, I can’t do dinner, I have to cover the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.”

  There’s an “I’m in, you’re out” aspect to it that gives you bragging rights I won’t pretend to be above—although I really wished that Justin could have come because you need someone to banter with you about why the models are wearing inflatable emojis that look like baby pool floats and generally look like the Village People if the Village People were lingerie models. I worked as a fashion blogger for several years before I got invited. One year, a print editor tossed me her invite before my time came. I was so excited—until I saw the bolded fine print about invitations being “non-transferrable” along with some other scary language that suggested armed officers would handcuff, arrest, and strip search any thug assistant who tried to enter under her superior’s name.

  The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show isn’t really a fashion show—it’s a holiday-time commercial disguised as an hour-long Vegas showgirl spectacular. Only instead of seeing synchronized dance moves and flexibility, you witness the girls walk, smile, wink, blow kisses, and playfully bump butts with the singers. It tapes in November before Thanksgiving and then airs about a month later on national television. Leading up to the taping and then the broadcast, VS keeps the fashion press busy for months by feeding them every little fact about the production, the costumes, and the diet and exercise routines the models undertake to prepare for the show. The media finds its own stories too, like how year 2010 was the first that an Asian model was cast, which is astounding—a legitimate story—though few outlets really cover these occurrences in any deep way beyond the witlessly enthusiastic “Asian Model Walks!” post. The story does deserve some witless enthusiasm but also some huge glittering question marks about why it took so long for VS to cast an Asian woman.

  But this is part of the beauty ideal the brand sells: thin, muscular, tall, and white. It’s the commercialized version of a high-fashion runway that freaks everyone out, leads to pervasive portrayals in pop culture of the industry as devilishly fattist, and in some countries inspires laws or other regulations mandating that fashion models’ BMIs be a certain number. But trading the weird, asymmetrical black clothing of a high-fashion runway for showgirl-on-crack costumes built upon push-up bras and thong underwear with a side of hair extensions—a beauty ideal seemingly dreamed up for men—prompts millions of people to gladly ignore the reality that Victoria’s Secret’s fashion shows are no more off-putting than the rest of them. They’re just more socially accepted because the clothing and prettiness of the models are things the masses readily understand. If fashion shows are foreign films with subtitles, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is Battleship, the mass-market action movie with so few words you don’t even need subtitles to understand them overseas.

  This event is so enthralling because everyone wants to know what the models in the show eat and what they do at the gym so they can adopt these routines and look like them, too.

  This fashion show—the most widely viewed in the world—is a bottomless well of media fodder. Yes, it’s fun to go to the fas
hion show and see the bizarre outfits on models in person and watch the world’s top pop stars fill in the space around them. But beyond such super­ficial appreciation of the spectacle, the show raises the same questions beauty pageants or nightclub go-go dancers do if you stop and think about them for any length of time. Once you’re “in,” you don’t want to question the fantasy ginned up by brilliant and aggressive marketing, fantastic costumes, and the world’s highest-paid fashion models. You don’t want to say what you feel and ruin being invited back again. Access to this exclusive experience effectively blinds many to the reality of what they’re witnessing: a bizarre celebration and objectification of wildly hard-to-achieve physical standards.

  • • •

  The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show has been around since the ’90s but didn’t become the obsessed-over explosion of glitter and rock-hard abs it is today until around the year 2001, when, according to the Hollywood Reporter, ABC broadcast it on television for the first time, astutely realizing that a parade of women wearing underwear stretched to a full hour would get pretty good ratings! In the early years, models just modeled normal-looking lingerie—the kinds of things you’d wear to bed or under clothes but not necessarily just for the purpose of looking glam while wearing nothing but underwear and Halloween costume accessories at the same time. ­Fashionista.com reported the 1995 show cost a paltry $120,000.

