Most young women in North America have either purchased something from Victoria’s Secret or, at the very least, have been inside the store. Since the late 1990s, Victoria’s Secret has “been one of the best-known and most talked-about brands” (Hanbury, 2020, para. 1) in North America. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show made its worldwide debut in 1995 and is watched by millions annually - that is until it was abruptly called-off in 2019. In this essay, I will argue that before its cancellation, the Victoria’s Fashion Show purposely failed to include plus-sized models and transgender models, as indicated by those in executive positions. To begin, I will provide a brief history and introduction to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and make note of the fatphobic and transphobic comments made by Victoria’s Secret’s parent company L Brands’ former chief marketing officer. I will then elaborate on why this incredibly disrespectful and harmful to plus-sized women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, and how it enables the harmful notion that members of these two communities should remain excluded from today’s beauty standard. Furthermore, I will argue that inclusive and diverse representation is necessary, especially due to the large amount of time that youth spend consuming media. Finally, I will conclude by making links between the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and other events of a similar nature and will note the major differences in the industry when it comes to body and identity representation. The type of outdated thinking and unfortunate brand values upheld by Victoria’s Secret in 2018 requires major upheaval, something I will later do in the takeover portion of this project.
Inspired by an uncomfortable trip to the store to buy his wife underwear, Victoria’s Secret was founded in 1977 by American businessman Roy Raymond. His goal was to create a women’s undergarments store that was specifically targeted towards men (Hanbury, 2020, para. 8). The first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show took place in 1995 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, where overwhelmingly slim, and primarily white, models “wore slinky slips and shiny bras” (Willett, 2015, para. 5). In later years, costumes and props were slowly added. Angel wings made their first appearance in the show in 1998 (Willet, 2015, para. 7), which led to the word ‘angel’ and angel wings becoming synonymous with the Victoria’s Secret brand. Once described as “an annual spectacle of glitter, cleavage and pop music” (Maheshwari, 2018, para. 1), the show is credited with launching the careers of world-renowned supermodels such as Gisele Bündchen, Tyra Banks, and Heidi Klum (Hanbury, 2020, para. 19).
Given that the show was once the “only fashion show regularly broadcast around the world” (Munzenrieder, 2018, para. 1), it was increasingly culturally significant to the store’s consumers. They targeted young women by featuring performances by “megastars like Taylor Swift, the Spice Girls and Lady Gaga” (Maheshwari, 2018, para. 4), and attracted millions of viewers annually. Run by the longtime chief marketing officer of L Brands, Victoria’s Secret’s parent company, the extravagant show quickly became “an iconic part of the brand’s image” (Hanbury, 2020, para. 18). Many viewed the fashion show as a “stroke of marketing genius - a commercial for the Victoria’s Secret brand packaged as a prime-time special” (Maheshwari, 2019, para. 4). As a result of the show’s popularity and success, many models aspired to become ‘angels’ and castings were highly competitive. However, the frenzy surrounding the show came to a crashing halt after the publication of a 2018 Vogue interview with the show's mastermind and L Brands chief marketing officer Ed Razek.
On November 8th, 2018, Vogue writer Nicole Phelps sat down with Razek and Victoria’s Secret’s vice president of PR Monica Mitro ahead of the show’s taping in New York City. The purpose of the interview was to discuss “what, if any changes, we’ll see when the show is taped today” (Phelps, 2018, para. 5). While there were several problematic things about the interview, the two points I will focus on in this essay were the controversial opinions held by two of the most powerful people within the Victoria’s Secret company.
Phelps, the interviewer, noted that there is currently a “young generation turned on by the multiple sizes of women in [Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty] show, and there are all sorts of different upstart brands that are putting trans women in their advertisements, women who are size 40 in their advertisements” (Phelps, 2018 para. 17). Upon asking the duo what their thoughts were on this and how Victoria’s Secret would change their marketing strategies with this information in mind, Razek responded to Phelps’ comment by noting that they had “attempted to do a television special for plus-sizes in 2000. No one had any interest in it, still don’t” (Phelps, 2018, para. 18). Later in the interview, Mitro and Razek began to discuss their sizing options. Mitro noted that their bra sizes range from 30A to 40DDD, with Razek chiming in: “So it’s like, why don’t you do 50? Why don’t you do 60? Why don’t you do 24? It’s like, why doesn’t your show do this? Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in the show? No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy. It’s a 42-minute entertainment special. That’s what it is.” (Phelps, 2018, para. 28). Though he later apologized for his remarks and retired from his position, Razek’s statement quickly garnered an abundance of negative attention from past and present Victoria’s Secret models, the media, and the public.
Within several days of the interview’s publication, the Victoria’s Secret brand found itself amid a major controversy. While many had already assumed that the 2018 fashion show would fail to include diverse gender and body-type casting, Razek’s blunt comments accentuated the failure of Victoria’s Secret to be politically correct, especially amidst the height of the #MeToo era, and provoked swift backlash across social media. On November 10th, Teen Vogue “published critical interviews with transgender models Carmen Carrera and Leyna Bloom and plus-size model Tess Holliday” (Waler, 2018, 6) in response to Razek’s interview. Shortly after Teen Vogue’s publication, Victoria’s Secret issued a brief and vague apology on their social media pages that many deemed insensitive and insincere. Kendall Jenner, the daughter of “trans icon Caitlyn Jenner and who starred in the show herself, posted ‘celebrate trans women’ to her 98 million Instagram followers” (Walker, 2018, para. 8). Plus-sized model Louise O’Reilly posted a link to a Jezebel article titled ‘Victoria’s Secret doesn’t want plus-size or trans women walking the runway’ to her Twitter page, accompanied by the caption “[p]rime example of why brands need to be careful of casting directors' opinions. Especially when it’s a 70-year-old man who’s living in the past. Thank god @rihanna brought us @SavageXFenty this year with genuine attention & love of diversity in her branding” (Walker, 2018, para. 10). Two weeks after the Vogue interview was published, Victoria’s Secret CEO Jan Singer resigned after two years in her position (Walker, 2018, para. 1).
