by Amy Odell
I have considered starting a group called Fashion Bloggers Anonymous, which would bring the industry’s lesser members together in a secret basement where we’d confess our least fashionable sins: “I am a fashion blogger and I eat”—looks around in fear—“club sandwiches.” Mayo packets and Wendy’s chicken sandwich cartons would blanket the floor. We’d forget that we used to approach certain realities of our business—like how so many fashion people are so thin—ironically. (Matter of fact, that’s why the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show feels so odd: much like many Serious Runway Shows, it carries with it not a trace of sarcasm or irony.)
So before the 2010 show, I was invited to a lunch for bloggers only at Bobo in Manhattan’s West Village, a nice Italian restaurant frequented by scene-y people who wear $300 ripped jeans and have memberships to those gyms you can go to only if you hire a personal trainer. The purpose of the lunch was the unveiling of the year’s million-dollar bra, which new mom Adriana Lima would wear in the fashion show a few weeks later. Adriana was to be present to eat with us and tell us everything we needed to know about the bra, the assumption being that there is sooooo much to know about this bra that we would need a whole lunch—preceded by some passed hors d’oeuvres and champagne—to absorb all of the information. About a single bra.
When my friend and coworker Diana, my at-work stylist and top sample-sale partner, and I arrived at the luncheon, we had to wait in line to sign a release form before entering, which is not a usual occurrence at these things. The fine print revealed we were signing away a promise that if we won any of the fabulous prizes they planned to raffle off, we would disclose the value of the items and that we won them at the event in any of our bloggings about them. This made some sense, as the then-relatively new FCC regulations required bloggers to tell readers when they wrote about things they’d gotten for free. The release also had some other rules about what we could and couldn’t blog about. I was pretty annoyed at having to sign away my right to free blogging just so that I could eat lunch in the same room as a mannequin with diamond boobs and a real-life supermodel, but when I objected, the intern taking the forms acted like I was speaking Dutch and did not compute. So I signed and went upstairs. I wanted the interview with Adriana.
Upstairs we were treated to a nice cocktail hour that included passed champagne and tuna-avocado toasts, all on polished silver trays. The bejeweled bra was on a mannequin positioned on a special stagelike platform, shining its radiance down on all in attendance. After Diana and I downed some champagne, stuffed our faces with a few of the tuna things, and engaged in some forced conversation with our fellow bloggers, she looked at me and said, “So. Do you want to go look at the bra?”
We approached the bra, which I honestly didn’t believe was the real million-dollar thing. I felt like it should be shinier. Plus, would they just leave a seven-figure piece of diamond underwear sitting there without a guard? We’re bloggers—we eat. Can we even be trusted not to get tuna grease on the thing?
“So. This is the bra. Here it is,” Diana remarked as she stared at the bejeweled cups, as though waiting for a deep, soul-altering epiphany. Looking at the bra felt like being in an art museum. Not in the sense that it was High Art, but in the sense that I had no idea how to approach the experience. I never know how long I’m supposed to look at a piece or what I’m supposed to be thinking about it to be really doing looking at art. But it was not lost on either of us that the event happening all around was like its own fancy rehearsal dinner for this single set of disco boobs.
After the cocktail hour, we were ushered into the main dining room, where a long table was set with name cards, like a wedding or an awkwardly formal Real Housewives dinner. Adriana Lima would sit in the middle, with the bloggers arranged in seeming order of importance around her. The more important you were, the closer you were seated to Adriana. I was happy to be one person over from her because while I love being in the presence of celebrities, especially models and especially at meals because you get to see what they eat, it would have been terribly awkward for me to sit next to her. Not only because I had royally fucked this up with Richard Gere previously on an assignment, but also because you can’t just turn to her and be like “OMG—did I tell you what this guy did to me?” She’s not a potential new BFF. You’re talking to each other only because you were both paid to. Your interactions just won’t ever feel any more natural or genuine than talking to your new hairdresser.