  By 1999, the models were wearing wings that weren’t wings so much as repurposed neon signs and feather boas on steroids, which is still nothing compared to what the models wear on the runway today, much of which wouldn’t fit through most double doorways. The show’s transformation coincided with the fall of the supermodel and the rise of the celebrity. As it became more difficult to become a household name as a model, the VS Fashion Show outfits became more outlandish. If no new Naomi Campbells came along to sell the show, something else, like the clothes (“clothes”), had to. The brand later figured out how to make its own stars through the strategic anointing of “angels.” It would also assert its own specialness by separating itself from—but still remaining connected to—the fashion industry.

  The show used to take place in February, but then moved to a November taping with a December airing, serving as the most epic holiday marketing device of any clothing brand. In terms of sales, the VS Fashion Show has proved a very smart investment. An analyst told Bloomberg Businessweek in a 2012 story that the show may cost $12 million, but it “pays for itself.” (That $12 million excludes the fantasy bra getup, which cost $10 million in 2013. To be fair, the fantasy bra came with a belt that year.) In 2010, the day after the show aired, the chain saw a daily high in direct business, BuzzFeed reported, adding the brand does an estimated $6.6 billion in annual sales. In 2014 Victoria’s Secret was named “the most popular brand of the year,” according to YouGov BrandIndex’s ­annual study of apparel brands.

  What’s amazing is how the company has been able to turn what is basically a big Christmastime commercial into a story that takes the media months to tell. And it all revolves around the hot ladies they carefully pluck usually from relative anonymity and pay quite handsomely to model the pairs of Swarovski-encrusted, fur-trimmed, charm-dangling, gel-stuffed contraptions they call bras.

  The version of VS models’ lives put forth to the press seems to go something like this: Victoria’s Secret models are born; they’re perfect. They have babies; they’re perfect. Two days after the delivery, they’re getting paid by a swimwear company to be fat free and glowing in their forthcoming ad campaign. By the way, they gave birth in their bathtubs with no pain meds. “How do you stay fit, you insanely gorgeous, happy, life-loving woman?” “I like to do yoga once a week and swim with the baby dolphins off the beach in my modest hometown, where my parents operate a small chicken farm [Giggles! Hair toss].” It’s mundane. It’s mystifying. It’s riveting.

  I remember looking through those Victoria’s Secret catalogs as early as middle school, the days when people still looked at paper pages of things and called companies when they wanted to place orders for clothes. (I’ll take a stone tablet and a chisel to go with that reference, thanksverymuch.) I thought the women were extremely beautiful—if I planned to look like anyone when I turned nineteen, it was one of them, because these are the things middle school–age girls are conditioned to want—to look this version of perfect.

  I was obsessed with Alessandra Ambrosio, who seemed to be the most prolific model of them all despite not getting the most attention in the media (which went to Gisele, probably because she dated post-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio and had abs flatter than a marble countertop).

  Alessandra modeled practically everything in those days—every garter, every padded disco bra, every pair of sexy sweatpants. The Victoria’s Secret catalog then, and now, represented what so many American girls want to be: tan and happiest when doing something as mundane as wearing pink shorts and twirling their hair. Oh, and fat free with boobs.

  What I discovered going from looking at pictures of these people to conversing with them in real life is that they look even more unreal in person than they do in photos. These women are freaks of nature: they’re supertall and have insanely slim figures yet still have butts and boobs that curve out from their bodies, as though someone stuffed dinner rolls into their clothes. The other thing you notice immediately about these women is their skin and facial features. Some of them actually have blemishes in person, which feels unnatural to behold when you’re so used to seeing the retouched, catalog versions of them. The others naturally have skin that looks like it comes spray-tanned and retouched. Often their eyebrows are twice as thick as yours, as though instead of growing pubic hair they just got a little extra something right above the eyes, because they’re #luckygirls. Usually, they’re ten times more gorgeous than they are in catalog photos, and you’d hate them for it if you weren’t so transfixed by it. I think this means that the camera not only adds ten pounds, it also just makes all of us look uglier. Which is why camera filters that make everyone’s cell phone snaps look like Ye Olde Photographs became so popular.

