Why Did We Fall for the Victoria's Secret Angels? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Though on one level it was about (of course) the next iteration of pinup culture as defined by, and catering to, men, the success of Victoria’s Secret, once a mere catalog company, was also the product of a host of cultural phenomena as fashion, entertainment, branding, sex and kitsch all began to merge at the turn of the millennium.
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the Victoria’s Secret Angels were part of the commercialization of the high/low moment that defined the cultural tenor of the late 20th century and is still going strong in collaborations everywhere.
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First captured by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1990 (and an accompanying book), it was later appropriated by fashion designers including Tom Ford, whose 1996 breakthrough Gucci show married the irony of kitsch to luxury materials (remember the GG clogs?) and an unabashed embrace of Studio 54 decadence
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It had an absurdist and knowing exuberance that appealed to both those who were intellectual slumming it as well as the mass market.
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Victoria’s Secret understood the allure of the personal brand, hitting just at the moment before Instagram would transform the notion of fame.
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By naming its Angels and promoting them as people and stars in their own right — by actually media-training them — they gave models power, profile and security.
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All of which promised to serve as a springboard into the next stage of a career, not to mention making them more competitive with the actors who increasingly occupied the covers of glossy fashion magazines.
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And Victoria’s Secret paid well: When Gisele Bündchen left the company in 2006, she was the highest paid model in the world, and, she told Refinery29 that Victoria’s Secret was 80 percent of her income.
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The effect obscured the dark underside of the story: the crazy diets (no solid food for days before the show!) and fitness regimens (at least two workouts a day) that the models underwent in search of the elusive perfect body. (And there was that Jeffrey Epstein connection.) It pushed an unrealistic version of a woman’s body on the world.
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the kind of arch, knowing performance of exaggerated femininity that the Angels were created to embody has neither ascended to the heavens or been consigned to hell, depending on your point of view.
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Rather it still exists in the drag community (where, arguably, the antecedents of the Angels could be found all along), packaged for popular and positive consumption in the form of such shows as “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”