After we were seated and began perusing the menu, Adriana breezed into the room. She shook everybody’s hands and addressed us each individually, introducing herself as though she were a friend of a real friend. She’s the hot girl you want to hate for being so hot, but ultimately can’t in the slightest because she’s so nice. I was charmed by her because not every celebrity tries with reporters. There’s a tacit assumption that the reporters are the ones who will try, and the celebrities will fulfill their part of the deal by just existing and saying stuff, quite often little of real interest or meaning. Interviewing many celebs is a lot like trying to train a cat: you make all these soothing encouraging sounds and the cat ultimately is just going to be a cat and do whatever she feels like doing. And it’s very likely she’ll just blink at you slowly and then turn her head to the side.
Adriana took her place at the middle of the table, and a Victoria’s Secret flack encouraged her to engage us in discussion about The Bra, which had been moved to the head of the table (or did it grow wings and fly there?). Adriana began saying things like, “It is so comfortable” and “I feel so sexy when I wear bras.” Enchanted by her presence, my fellow bloggers, drunk on Victoria’s Secret/free champagne already, countered with probing questions like, “What advice do you have for women about lingerie?” And: “Are you nervous about the show?” It gets painful. Reporters become so conditioned to behave in a way that will please brands providing them access or ad dollars that many just stop asking the stuff people really want to know about. The end result is that most people in the public eye and many of the outlets that follow them are conditioned to be boring. A good reporter works around this by warming the subject up with boring questions and then joking around with her or asking the things you actually want to know. And the things you actually want to know usually don’t involve how the person feels to be opening a disco boobs fashion show.
Adriana’s nonchalance is halted when the food orders are taken. We can choose one of a few items for each of three courses. When the waiter gets to Adriana, the efficient ordering process stops, as she engages in whispered discussion about her meal. Her lunch was then the last to arrive at the table because she had a special off-menu order in keeping with her preshow diet. When the food arrived, we tried not to eye whatever Magic Lunch Adriana was eating. I tried to extract something interesting from the Victoria’s Secret rep sitting across from me.
Over the past three years, some of the top Victoria’s Secret models had gotten pregnant and sat out the show; meanwhile, Miranda Kerr walked in freaking Balenciaga—one of the great runway bookings—at six months’ pregnant. Would Victoria’s Secret ever put one of their pregnant angels on the runway?
“HA! Hahaha. Hahahahaha. Haaaaa no,” she said, as Adriana cut into her chicken breast, peeling back the skin and pushing aside the baby carrots that came with it. Adriana had had her baby a year ago and was making her big runway comeback this year, opening the show and wearing the very diamond bra seated at the head of our table.
I needed to ask Adriana how she planned to look pretty much as prepregnant as possible by the show’s allotted date. Halfway through her meal, a rep asked Adriana to talk to me. Rather than sit at the table and turn around, putting me in the awkward position of standing up above her or squatting at her feet below her (the glamorous life), she ushered me to a banquette at one end of the room, well out of earshot of everyone else there. I could feel the jealous eyes of the fashion blogging community follow me to that booth. This was kind of Adriana, f
or most celebrities would just have you kneel at their feet and interview them in a posture of discomfort and subservience, a physical symbol of the status difference between the two of you, as if their designer clothes and overall flawlessness weren’t enough.
Adriana was radiant, with a slightly shy energy. I could tell as we started talking that she had memorized some things to discuss and really wanted to work in what Victoria’s Secret was paying her to say. I warmed her up with some requisite questions about the bra. How was it fitted? She gave me the canned, breathy replies she had clearly thought out before the lunch. “This year they chose the Miraculous Bra, which adds two cup sizes,” she said. “It’s like feminine, very bombshell, and I think for me, also, sometimes they ask me if I would feel comfortable in it? And I love a push-up bra, so what I like right now is the Miraculous Bra, so they take in this bra and they embroider the diamonds, the gems, one by one in that bra. It’s very comfortable, very comfortable.”
