Tales from the Back Row (19 page)

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 was 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.”

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 for
ever. 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'Oré
al 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 pro
duce 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 draw nearly that many viewers even if they aired at the same time and were hosted by hot women wearing diamonds instead of clothes.