I Was Finally Represented in a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show — and I Don’t Care

[View this email in your browser]( | [Manage newsletter subscriptions](newsletter=all2) [Allure logo image]( October 16, 2024 [gigi hadid walking the 2024 victoria's secret fashion show runway with pink wings and lingerie]( OP-ED [Victoria’s Secret Needs to Read the Room]( Their main event has gone from being the Met Gala of the disrobed to something I thought it could never be: Irrelevant.   [contributing editor danielle pergament]( Like anything, it helps to have context. It was the year we learned what a “Macarena” was. Friends was sweeping the nation (the first time). Perfectly respectable people stopped washing their hair and started wearing plaid flannel shirts. A cup of coffee cost roughly a dollar and didn’t take a paragraph to order. Amazon sold its first book. That’s what 1995 looked like in case you weren’t there. It was also the year that Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie store you knew from your local mall, had its first runway show. Looking back now, that first show was, in a word, quaint. Maybe even a touch…boring. Then someone somewhere had an idea that roughly went like this: Make this show so bonkers and superlative that it changes the whole game. It moved all over the world. It made careers. It turned models into phenoms. The show was a blur of enormous headgear and an extravaganza of cultural fetishization and appropriation (of Chinese culture and indigenous people culture and pretty much any other culture you can think of). And very much pageantry. Very much spectacle. The actual clothes were the least of it. Quite literally. Thinking about it now, it’s hard to imagine that I thought it was the epitome of importance—beauty, fashion, power, women, New York. But there must be a myth about the dangers of mortals engaging with angels. It wouldn’t end well for the mortal... [READ MORE]( [ashley graham walking the 2024 victoria's secret fashion show runway with black and gold wings & lingerie]( OP-ED [I Was Finally Represented in a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show — and I Don’t Care]( Seeing a few women with bodies like mine only highlighted how silly the whole thing is. Now I feel free of it.   [news editor nicola dall'asen]( If I had seen last night’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show when I was a tween, I might have cried tears of joy. I might have felt empowered watching Ashley Graham’s thighs flex and jiggle as she strutted around in a lacy leotard. As an average albeit slightly chubby girl, I might have felt a little less unworthy in the flock of thin friends with whom I sometimes watched the show during sleepovers, all decked out in PINK merchandise I could barely fit into. In reality, sitting there alone in front of my TV at 30 years old, I felt absolutely nothing at the sight. Honestly, I was bored to tears. In fact, I thought the show was so bad that it wound up healing something within me. Like many, many, many people, I’ve been pissed at Victoria’s Secret for decades for excluding me (and more so, people bigger than I am) not just from buying pretty bras in its stores but from its formerly-annual Fashion Show. Thin models had been the standard from its inception in 1995 all the way through its cancellation back in 2018 (which, you’ll remember, was caused by an irredeemable downfall in ratings, the company’s just-revealed connections to Jeffrey Epstein, and backlash to transphobic and fatphobic comments made by its CEO at the time). To a skeptic nation, over the course of the past few weeks, the brand promoted its grand comeback with a vague promise of inclusivity... [READ MORE]( More on Allure.com   [At 71, the First Black Trans Model Looks Back]( || Almost 50 years after Tracey Norman's face was on a Clairol box, she says she’s still “in survival mode.” [READ MORE](   [Maggie Smith Reminded Me It's Not My Destiny to Be Invisible]( || “Here I am,” she seemed to say. No apologies. No regrets. Just a smile. [READ MORE](   [Tara Lipinski’s Fertility Struggles Included Four Surgical Abortions]( || “Without them, I don’t know if I would be here today." [READ MORE]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( [Pinterest]( This e-mail was sent to you by [allure.com](. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, allure@newsletters.allure.com, to your address book. View our [Privacy Policy]( [Unsubscribe]( or [Manage your newsletter subscriptions](newsletter=all2) Copyright © Condé Nast 2024. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.