I eased into questions about her diet and fitness regimen. I was fascinated to hear her answers because being a woman who lives in the world I’m trained to care more than I should about being thin and looking hot. (This interview took place a year before Adriana’s controversial comments about going on a liquid diet nine days before the show surfaced in the Telegraph.) But when the diet stuff came up, Adriana spoke to me like more of a girlfriend than a Victoria’s Secret–ordered, thanks-for-signing-our-release-form girlfriend. She explained that she spent two hours in the gym every day in the weeks leading up to the show, and that her diet consisted of only four ounces of protein at a time, and only white or green vegetables, all steamed or grilled, no fat, no carbs. Between meals, she’d have a protein shake or cereal bar.
“Definitely zero carbs for sure,” she said when I remarked on the low carb count.
“How does that feel?” I asked.
“Better actually. I feel healthier, I feel much healthier, yes!”
“I could never do that. When I don’t have enough carbs I get so, I don’t know, tired,” I told her.
“Because everybody’s different,” she said. “That’s why I have a nutritionist. I go there, and he checks my blood, my breathing, everything to make sure what’s going to work for your body, you know? For me, for example, if I eat chocolate or have dairy, I will feel puffy. Sometimes carbs makes me feel puffy—it makes me swollen. To me? Yes.”
And that, my friends, is the difference between a VS model and a normal person. (Of course, Adriana looked about as puffy as a steel pole. In a great way.)
One other reason I will not look like Adriana or her peers, ever, is because I can’t afford/don’t have time for the nutritionist, trainer, and whatever other assistance she gets (genes) to look the way she does. It’s in Victoria’s Secret’s best interest to make the process as easy and as pleasant as possible for her, because it is largely the impossible dream of what her body would look like now, and a few weeks later on the runway, that makes the brand so interesting and appealing to the masses.
Adriana explained to me that getting her body back to the way it was after giving birth to her daughter was an enormous challenge. Once she started talking to me about the same struggles all women face with their bodies—and how much she loved being a mom—she lost her nervousness. “I think motherhood is a beautiful thing. And I think that after I had my baby I feel much more beautiful, I feel much more sexy, I feel much more confident,” she said. “I feel like, womanly now, and not like a child, and that’s a wonderful thing. I feel giving birth, the experience was amazing. I have no words to describe how beautiful is that moment. I don’t [know if] people realize how powerful is this—to have a baby! I mean, you’re creating life. I really felt like I’m a goddess. I felt like I’m a goddess! I created a life! And there it is. And so many times you forget about these things.” She made me want to conceive a child Virgin Mary–style right then and there. “It’s a beautiful thing, to have a baby.” There you have it: Adriana Lima, supermodel, felt like an unconquerable goddess when she gave birth, which would seem to suggest that a woman doesn’t need all the diets, fancy workout regimes, and diamond bras to feel like, well, an angel. After ten minutes with Adriana, a publicist came over to give me the “wrap it up” tap.
I commend Adriana for being honest about what it takes to look that way at age thirty after having a baby. Knowing that’s what it takes to look like her actually makes me realize that I will most definitely never look like her. Going to the gym twice a day and not eating solids for longer than three hours sounds like something I’ll never do. I’ll keep my cellulite and enjoy my salad dressing not on the side. I am fine with not knowing what it’s like to be hit on by Leonardo DiCaprio at an after party. (I might feel differently if I were a wealthy housewife living somewhere like the Upper East Side or Beverly Hills, where, television has taught me, life is a circuit of mean-spirited dinner parties, Botox appointments, personal training sessions, salon visits, and lunches where no one eats anything but white wine.)
I didn’t win any of the raffle prizes that day—which included a Swarovski-encrusted bra, panty and garter set, and some jewelry. I left feeling like I wanted to have a baby—and bigger boobs, but mostly a baby—along with the will not to eat sugar and to work out for two hours every day so I could feel and look as good as Adriana.
