Greetings, patriots!
In the words of the preternaturally wise Trixie Mattel:
Well, sort of. You see, I have some tough news to break to all of you as I still haven’t quite processed it myself. But as it turns out, wouldn’t you know it, I’m a perfect juror! And this city has been searching high and low for a handful of those which is how I found myself spending this entire week in overheated courthouse purgatory. That’s right I was **chosen**. And, you guys. What the hell’s goin’ on in there. I understand this is my civic duty, and I will be dutifully performing it. But why does it have to be quite so mind-numbingly tedious and labyrinthine. It very much gives airport gate minus any form of amusement, treat, entertainment, or distraction. It is a mandatory endless study hall where you live in perpetual fear of not hearing your name called over the PA system which will in turn cause you to get marked absent and held in contempt of court. And that’s probably all I’m legally allowed to say about that.
However, this new judicial twist of fate means that the email you receive this week and next are probably going to be later, stranger, and more disjointed than ever before as I am being federally sequestered largely sans laptop. Which means I haven’t had the leisure time to peruse my many trash websites and ruminate upon their contents as is my wont, but I have been reading a whole lot of big brain fashion theory and y’all are about to be soo sick of me when we get back to our regularly scheduled yapping. And you better believe I already have a choice quotation to share with you below. Because I couldn’t send out an email to paid subs earlier this week, I just split today’s newsletter down the middle. So we’re all going to discuss the many flops of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show together and then paid subs will be getting an exclusive look at literally everything else that happened this week. Sign up if you want a sneak peek at that stuff too. And, unless the court system has other plans for me, next week I still intend on writing an essay on the Renaissance Fayre Fall trend as a form of pre-capitalist yearning, and you better believe I plan on quoting some Marx and Baudrillard in there. I told you, my insufferable era is loading!
Oh! And thanks to everyone who watched my second ever YouTube video this week! It’s already surpassed the first in views and, incredibly, I’ve gotten a couple of comments on it from people who aren’t even readers of this newsletter and they’ve all been very nice. The Mess Empire grows stronger by the minute!
As for today’s title, it’s just a line I stole from this all-time hall-of-famer tweet penned by a Swiftie this week in response to a video of Sabrina Carpenter doing some pretty standard choreo:
I feel like we haven’t had a real Twitter treat like this in a hot second. It’s nice to be reminded why we all fell in love with that platform to begin with. It’s still a dumpster fire though.
Ok. I think I hear the government calling my name, so let’s get to it.
The biggest thing happening in fashion this week was a runway show for lingerie that I think we, as a society, have evolved past the need for. At least in its current iteration. Because despite Victoria’s Secret seeming confident that returning to their old ways would be what would restore them to their former glory after their erroneous “woke” dalliances, that does not seem to be the case. I feel like instead of trying to do something actually glam and campy, they just blew their entire budget on hiring supermodels and skimped on literally everything else. As you can see above and will continue to see below.
But before I get in to the brand’s choice of attire here, let me first say that bringing back Tyra Banks to close the show was absolutely 5000% the correct choice. She is so OG Victoria’s Secret in the best possible, deeply 90s way. Tyra’s face card has never been in question and she also continues to have such a crazy good walk. It’s actually jaw-dropping to see an old pro at work after being conditioned to accept absolutely no personality on the runway for the last two decades. I think Tyra nailed the strong, yet bubbly all-American strut that’s the Victoria’s Secret signature. Now, the outfit they put her in, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired. I can understand if Tyra wanted to be more covered up, but I have a feeling they wanted her to be even more covered up and they are just not slick with their little tricks. The slimming optical illusion corset…the giant cape……the long sleeves. Personally, I think you can also see this same nonsense in how they dressed Ashley Graham, Paloma Elsesser, and the handful of other plus-size models they’ve finally allowed on their runway. But even amongst the skimpier looks, it wasn’t just Tyra’s costume that felt like the castoffs of a cheap Vegas magician.
All I really have to say about these two is god bless the Hadid sisters. Truly the closest thing to modern supermodels we have. And boy was Victoria’s Secret leaning hard on them on Tuesday night to keep people engaged. The Hadids bookended the show and I thought their looks were, you know, fine. Gigi’s wings move around which is cool and I don’t know why they didn’t experiment more with that type of animatronic in the other girls’ looks. I also understand it’s a matter of wearability and weight balance or whatever, but I absolutely loathe these thick backpack straps all the girls with big wings like this had to wear. VS tried to zhuzh them up with rhinestones and stuff, but I’m afraid nothing can save it. It’s distracting and ugly and if we’re going to put all of this money and labor into the creation of these things, why ruin it with that one detail. There must be other ways.
Which reminds me, at first when I saw the clip of Gigi on TikTok, I actually thought her wings were CGI. And it made me wonder, why doesn’t VS play more with digital iterations of their wings like that?? Even if just as bonus content for those watching at home. They could be so much more fantastical and insane without having to actually physically lash them to one of these 100-pound women, and you could get really cool digital artists to collaborate on them.
I’m also surprised no one wrote anything about Kendall Jenner being absent form this whole spectacle. Did no one else think that’s weird after she made such a big deal out of becoming a Victoria’s Secret model to begin with. I wonder if she’s trying to lean more high fashion now or they just couldn’t afford her after how much they already spent on everyone else.
