For the best part of the 1990s and 2000s, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show “represented the nexus of pop culture, fashion, entertainment, camp, commerce and upbeat, all-American ‘sexy'”, said Emily Cronin in The Telegraph. “Then, abruptly, the party was over.”
Rocked by toxic workplace allegations and the “MeToo reckoning”, the show was pulled in 2019 with “many predicting it would never return”. But last night, following a five-year hiatus, the polarising runway show was back at the brand’s flagship store in New York City.
Organisers were tasked with balancing a “narrow tightrope of values”, said Cronin: “seductive but not male-gazey, inclusive but traditionally feminine”, and shedding the more “problematic” elements. But “does the show – and everything it once stood for – still belong in 2024?”
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‘Boring and lacklustre’
Once the “sexiest and most outrageous night in fashion”, last night’s show was “accused of going woke”, said Adam S. Levy in the Daily Mail. A “far cry from the event’s heyday”, some fans labelled the new staging “boring and lacklustre”.
This year’s comeback “promised to ‘celebrate all women'”, and featured the first walk down the Victoria’s Secret runway for Brazilian model Valentina Sampaio, who became the first transgender model to represent the brand in 2019, said Annabel Rackham for the BBC.
Alex Consani, another transgender model, appeared on the runway, along with a handful of plus-size models including Ashley Graham and Paloma Elsesser. But there was also an array of “fan favourites” returning to the show, from Gigi and Bella Hadid to Candace Swanepoel and an “unexpected” appearance from Kate Moss. Former “America’s Next Top Model” host Tyra Banks also returned to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show runway for the first time in almost two decades.
‘A lot of lip service and little action’
“There are moments from the original Victoria’s Secret Fashion show that live rent-free in my mind”, like “Rihanna out-strutting the models” in 2012 or Cara Delevingne’s “football-inspired look” in 2013, said Dani Maher in Harper’s Bazaar. “This year, were any moments burned into my brain with similar urgency? I’m not so sure.”
Efforts to make the comeback show “bigger and better than ever” by bringing back so many famous faces meant the runway was still “overwhelmingly dominated by thin conventionally attractive models”. And while disabled models did appear on the pink carpet, they were absent from the runway itself. The “narrow lens of beauty” from decades gone by still seemed to “linger in the air”.
“I love a good dose of nostalgia”, added Aiyana Ishmael in Teen Vogue, but “there are some things better left in the past”. Despite the brand’s noisy pledges to make this year’s event more inclusive, the tiny number of curvier models “felt like a gut punch”. And if the attempt at diversity “begins and ends with mid-size hourglass-shaped models, where do I and so many women like me fit in?” All in all, the show felt like a “lot of lip service and little action”.
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