Victoria's Secret Fashion Show "Male Gaze"
As a kid growing up in a small-scale town in Ohio, there were few major cultural events that captured everyone's attending. People would gather every February to picket the Superbowl, the Monday after the Oscars would be spent talking about winners and losers, and presidential debates and inaugurations would be watched and commented on once you were erstwhile enough to understand them. But one of the biggest, most memorable events, which took place every Dec, was also the i that teenage boys near savoured the opportunity to talk about; making the annual proud announcement that they would spend their Saturday piled into someone's basement with other teenage boys, pounding some root beer, inhaling Cheetos, and gawking at the Victoria's Underground Fashion Bear witness.
The Victoria's Hush-hush Mode Bear witness began in 1995, initially every bit a promotional tool ahead of Victoria'south Secret's parent visitor, L Brands, going public on the stock marketplace. But it took but a few years for it to become a global phenomenon. It ran every twelvemonth bated from 2004 (when the show instead went on a "grassroots" tour around America), drew in live audiences of millions, and became the height of achievement for supermodels: walking downwardly the world's near-watched runway. The Victoria's Secret Way Show permeated every corner of America and, for decades, was the subject of annual salivation for men of all ages.
I speak in the past tense because on Friday, Victoria'south Secret confirmed what had long been rumoured: the style testify was ending in guild to take the brand in a new management. "Going forward," said Les Wexner, the 82-year-former CEO of Fifty Brands, who is currently under scrutiny over his links to Jeffrey Epstein, in a memo to employees on Fri, "we don't believe network television is the right fit". He said that Victoria's Secret would instead focus on "heady and dynamic content and a new kind of event – delivered to our customers on platforms that she's glued to … and in means that volition button the boundaries of fashion in the global digital age".
Now, this statement isn't entirely misleading. Having the same major marketing strategy pre- and post-Instagram is bad business, and a live fashion show with a half-time popular star performance feels peculiarly of the Noughties. But what this memo skirts around is the mammoth weight of mod discourse, nether which the show had long been buckling, and the fact that if the evidence went on whatever longer, it would finally scissure.
The evidence had one painful problem that you likely don't need spelling out: it was, despite masquerading as a homage to "girl power" and female person self-love, perhaps the least feminist event one could fathom. I wrote last November well-nigh how the Victoria's Clandestine Fashion Show was struggling to be woke. To describe its attempts to go racially and physically diverse every bit half-hearted would be generous, and its models remained overwhelmingly white, stick thin, and were barred from answering questions about feminism. Concluding year's prove came under fire when then-marketing director Ed Razek said that he didn't want the show to have "plus-size" women or "transsexuals" because "the show is a fantasy". And fifty-fifty beyond the terrible eyes, the show was suffering from dwindling viewership. Equally one person in the NS office joked, "the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is for people who haven't discovered you tin can get porn on the cyberspace" – an increasingly small-scale demographic.
Despite all of this, the Victoria'south Secret Manner Bear witness was undeniably iconic – but increasingly for the reasons that clashed violently with the brand's simulated-feminist aims. Until the bitter end, it continued to bask in feeding the male gaze and making millions of women feel shitty about themselves. As a teenager, I desperately wanted to get my hands on an uncomfortable PINK bra and the matching underwear (which rode up and then bad it'south a miracle I didn't become a UTI). Even at 12-years-old – 12-years-old! – I thought that wearing sweatpants with the Victoria's Secret brand plastered across the barrel was the height of coolness, and convincing my mom to let me get panties in the five-for-$25 deal felt like my life'south greatest battle.
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At the same age, boys at my school were approaching girls at school to brand wanking jokes virtually VS models who were ten years their senior, and would boast of gathering in sweaty living rooms to watch – and presumably to get erections in unison. This was a part of what fabricated Victoria'due south Secret permeate even suburban Ohio; information technology gave permission for young girls to gain value from beingness rampantly, unabashedly sexualised. Watching Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss hold easily in diamond-encrusted lingerie and shout "feminism!" wasn't going to make it feel whatever less soulless.
We shouldn't be overly gleeful about the death of the Victoria's Surreptitious Fashion Bear witness – the company volition go along to cloak itself in the language of female empowerment while appearing in 13-year-olds Instagram stories to tell them their tits are besides small. When I was that 13-year-old, desperately trying to get my hands on some PINK merch, I wasn't solely influenced by the effects of the mode testify, but the entire total-court press of messaging from a lingerie brand that idea "why not too target children?"
Merely fifty-fifty with the continuation of its other insidious marketing practices, the cancellation of the Victoria's Secret Manner Show is a win. And the relief of young girls spared their male peers' comments for years to come volition soon be palpable.
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