Let's Talk About Victoria's Secret The Tour '23
A replacement for the fashion show it is not.
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Even now, nearly six years after it happened, I still can’t believe how thoroughly the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show imploded.
Sure, it was a ticking time bomb: Between changing societal norms around sexualizing women in the media, the increased visibility of conversations around gender and body diversity, and the #MeToo movement which sparked off in Hollywood in 2017, an hour-long, nationally-televised special about women in lingerie couldn’t possibly have been much longer for this world. The last Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show to air only brought in 3.3 million viewers, significantly down from a 10.4 million viewer high in 2010.
But Ed Razek took a slow-burning fire and doused it in gasoline when he gave a disastrous interview (with the brand’s executive vice president of public relations present and participating!!! I will never get over that detail.) to Vogue’s Nicole Phelps in 2018. It has since become the stuff of PR legend, so I won’t rehash it here. But when it was published the day the 2018 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was set to tape, it was like watching a car crash in slo-motion. And that was truly the least of Razek’s and Victoria’s Secret’s problems.
Reaction was…well, I won’t say “swift,” considering Razek didn’t exit the company until August 2019, and the brand didn’t officially cancel the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show until November 2019. Still, the show was the tentpole of Victoria’s Secret’s advertising plan and one of the biggest televised events of the holiday season, so canceling it was a Big Deal.
Then, in March of this year, the brand shared it would be bringing back the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show after a four year hiatus, saying in part, “As we’ve previously shared, our new brand projection and mission will continue to be our guiding principle. This will lead us into new spaces like reclaiming one of our best marketing and entertainment properties to date and turning it on its head to reflect who we are today. We’re excited to share more later this year.”
Sure! Great! Except, in the meantime, Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty lingerie line had stepped into the gap left wide open by Victoria’s Secret, taking its fashion show formula and vastly improving upon it. So Victoria’s Secret couldn’t exactly trot out that same old army of identically-thin models, battered bombshell blowouts wafting in the wind down a worn out glitter runway.
The solution: Victoria’s Secret The Tour ‘23, an hour and a half-long, pre-taped special now available to watch on Amazon Prime which combines documentary-style filmmaking with high-gloss modeling segments. The brand worked with a group they’ve dubbed the VS20, clusters of five creatives handpicked from four different cities (Lagos, Bogota, Tokyo, and London) who were given the opportunity to curate art, tell their stories, and platform their work.
Each city features a fashion designer who whips up a collection to be modeled by a cadre of top models and celebrities (notably, Ziwe and Julia Fox, who appear early and seem quite random given the rest of the special). Interestingly, almost none of these collections have anything to do with Victoria’s Secret; most don’t even feature their lingerie, nor do they use their materials. There’s not even a simplified, shoppable version of their designs on Victoria’s Secret’s Amazon landing page.
The second of the five artists in each city is a filmmaker, whose job it is to document everything happening in their respective cities. The other three artists vary in medium from dancers and musicians to sculptors and painters. These, too, have next-to-nothing to do with Victoria’s Secret.
In fact, the only part of Victoria’s Secret The Tour which sells any Victoria’s Secret product at all is a segment smack in the middle—think of it as a supermodel halftime show—which features models stalking about in super-embellished Victoria’s Secret-branded corsets, bodysuits, and panties. As Gigi Hadid, our (adorable!) narrator quips, “I mean, come on! We had to bring back a little bit of the old show.”
I watched Victoria’s Secret The Tour ‘23 the day it dropped, and I enjoyed it overall. It does a nice job of showcasing the artists and creating some compelling storytelling; I found some of the stories included beautiful and moving. If you’ve got the appetite for documentaries, it’s worth watching. But what does it have to do with Victoria’s Secret? F*ck if I know. Almost nothing about Victoria’s Secret The Tour ‘23 matches up with the brand Victoria’s Secret as it exists today. Step into one of its stores, or peruse its website; the brand is still an explosion of pink, a collection of lace and frills that have little in common with the gorgeous, slightly-gritty central set piece of the special.
