The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and Me: A Love Story

Karolína Kurková in a flight attendant outfit.

The runway portion of the show was often sectioned off into themes reflected in the truly ridiculous costuming (Kurková was dressed as a buxom flight attendant in the aforementioned shoe-gate episode), and live musical performances accompanied each segment. There were few experiences in my youth that conjured the kind of full-on hysteria I felt when, in the 2003 show, Tyra Banks absolutely tore the runway to N.E.R.D.’s “Rockstar,” which was remixed specifically for the show. The hair was blonde. The waves were deep. The eye was smoky. The bra was bedazzled. And the tiara was sitting exactly where it was supposed to be: on the head of our queen mother.

It was fabulous. And I was fabulous. And something about my ability to recognize the majorness validated my outsize self-esteem at the time. These were my people. This was a bit of me. Even then, in my Hot Topic tights, thousands of miles away from the broadcast in New York City, I knew this was where I was meant to be. Diva to diva, a slay is a slay.

Tyra Banks walks the runway at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2003.

While my friends spent this precious hour somewhere in the vicinity of our local food court’s Hot Dog on a Stick, I was kicking off my Converses, getting ready to leave it all on the living room floor.

“3… 2… 1…,” I’d hear over a walkie-talkie, “Go, Adriana.”

It seems impossible, in today’s hypervigilant climate, that a young, chubby Black girl would have felt anything more than self-loathing and mortifying rejection while watching the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Still, something about the Angels signaled possibility to me. They offered an escape. It’s not that I considered them to be perfect, but the world they inhabited was the kind of paradise that I could close my eyes and see. If I could feel that magic, then that was proof enough that the magic was actually mine. And as I clung to daydreams of discovery during homeroom, the walls of my mind were plastered with that crossed-legged, hippy walk Banks made famous—the one I’d practice crossing the street, and between classes. Believing, in earnest, that all I needed was a pair of wings to take flight.

Tyra, Heidi, Gisele, and Adriana—they were my superheroes. And perhaps that was by savvy corporate design. In those days, Victoria’s Secret spent bajillion-dollar budgets hiring Michael Bay to direct its seasonal commercials, and you could tell. Any one of these TV spots would be right at home within the Transformers cinematic universe; they could live quite comfortably within any number of action film franchises, to be honest. There was drama, there was intrigue, there were smoke and mirrors (literally!), crisp white sheets billowing in mega-knot wind with no known source. There were 100 cameras capturing 2,000 angles of the same pair of mile-long legs, and, for some reason, even though this fantasy couldn’t be further from my reality—even though those impossibly long legs would never be mine—I didn’t feel belittled or left out. I felt wild with ambition.

Paloma Elsesser at Victoria’s Secret’s The Tour ’23.

I struggle reminiscing about those days. Sometimes, I find myself wondering if perhaps the negative influence of sitting five inches in front of a monitor projecting inadequacy into my psyche was so subliminal that I was never truly privy to the toll it took. When I look back at my obsession with Victoria’s Secret, it’s as if the memory lives behind a facade of frosted glass—I can make out the shape and size of the trauma, but it’s undefined and murky. I know it’s there, but the integrity of the container convinces me that it will never break through. Maybe time has just washed away the stains of insecurity, maybe practicing radical self-love was the balm I needed, and the shame of once subscribing to white thin supremacy is gone for good. It’s not lost on me that Victoria’s Secret, especially in the early aughts, was not meant to be a friendly place for women with bodies like mine.

Still, the fact remains, whether truth or illusion, that being curvy and seeing women so confident in their sensuality felt powerful and desirable. At the ripe old age of 12, that was very close to all I wanted to feel.

Even now, as I prepare to attend the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show as a guest, I get butterflies. Not because those Angels I always adored are now friends and colleagues and some even inhabit bodies that look much closer to mine. Not even because baby Gaby has made it to these once-impossible spaces, but because I know that when I see Banks’s first walk on the runway live, I’ll be transported back to 2003.

I’ll be in my childhood home, bursting at the seams with dreams and infinite possibility, rabid with wild obsession, illegally downloading “Rockstar” on Napster as I strut back and forth with more attitude than I know what to do with. Life will be good. It’s an irreplicable high, and I’ll chase it to the end of the last runway on earth.

Gabriella Karefa-Johnson is a New York-based stylist and fashion editor. Her approach is largely narrative and focused on diversifying representation in the high fashion landscape. Formerly Vogue’s Global Contributing Fashion Editor-at-Large, she was the first Black woman to style a Vogue cover in 2021, featuring Paloma Elsesser. Karefa-Johnson styled numerous iconic global Vogue covers including the September issue featuring Serena Williams’s retirement announcement, Margot Robbie, Bella Hadid, and Olivia Wilde. She has also contributed to publications like Perfect, Re-Edition, and The Wall Street Journal. She previously served as Fashion Director of Garage. In addition to her editorial work, Karefa-Johnson collaborates with like-minded commercial clients including Nike, Etro, Miu Miu, Calvin Klein, and Armani, to expand and elevate the representational field.