Remember The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show? This Is It Now. Feel Old Yet?

When I was in high school there were three annual events that set the halls ablaze with anticipation and gossip: prom, the Super Bowl, and the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. This was 2010-14, arguably the height of the brand’s power. The popular girls wore Wonder push-up bras two sizes too big for their pubescent bodies. Weekends were spent rifling through the 5 for $25 pantie bins in search of cheap lace thongs your mother would shake her head at when she did your laundry, but we needed thongs because if you wore regular underwear under your PINK brand yoga pants, they would bunch up and show. The problem with thongs, though, was that they’d ride up and give you a whale tail over the waistband of the yoga pants, which you had to roll down far enough to make sure the brand name was completely visible. This was a distraction to the boys, of course, and so many girls got dress-coded for it that they just stopped wearing underwear altogether.

All of this is to say that the VS fashion show was a big deal. Gone were the days of ’90s supermodels you knew by name, but that did nothing to lessen the power of these 8-foot-tall glamazons. What were the wings going to look like, and who would be the featured on-stage artist, we wondered. This was not a “fashion show” in the traditional sense in that there were no clear “fashions” being displayed that would eventually be available for purchase. I mean, sure, you could go on to buy the lingerie, but would you? Of course not, and not just because we were kids—I would genuinely like to see the metrics of even adults purchasing the looks shown in these shows. We were never going to wear anything like that—we were never going to look anything like that because even the “Angels” as they were referred to, didn’t look like that most of the time. We were watching because we were unsexed teenage girls and we wanted to feel like women. We wanted to hear what the boys said about it the next day, and depending on where we fell in the roster of cool-girl-hotness, either roll our eyes at them or lean in and flirt. Either way, we felt superior for once in our lives. Tragic, right?

Nowadays, we’re all a little bit wiser, and the VS fashion show has fallen out of fashion, as it were. That documentary in 2022 exposed the brand as a hollow cash grab dreamed up by a gross man (shocker!), and most women I know are opting for comfy bras sans underwire and padding or no bra at all. After I escaped the hormonal hell of high school, I honestly forgot about the Angels.

So, imagine my surprise when I found out the fashion show was still a thing. And it happened last night.

Turns out it hasn’t been a thing for six years (maybe that’s why I’ve felt so good about my body recently?), but I guess the powers that be at Victoria’s Secret got together in a board room somewhere and decided, this is 2024, the year of our lord Ozempic, let’s put the Hadids in some panties and push them down a catwalk.

I’m obviously not in high school anymore (thank God), so I can’t speak to whether the kids cared or not, but I have to wonder if any adults cared, either. Were the executives running focus groups, polling the masses to see if they were clamoring for some models in wings and underwear? Have we simply run out of ideas?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in a world where fashion models have any real star power anymore. When I was 16 and gangly, never the right shape to fill out those bras and yoga pants, I dreamed of a day that I wouldn’t be compared to Adriana Lima. I guess I thought we were finally there.