This is a controversial opinion, but I think doing away with the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show altogether was a mistake. Canceling it felt like the brand picked up its toys and went home instead of sharing with the new kids on the playground. I actually liked the VSFS—I’ll pause so you can all gasp with surprise that I loved watching something that was glittery and glossy, it won’t hurt my feelings—and felt it could have continued existing with a few important tweaks.
These are the kinds of ideas brands should pay consulting money for, but here they are for free! First and foremost, the models—and most importantly, the Angels—needed an image update. (It will never not be funny to me that, after the implosion, the brand hired a red-headed model and pushed that as revolutionary.) Better racial diversity, better gender diversity, better body diversity. I know this might shock some of you, but you can put a fake tan and a bouncy blowout on a fat body, too. Along that note, the show would’ve been so much better without all the segments touting “how to train like an Angel” and the pre-show press about what the models (were not) eating to prepare. Like, what was even interesting about those?
Swap the Michael Bay commercials for something shot by a woman, bring in some of this artistry idea from The Tour ‘23, hire some women to consult and listen to their ideas because it doesn’t count if you don’t actually execute anything, and I think you’ve got the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2.0. In many ways, that would have felt more meaningful to me than what they did with The Tour.
There are two sharp examples from The Tour that drove that feeling home for me. The first is that the brand brought back Adriana Lima, arguably their most iconic Angel and an 18-year (!!!) Victoria’s Secret veteran, to model in The Tour. Lima is as beautiful as ever, but her body is different than it was in her Angel years—as it should be! She’s 42 years old! Watching her prowl around the set, I couldn’t help but think about how much more powerful it would’ve felt to see Lima in this body strutting down that sparkly runway, proof that women can age and change and still be just as sexy. No starvation diets, no hours-long training sessions; just one of the world’s most gorgeous women as she exists in her body today.
The second was the segment with London-based lingerie designer Michaela Stark, who herself is plus sized. I was both surprised and delighted that they left this full quote from her in the film:
“In high school, it was very much a thing, like everyone was so excited for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. We’d all put it in our diaries, go and watch it—like, it was a big thing. But it was also that culture around it of not wanting to eat after you saw it. This was genuinely an opportunity to even further delve into that feeling I had as a teenager, the roots of the body dysmorphia that I felt, and actually tackle them from the archives in Ohio.”
REAL! God, that is so real. As a teenager, I remember taping up cutouts of Victoria’s Secret models (and Britney Spears) inside my kitchen cabinets in hopes it would stop me from snacking. As an adult, especially once I had experience in the fashion industry, I understood it was the models’ literal jobs to look like that, and they sacrificed arguably too much to make it happen. But it’s a reality the old Victoria’s Secret would’ve never acknowledged, let alone feature in the fashion show, even as they fueled it by barring othered bodies from appearing anywhere near their brand.
The brand flies Stark to their Columbus, Ohio headquarters and lets her play in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show archives. Stark flits from wing to wing like a kid in a candy store, and later on, she whips up her signature corsets and pairs them with wings from Victoria’s Secret Fashion Shows past. It was incredibly moving for me.
Ultimately, that’s what I wish Victoria’s Secret had done instead of, or in addition to (I did genuinely enjoy watching it), The Tour. There was something so healing about seeing the old Victoria’s Secret juxtaposed with these new and more progressive ideas, in seeing Adriana Lima allowed to simply exist instead of forcing her to stay the same as she was at 20. And, let’s be honest: Dipping viewership or no, more people would tune into the aired Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show than will be watching The Tour ‘23 in full on Amazon Prime.
But, you know what, I have to applaud the brand for trying something so out of the box, for not slapping product in every spare moment and editing out the rougher edges. I like to see a wild swing! And I just wrote nearly 2000 words about Victoria’s Secret The Tour ‘23, so it’s not a total loss as far as experiments go.
Who knows if the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show would’ve still been limping along into this holiday season without Razek’s comments. Maybe it would’ve been dead in the water by now anyway. Still, I’d like to see the brand take another pass at reimagining what it could be.