Tales from the Back Row

by Amy Odell

  Filling in every empty space in the cavernous backstage area were reporters, camera crews, and publicists, all trying to do the same thing: turn this big, $12 million sparkly commercial for the world’s premiere mall lingerie brand into a story. It’s a lot of work partly because it’s hard to find new and interesting things to say about it. And every time you come close to finding a story, Kanye West rolls through to say “hi” to one of the models, distracting everyone in the room and creating a huge clusterfuck around the model about to tell you something really good, like that she can’t wait to get pregnant again. I can compete with the Us Weekly reporter for someone’s attention, but I cannot compete with Kanye West + entourage for someone’s attention.

  In the middle of the room sat Miranda Kerr, the supermodel who was then married to Orlando Bloom and has a child with him and is the kind of celebrity who dresses up to walk to her car because she knows paparazzi stalk her. She was talking to reporters about breast feeding and how honored she felt to be wearing the $2.5 million “fantasy treasure bra” made of diamonds and other precious stones in the show. She had memorized stats about the bra, like the number of carats it contained and its precise gem-etic makeup. People who are so media-trained are like telemarketers, ready to give the same spiel to anyone who will listen. I am here covering the show for New York magazine, and supposed to report on Kerr in particular for a print feature. Since she seems to enjoy talking about her baby in the kind of detail most celebs prefer to keep to themselves, I asked about him.

  “This morning I was up at five a.m. with the baby, and then we had to be here this morning at nine, and we’re doing, we have a lot of press and fittings and um, you know, it’s kind of, it’s very busy between, and then we have, like, one show at four and another show at eight, so,” Kerr told me as a makeup artist applied indiscernible foundation to her under-eye area, which Kerr examined herself in a hand mirror every twenty or thirty seconds. (Victoria’s Secret puts on two fashion shows: one for VS staff and some press, and another for press and everyone else lucky enough to be invited, or so I’ve been told. Footage from both is what we see in the televised broadcast.) “I really want—ideally, I want to be with my son all the time, but you know, I might as well do this while I can,” she continued. “And after I finish this week with Victoria’s Secret, I’m going to take a few months off over Christmas so that I’ll be able to be with him again.”

  Kerr said “while I can” because of course she can’t do this forever. She seemed to know she was probably on her last couple of years of Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, because modeling contracts last only as long as you are young looking and fresh feeling enough to excite the general public by wearing underwear so embellished it makes you look like a Christmas ornament. (The “fantasy treasure bra”—made of 3,400 precious stones, 142 carats of white and yellow diamonds, in case you were wondering—hid the naughty bits of a mannequin several yards away from her.)

  Victoria’s Secret does not pick models who deserve their contracts just by being their famous selves, the way celebrities deserve endorsement deals. You look at Beyoncé’s endorsement deal with L’Oréal, for example, and you think, Why wouldn’t Beyoncé deserve to be in a L’Oréal commercial? She’s EFFING BEYONCÉ! THEY ARE LUCKY! Whereas with Victoria’s Secret, you are less likely to look at many of the models and think, Why shouldn’t they star in the ­Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show? VS is LUCKY to have them! Marcie ­Merriman, VS’s director of brand strategy and planning from 2001 to 2003, told Bloomberg Businessweek before the 2012 show taping that the brand “would never pick known models or ones that are already out there, because the brand is stronger than that.” It’s a vague proclamation, as so many relating to casting models for ­anything are, but what I get from that is they want people who can fit into the brand and will have to work hard to show that they deserve their contracts. You get the sense that the models are lucky to be genetically blessed, but also that if they don’t take proper care of their bodies and their hair and their skin and their image and all that to stay Victoria’s Secret–ready, or simply reach a certain age, they’ll be out on the street with their hand mirrors putting on their own foundation.

  Like Gisele’s, Marisa Miller’s, and Heidi Klum’s before hers, Kerr’s contract ended just a couple years after that interview. But like every good multiplatform celebrity, she has other nonmodeling gigs in the works. “I have my organic skin care line, I have a book that I’ve written,” she told me at that show. “The title is Treasure Yourself, and it’s won quite a few awards in Australia. It’s been the number one bestseller and now it’s being translated into nine different languages.” The book hadn’t yet launched in the United States, she explained. I don’t know if this is a line from the book, but when I asked her what’s empowering to women—an alleged cornerstone of this excessively bedazzled marketing device—she replied, “I want to encourage women to embrace their own uniqueness. Because just like a rose is beautiful, so is a sunflower, so is a peony, I mean all flowers are beautiful in their own way, and that’s like women, too.”

  Kerr may have been wearing the same pink robe and chestnut hair extensions and bronzer as all her other brunette colleagues in that room, but at least she could embrace her own uniqueness with her very own pair of stiletto pumps. I felt ready to embrace mine by leaving and picking up a turkey club for lunch.