Unfortunately, I already had a blog, which, like a child, is a fussy, needy, and all-consuming thing that not only takes a lot of energy but also might make me gain weight. Sometimes when you’re blogging, you feel like you can’t even get up to go to the bathroom. One comforting thing about feeling like a much less spectacular human than you did pre–supermodel encounter, though, is that you realize you have no reason ever to look like said supermodel because you will never have the time or resources or need to do so.
• • •
After the diamond bra press palooza comes the fashion show. But before the show, some of us reporters get to go backstage. Reporters here are obsessed with the models’ diet and exercise routines. (Unless you’re Miranda Kerr in 2011, in which case you’re relegated to the topic of breast feeding, which must be a welcome change for her, even though she still has to talk about her boobs.)
You’ll find two buffets backstage at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. One is for food: hand-carved meats, pasta in dairy-based sauce, brownies as big as your face. The other is for hair extensions: blond, light brown, brown, dark brown. The tables for these disparate sets of things sit disconcertingly next to each other—not that any one seems disconcerted.
“Yeah, that’s cute! With the strawberry!” one photographer said to three models posing with the chocolate-covered fruits up to their mouths when I was backstage at the show one year. This treat seems to serve as more of a prop for exhibiting practically glass-encased sex appeal than actual sustenance.
This show is, I’m told, a vehicle of fun and happiness. Escape and beauty. Bright colors and dreams coming true! Sparkles! But mostly, it’s a reminder that VS has been inimitably able to put forth an ideal of the female form and that it had a big hand in convincing the world what the best-looking women should look like: tan but not orange, buff but also very thin, glowing but not shiny, tousled yet perfectly made up. It’s all very strange, like existing inside a grown man’s dollhouse.
Backstage, all the models wear the same hot-pink satin robes bedazzled with the VS logo. Models can wear whatever shoes they want, though. I saw everything from combat boots to stilettos to flip-flops. None of them looked like they went with the bathrobes, but this is a strange and magical land where your hand-carved pork loin comes with a side of wig parts.
Some models wear visible tank tops and other clothes underneath their robes, while some seem to be wearing just a bra. Anja Rubik, a model who isn’t licking chocolate-covered strawberries before photographers, took one of each face-sized cookie and brownie so she could nibble a bit from all of them.
I w
as supposed to interview the models backstage and find something interesting to write about the whole thing. Since models getting hair and makeup done while wearing pink robes isn’t really a story, but their collision with Real Food feels like maybe a story, that’s what I ended up focusing on. Besides, I see what you people click on, and I know it’s anything in the vein of “Model Interacts with/Ingests Food.” I wondered if the press were allowed to enjoy the buffet (as I previously mentioned: VERY LARGE COOKIES), but in the chance of limited supply, and because I’m very awkward in the face of uncertainty, I did not. I wouldn’t be trapped in this room all day and could leave to feed on whatever I wanted without people taking my picture while I did so. (Is there anything worse than being photographed eating? No, there is not. No wonder so many people who spend their lives in front of the camera become so food weird.)
The food and hair buffets stood at one end of the room. Next to them were a few large round tables meant for dining, like some kind of political convention. They connected to a lounge area consisting of a few stylish, hyper-rectangular gray couches with coffee tables and floral arrangements. It looked like the waiting room of a posh dentist’s office. Except for the fact that the rest of the room was filled with long tables with mirrors and lights for hair and makeup. Sitting in front of these mirrors were the roughly forty models who would walk in the show, each surrounded by a small army of people fussing over her hair and face. And in the far corner, created by floor-to-ceiling curtains, was a room with a white sheet of printer paper stuck to the front that read “BRONZING.” Even given the fairly fantastic access media gets to the VS Fashion Show, no nonmodels are allowed in here; it must have been a naked activity, this “BRONZING.”