  The show cycle typically begins with the announcement of the model bestowed with the honor of wearing the “fantasy bra” in the fashion show. The fantasy bra is covered with diamonds and looks like something from a Carnivale float or one of those stores on Lincoln Road in Miami that sells bedazzled jeans to men. The brand unveils a new fantasy bra each year. The fantasy-bra-wearing model is positioned as the star of the show, and much of the preshow press revolves around her. In recent years, this “angel” (the term for the upper-echelon of Victoria’s Secret models who have long-term contracts and may or may not live in houses made of clouds) has delivered a baby. Take a look:

  2012:Alessandra Ambrosio wears diamond bra on runway six months after the delivery of son Noah.

  2011:Miranda Kerr wears diamond bra on runway eight months after the delivery of son Flynn.

  2010:Adriana Lima wears diamond bra a year after delivering first child, daughter Valentina. (Also opened the 2012 show eight weeks after delivering second child, but not in the diamond bra.)

  I don’t know if VS does this on purpose because postbaby bodies are just so viral these days, or if they just pick their favorite model of the moment and many happened to have recently had a baby, but a birth automatically adds another significant dimension to the story of the show: How will she get her pre-baby body back in time? The curiosity about this gets so intense, so feverish that you’d think these women were picking the jewels off their fantasy bra and giving them away with their answers.

  Prior to the 2011 show, Adriana Lima shocked the press with her revelation to a Telegraph reporter that she worked out twice a day for the three weeks leading up to it, went on a liquid diet nine days before the show, and stopped drinking and eating anything twelve hours before the show. Her comments stand in stark contrast to many other models and entertainers who claim to get in shape through occasional
yoga and never dieting. Her comments also deeply surprised the American public, like we all expected her to spend the three months leading up to the show sitting on her ass in front of the TV eating fried chicken and drinking eggnog. But we were taken aback nonetheless because most celebrities claim that looking model-y is as easy as existing (which some would argue is true if you take into account Photoshop). But I don’t know why more of them don’t admit that it takes a nutritionist, a trainer, time, money, kelp salads, what have you, to look the way they do. What would happen if they let their secrets out? The rest of us would look like them? No—most of America is content working their desk jobs, avoiding the gym, and never consuming a $12 green juice ever, which, to be fair, tastes bad in addition to costing as much as a dinner salad at TGI Fridays.

  After the brand announces the model chosen to wear the “fantasy bra” in the fashion show, promotion around said disco tits and owner of said disco tits ensues.

  • • •

  I was privileged enough to attend a little warm-up event to celebrate these disco tits before the 2010 show, as a writer at the Cut. It was just for people like me, that special species of writer and reporter the fashion industry referred to as “bloggers,” though it seemed weird to even make the distinction anymore because practically every professional writer in the world then had to write for something that is a blog. Fashion eventually came to realize they can no longer ignore people who cover fashion on the internet for the greater good of their marketing strategy, but they’re even more slowly figuring out how to treat us.

  Events for fashion bloggers only is something many fashion companies used to do quite often. Sometimes the blogger-specific events take place at the same time as some other more fabulous event, the point being that if you go, you get to watch an internet livestream of the event you’ve not been invited to. A fancy magazine editor might be invited to the Victoria’s Secret Show and After Party while I am invited to a live telecast of the show and an after party for the telecast, held in the upstairs of a moderately nice bar with passed hors d’oeuvres the size of a fingernail (when food’s that small, that’s what it all looks like, too). It’s the back row of not–Fashion Week stuff. One big difference between most of the blogger invites and most of the invites for the other More Important People, it seems, is that the bloggers are frequently bribed with the promise of free food. The non-blogger-specific events are fabulous enough that they don’t have to bribe the invitees with food. But that’s because the people being invited are fabulous enough that they would never even require a free feeding. And the more fabulous you are, the more fabulous it isn’t to be seen eating—or at least, that’s the message I get from some of the fashion industry’s most prominent members, who, despite insisting that they love curvy models and eating bacon, wouldn’t want a curve to form on their own figures.