  • • •

  Adriana Lima was sitting in her hair and makeup chair surrounded by more reporters than most of the models here. Alessandra Ambrosio was roaming around in heels and her pink robe holding a green juice. Models love green juice. I’ve been told some drink it like water. If you think this is a habit you can adopt, let that idea go now: each of these green juices costs something like $7 to $11 each, and I’m not sure you’d make juicing a much more affordable pursuit even if you bought a fancy-ass juicer, picked up fresh produce from Whole Foods constantly, and made it yourself. I heard of one model said to have a green juice addiction so serious that when money became tight she cut back on her housekeeper rather than her juices. This was no small matter since she had no idea how to pick up after herself and was living in a pigsty. And her green juice habit was thought to be a big source of the depletion of her bank accounts since she had, like, seven a day. Meanwhile, the story had it, she smoked cigarettes.

  But back to Alessandra: she’s not on a liquid diet. “There’s these juices right here,” she says, motioning to the green liquid in her hand, “and on the first day people really thought I was doing a fast, and I was like, no. I was doing omelet even if it’s an [egg] white omelet with vegetables inside, I’m still doing that.” (Alessandra, like Adriana, is Brazilian and speaks with an accent.)

  “If you’re doing the shows in Milan or Paris, you don’t really have to do anything besides watch what you eat. And this one you really have to take care of your body, your skin, everything, you know? Because everything is exposed here and everyone is watching,” Alessandra told me, explaining that before the VS show, she intensifies her workout routine, focusing especially on her abs and glutes.

  “Everyone” includes the live audience and all the people who watch the show on TV when it airs a month later. The VS Fashion Show won’t get royal wedding levels of viewership—if the royal wedding is like a Justin Bieber stadium spectacular with enough pheromones in the air to warrant a gas mask, the VS Fashion Show is like an indie band at an outdoor festival that plays at noon when no one’s high yet—but still draws around 9 or 10 million sets of eyeballs. As a reference point, the Oscars, which is pretty boring as far as television goes, if we’re to be perfectly honest, got 43.7 million viewers in 2014. The VS Fashion Show is really not that different of a program, if you think about it—hot, well-dieted, and well-gymed ladies strut about wearing sequins and hair spray, ­musical performers do songs—but it’s still an infomercial with zero stakes or suspense, so 10 million is actually kind of staggering. Magic Bullet ads definitely couldn’t d
raw nearly that many viewers even if they aired at the same time and were hosted by hot women wearing diamonds instead of clothes.

  As for the live audience, this is a different beast. Well, actually, lots of individual beasts, but mostly of the same species. You have the press, seated in order of importance, with the “most important” closer to the stage, celebrities in the league of The Rock and Adrian Grenier and Pitbull in the front row, along with a few less-well-known women celebs who may as well not be there since it’s not their pushed-together breasts and fat-free outer thighs that ­everyone came to see. And all around, filling in every hole and all the bleachers behind the VIPs, are the men in white shirts and dark blazers, many of whom came in packs, a few of whom have managed to bring a date. They look and smell like bankers/other kinds of people who work on Wall Street. I have been told that these men are invited to the show because they have something to do with VS’s parent company L Brands’ financials and are asked to attend in hopes that they’ll rate the stock favorably. (Victoria’s Secret, despite my asking about who gets to go to the show, would not tell me. And a lot of the models told me they get to bring only one guest if that.)

  The appeal of the event for this odd horde of straights seems obvious—women in underwear, rock star performances, and above all, bragging rights. But even so: this is not a straight haven! No fashion show is! Fashion shows are about clothes and flamboyance much more than the sexy ladies walking back and forth, and this carries over even to something as commercialized as the VS show. Even though the VS show is about some of the models as much as what they wear (which is not true of many other shows), everything glows pink, and no part of the decor that can have a heart or other mark of girliness is without it. Meanwhile, 80 percent of all attendees have such lousy views they won’t even be able to tell whether that arrangement of Swarovski crystals on the bras are butterfly- or star-shaped, or whether certain embellishments are made of fur or feathers, so it’s not like the cleavage is going to look that memorable. If you take iPhone photos of the show, you’re just going to get a bunch of blurry distant shots that make the whole thing look like an aquarium on crack. Also, Victoria’s Secret fills the production with so many distractions—acrobats and dancers and Katy Perrys and ribbons and balloons and plastic guns that shoot bubbles—that the boobs and butts are, quite often, beside the point.

  Also beside the point: these straights’ dates! The women are sparse in the crowd but easy to spot, since they all wear a sort of uniform: tight rayon dresses, no stockings (it’s November in NYC), heels that are so high and pinlike that you feel nervous watching people walk stairs in them, flat-ironed hair, tan. They look like the kind of women who dress up for everything, like the gym or picking up the mail. Though the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show invitation specifies “cocktail attire,” many people there ignore it.

  Before I knew dress code didn’t really matter, I did dress up a bit to go to the VS Fashion Show. But then I saw all the other writers attending in jeans and ballet flats and swore I’d never be tricked into wearing uncomfortable shoes there again in my life.

