Tales from the Back Row (20 page)

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.”

After having her baby, she said, “I was told, like, don't worry about coming back too soon, just take your time and enjoy your baby, and I really appreciated that. No pressure.”

Free from worrying about maternity leave was Candice Swanepoel, then a little younger than some of the other models, at twenty-three years old. I started talking to her about her duties as the first model out in the show, and we weren't long into our conversation before her big blue eyes got even bigger and commotion erupted around us. I turn around to witness a throng of photographers encircling Adriana, who was standing on top of the makeup table, robe cast aside, wearing only a lace bra and panty set and posing by angling her butt and boobs simultaneously sky
ward. Judging by the excitement in the room, you would think she was lying on her makeup table giving birth to a cat.

“Over here, Adriana!” the photographers shout. You have to remember that nothing truly goes
on
back here for hours other than girls sitting around getting their hair extended and Kanye West breezing through to chitchat with a cool fashion person.

“Is that going to be you in a minute?” I ask Candice.

She furrows her brow. “No, I hope not.”

I ask her if we're too obsessed with the models' diet and exercise routines.

“A lot of people, it's always the first question: ‘So, what have you been cutting out?' ” she says. “But I understand the speculation because it is about our bodies and we take such good care of ourselves, so people want to know how.”

The de facto way models think about diet and exercise is “taking good care of oneself.” Is cutting out carbs and sugar for weeks truly the definition of taking good care of oneself? Or is it really just treating oneself the way one must in order to work for Victoria's Secret in this capacity? These blurred lines are a problem, because women who enjoy dessert and buttered toast in moderation might be fooled into thinking they're not taking care of themselves. They might be reluctant to “indulge” in a whole banana after reading in a magazine that they should have only a half of one with breakfast. The truth is that what many Victoria's Secret models do with their diets and exercise routines is extreme. We just forget it because we've become such slaves to physical perfection that we've forgotten what's normal, what's healthy, and what's just vain.

I don't even have to ask Candice about her specific routine for her to start telling me about it.

“Like me, my diet doesn't really change. I eat a lot of protein; I
try to eat more to be more muscular. So I don't know how it is for other girls, but for me, I don't change my diet,” she says. “My exercise routine I do. I push it quite a bit ten days before.”

She adds, “But certain people question it in a way that seems . . . They want to think that you're unhealthy.”

The food and dieting is such an obsession at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show because that is the
story
for many outlets covering the show. We watch to see the insane wings, the rock star performances (Maroon 5, Kanye West, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj have all performed at a VS show), but mostly, the perfect thighs, abs, waists, hair, etc. Victoria's Secret will give you only so much information about the show (it won't even tell you why all those straight dudes are there!), so once you've gone over how much glitter was used on the runway (which is often made of glitter, in case nothing else on the screen gets your attention), how much the wings weigh, how many carats of yellow diamonds are in the fantasy bra, the only true arc you have to your story is how the models made it there. And the answer is by working on their ­bodies—or taking really “good care” of themselves, however you see it—until they have the most enviable figures on the planet.

While these women seem inhuman in their sheer physical perfection, all that diet and exercise suggest that they, too, are as self-conscious as the rest of us. After all, if I had to put on those wings, a thong, a bra, and bronzer, and walk down the runway in front of movie stars and Pitbull in the audience, and the 10 million people around the world who watch the show, I'd stock up on green juice, ban cupcakes and wine from my house, and spend two hours a day in the gym every day for a few weeks, too. But if I did that without their contracts, it would not be considered taking good care of myself. People would just think I had eating issues.

• • •

Since the VS Fashion Show is televised, the whole space has to look great—not just the runway—and in Victoria's Secret's opinion, “great looking” resembles the interior of a Las Vegas burlesque club. Unlike most fashion shows, here the audience's benches have nice cushions on them, and the rows even used to be bookended with little parlor lamps.