Anyway, Bella’s Gossamer shag coat thing feels like VS’s attempt at something very couture, very Schiaparelli, but I think it just reads very Muppet. Something the choice in material and ombré really doesn’t help with. I feel like if they just leaned harder into the feathered showgirl aspect of it all it could’ve been kind of fabulous. And writing that actually just made me realize, why don’t they ever collaborate with high-end fashion labels on exclusive lingerie collections? Pull an H&M. Especially since they could launch it in tandem with this show……Now, how did I just do all of VS corporate’s job better than they ever have.
Speaking of nepo children. Listen, I love Kate Moss and I love to see Kate Moss on a runway. All she ever does is prove why she is the true supermodel Supreme (in all senses of the word). But she is just not a Victoria’s Secret girl. For me, her look and personality are too intense, too couture for the world of VS. Kate does not do light and bubbly. I’m glad they kind of recognized that with this choice in wings and attire at least. But let’s just get her an Agent Provocateur campaign and call it a day.
Also, I feel like part of her contract must have stipulated that if she did this show they had to cast her daughter and give her some sort of special spotlight moment because I just do not understand the career trajectory of Lila Moss. I’m sorry to say it, but whatever je ne sais quoi her mom possesses is not genetic. The wings spelling out her name are also SO weird. No one else had these. All the other girls with word wings had ones that just spell out “Victoria’s Secret.” Why did this happen at all, let alone for a model most people do not even know like that.
Something else that I never like in a Victoria’s Secret show is when they try to do regular fashion. That is not what the people come to this runway for. We do not want to see a ludicrously capacious palazzo pant done in the signature VS pajama pant stripe. Nor do we want this Miu Miu-adjacent sheer pencil skirt and thong combo that misses the entire point of what makes Miu Miu’s version cool to begin with. But the final nail in the coffin of this whole affair, for me, was the catastrophic choice in footwear. Please go watch this video of icon Doutzen Kroes getting her heel stuck in a crack in the runway causing her to accidentally kick her shoe off entirely while the rest stays entwined around her leg. Nightmare. One that VS edited out of the final broadcast lol.
While it’s already crazy to me to spend multiple millions of dollars on an event only to still not even get the runway right, Rene Caovilla — the maker of all these high heels — also must pay for his crimes against Angels. The footwear was cheap and extremely uncomfortable. The stiletto was actually bending under these models’ weight and in all the picture backstage, as soon as they’re walking down the stairway into the dressing room, you can see everyone ripping these things off their feet in frustration. I just feel like if you’re going to make a bunch of women walk around in their underwear in front of the entire world the very least you can do is give them some shoes they can actually walk around in. And perhaps a safe, seamless platform upon which to do so.
I’m also obsessed with how VS decided who did and did not get wings this year. Because, once upon a time, wings were reserved for a select group of elite girls within the already elite pool of VS models. But this year, soooo many of them had wings so when you saw one that didn’t it felt particularly rude. Especially when some of those without them were actually old-school VS legends, like Eva Herzigová and Irina Shayk. Like, again, how does Lila Moss have wings composed of her own name while Eva and Irina get bupkiss??? Anyway, in addition to there being no stories about the Kendall thing, the press in attendance were also apparently snoozing backstage because there were also ZERO stories or even just vague questions asked of Gigi and Irina about working together and their shared interest in Bradley Cooper. Was Page Six not invited to this because that seems like the first thing they would’ve written up…..Tabloid reporters please do your job.
And to conclude the free portion of today’s email, I’m now going to use this image of Dylan Sprouse attempting to pull focus from his underwear model wife to deliver unto you some very interesting thoughts I read this week during my city-mandated staycation. I was reading about Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher whose work largely focuses on the body as the primary site of knowing the world, which led me to the theorist Iris Marion Young who applies Merleau-Ponty’s work to women’s embodied experience of fashion. Specifically in her essay “Breasted Experience,” “She argues that the appraisal of breasts as objects to be judged in terms of idealized media images of what they ought to be does not adequately account for how women experience their breasts. Ultimately, women do not view their breasts simply as objects seperate from themselves, despite their widespread fetishization in our culture, since they cannot totally disconnect themselves from their experience of them as part of their corporeal being.” In her essay, “Women Recovering our Clothes,” she goes on to write, “From the position of the female subject, what matters most about her breasts is their feeling and sensitivity rather than how they look.” She criticizes the bra “as an item of clothing that serves as a barrier to touch, moulding the breasts in accordance with the patriarchal ideal of them as round and firm in appearance. While such breasts may be considered to look more attractive, breasts unrestricted by the bra have a greater sensitivity to touch and are more fluid and malleable, changing in response to the body’s position and movements. As such, they are experienced as an integral part of the woman’s body rather than as firm, unyielding objects that phallocentric culture posits as the norm.” In modern society, “What matters most is how breasts look and measure, their conformity with a norm, the impossible aesthetic of round, large and high on the chest. These objectifying constructions are clearly manifest in surgical medicine’s angle on the breast… Indeed, cosmetic surgery often results in a loss of sensitivity in the breast and in the sensation of them as ‘foreign’ objects unrelated to the self, because of their lack of mobility and malleability. Thus, the attainment of a ‘sexier’ look is at the expense of women’s own sensual experience of their breasts.”
I just think there’s a lot of food for thought there when contemplating a runway show that is attempting to sell us the idea of “sexy” based off these same phallocentric ideals of what sexy is. Perhaps it’s time that Victoria’s Secret also think a little more deeply about what exactly the breasted experience entails……
Ok, the rest of this saga is going behind the paywall. Sorry to do it to ya, folks, but this is my primary source of income, especially for as long as I remain locked up in this court house. But, regardless of your subscription status, I’ll see the rest of you back here next week for some renn fayre theory and further tales of perdition! Goodbye!
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