  But the women who dress up can’t know better. They’re there at the behest of a man, who’s either weird enough or out of touch enough or presumptuous enough to assume that the VS Fashion Show is a great place for wooing a lady. It might be, for some couples, but based on what I’ve seen, it’s incredibly awkward. The women dress up to be ogled because they can’t help but know they’re with a man who is not ashamed of ogling, whether it be her or the BRONZED ladies on display in front of them. And usually these men don’t just bring a date but also their gaggle of straight man friends. In my experience, nothing is worse than being the only woman stuck with a group of your boyfriend’s friends. Some ladies thrive and really ham it up in these situations, but I clam up and get anxious because I feel like I’m expected to ham it up but really have nothing in common with these people and can’t think of anything to talk about with them because I hate the things they like the most (nonleotard sports, for instance). At the Victoria’s Secret show, what are they supposed to do? Act like they’re really into seeing women walk around in underwear?

  • • •

  Backstage before the show, most people aren’t talking about the ogling. They’re talking about food and diet and exercise. For longer than a decade now, the world has been consumed with blaming the fashion industry for popularizing the notion that being very thin is the most beautiful way women can look, thereby making not-very-thin women around the world feel bad enough about themselves to embark on a lifelong journey of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, and general self-dissatisfaction. The fashion industry is aware of this reputation, of course, and makes a great show to the public of not being—or wanting to be—responsible for this kind of mass self-loathing. We see this in Vogue’s “shape” issue, where “curvy” women like Beyoncé and postnatal Gisele get more pages than they, well, usually do. And with the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s “Health Initiative,” which is a vague set of bulleted directives for designers and others working at Fashion Week that are supposed to keep models with eating disorders off the runways. None of it is very convincing, partly because industry members themselves certainly don’t act like it’s okay to have some extra fat. You can hardly have a conversation about fashion without the running “no one in fashion eats” joke entering into it—and that idea wouldn’t be so ubiquitous if it were entirely baseless. Yet food and diet isn’t the main story of other fashion shows, like it is at Victoria’s Secret, because we’ve mostly become numb to how depressingly thin the models are.

  Constance Jablonski, a model in the show, dismissed the idea that the VS Fashion Show deserves criticism for presenting an unrealistic body type. “Obviously, we are all real, we are just doing our best and having fun,” she told me backstage. “I love sports, I do a lot of sports anyway, so I’m going to the gym a little bit more in the last two weeks, and, you know, that’s it.” So, no liquid diet? “No, as long as you are healthy and do a little sports, you get sleep, you will be fine.”

  Doutzen Kroes, released from the confines of her makeup chair and walking around the room, is the first model who asked me how I was doing, which was amazing because most celebrities at any press event never ask about the reporters. “How is it for you? Like . . . the same questions all the time, is it boring?” she asked as she took a seat in a wayward director’s-style chair to rest her feet. Boring, no—I could never be quite bored in the presence of so much pink and sparkles and tall women in neon wrestling robes.

  “I worry that you guys are getting asked the same questions all the time, and I want to ask you different questions,” I told Doutzen. “Okay, here’s one: What have you not been asked that you wish someone would ask you about?”

  “Oh my God. No, I really don’t know that one,” said the model, who is Dutch and also has an accent.

  “I feel like everyone just asks about diet and exercise,” I continued.

  “Yeah, they always ask what I did to prepare for the show, and I think it’s always the same answer—every girl gives the same answer I think.”

  Which is . . . ?

  “Well, working out and watching what you’re eating. That’s all that it is,” she said. “I try to have a really healthy and balanced diet throughout the year, and then I just go really extreme with the no sugar and no carbs two weeks before the show.”

  “That’s not that bad, is it?”

  “No, I know!” She continued: “I feel healthy, I feel good. It’s actually good that we have the chance to work on our body like this.”

  She didn’t mean, she said, that they’re the only people who have the chance to be fit and focus a lot on exercise and diet, but in a way, they are: Who else is paid to do everything they can to look as flawless as possible?

  Doutzen has worked with the CFDA to promote its Health Initiative, which I commend her for. Even if their efforts haven’t been
perfectly effective, they’re trying to do the right thing.

  “It’s a lot of skinny girls, you know?” she said, referring to the fashion business, generally. “Even here, it’s like, I think it’s important that we show everybody, everybody should be healthy, and there are thin girls naturally. But I think you can see, you can tell when a girl is not eating. And I think that’s really worrying for me; I hate to see that,” she said.

  Does she see it here?

  “No, because here I think for Victoria’s Secret, you cannot just be thin; you have to have muscle tone. That’s why working out for the Victoria’s Secret show is so hard. It’s like—it’s harder than athletes sometimes because you cannot have too much muscle, and for athletes it’s about strength, but for us it’s about what we look like.”

  She did not think that VS should put a pregnant model on the runway, though, “because then it’s the wrong message. Then it’s like, they’re not a maternity brand,” she explained. “And I think you can look very sexy in lingerie and be pregnant. My husband loved me when I was pregnant. But there’s always people that it would turn off, so I think it’s good to stay away from that. I think Victoria’s Secret’s already doing a great job for supporting us and to let us have babies. There’s so many brands that would not.”