Razek’s comments in the famous Vogue interview are problematic for numerous different reasons. First and foremost, his terms and definitions are fairly outdated. As noted in Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014), Dr. John Oliver proposed in 1965 that the term ‘transsexualism’ be replaced by the term ‘transgenderism’ with the argument that “the concept of sexuality could not account for the all consuming belief that transsexuals are women who by some incredible error were given the bodies of men” (p. 232-233). As Siebler defines it in Transgender Transitions: Sex/Gender Binaries in the Digital Age (2012), a transgender person is “someone who occupies the borderlands between communities and identities” (p. 77). The term was officially coined as a result of the “gay/lesbian rights movements of the 1970s” (Siebler, 2012, p. 77), and by the mid-1980s, the word transgender had been used multiple times “in medical, pop-culture, and trans community sources alike - as an umbrella term inclusive of transexuals, cross-dressers, and other gender-variant people” (Williams, 2014, p. 233). The term entered widespread use as an umbrella term “within the United States in the early 1990s” (Williams, 2014, p. 232). Therefore, Razek’s terminology, used in 2018, is considerably outdated and was deemed incredibly transphobic by several members of the LGBTQ+ community (Walker, 2018).
In addition to his lack of education regarding modern terminology, Razek’s comments make it explicitly clear that his specific ‘fantasy’ is solely comprised of thin, cisgender women. While he is certainly entitled to his personal fantasy, his general commentary of ‘we don’t think they should be in the show’ indicates that he is speaking for the brand as a whole, as one in his executive position conducting an interview does. This insinuates that anyone who falls outside of this narrow category of thin, cis women are unworthy of viewership, praise, or success in the modelling industry as long as the Victoria’s Secret brand is involved. Razek’s refusal to include transgender women in his lingerie fashion show indicates that he fails to see them both as real women, and as women who can wear lingerie and express their sexuality on a runway. This in turn sends the message that trans women do not belong in the fashion and modelling industry as they fail to meet a certain beauty standard upheld by Victoria’s Secret.
Not only were Razek’s comments transphobic, but they were also deeply fatphobic. As defined by Virgie Tovar in her book You Have the Right to Remain Fat (2019), fatphobia is “a form of bigotry that positions fat people as inferior and as objects of hatred and derision” (p. 16-17). Fatphobia uses the treatment of fat people “as a means of controlling the body size of all people” (Tovar, 2019, p. 17). Razek’s belief that plus-sized women should not be included in the Victoria’s Secret show, and that there remains absolutely no interest in seeing a plus-size lingerie show, is both inaccurate and a control tactic that reinforces harmful beauty stereotypes. In an era where body sizes of all types are accepted and celebrated, Razek’s view on this subject matter is highly outdated. As Abigail Saguy mentions in Come Out, come out, whoever you are (2020), fat activists such as Marilyn Wann have decided to ‘come out’ as fat as a means of celebrating their bodies. By using the term ‘coming out’, Wann implies that “being fat is like being gay and that, just as it is good to be ‘out and proud’ regarding one’s gayness, so it is good to be ‘out and proud’ about one’s fatness” (Saguy, 2020, p. 2). In contexts such as the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, in which “social stigma - or unwanted difference - is plainly visible rather than hidden, coming out as fat means owning one’s fatness or refusing to apologize for it” (Saguy, 2020, p. 2). Virgie Tovar reiterates this thinking when she notes that as a culture we have “characterized being fat as an inherently bad thing when in reality body size is meaningless and lacks the good or bad associations imposed by wider culture. We are not born thinking fat is bad and thin is good. We learn these things through an ongoing cultural education” (Tovar, 2019, p. 17-18). In this case, Razek’s harsh transphobic comments enable the harmful notion that plus-sized women are excluded from the mainstream fantasy, and therefore don’t fit Victoria’s Secret’s outdated and damaging beauty standard.
Additionally, because the Victoria’s Secret show was televised to millions of viewers and received immense amounts of press coverage, the attitudes held by Razek, and therefore the Victoria’s Secret brand, can have a major influence over the audience's opinions and their perception of who belongs in the modelling industry. And while it is true that viewing “on a television set has declined slightly among Americans, overall consumption of mainstream video content across multiple platforms (including online platforms) continues to climb” (McInroy et al., 2017, p. 33). Therefore, it is widely understood that the televised fashion show was still highly successful as it could be streamed on numerous different platforms and received major press coverage. Research has previously indicated that “North American youth (age 12-18) spend a significant portion of their time engaging with traditional and new media (between 7 and 8 hours per day of total media exposure, including 2-3 hours per day of television exposure” (McInroy et al., 2017, p. 33). And, as such, when media use by young people increases, “so does their exposure to media messages” (McInroy et al., 2017, p. 33) and media consumption. Media consumption may be “defined diversely, including by means of frequency, recency, or content. As consumption increases, access to depictions of particular constructs (such as LGBTQ+ people) also intensified” (McInroy et al., 2017, p. 33). So, for instance, when millions of young women, both cisgender and transgender, tune in to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show special and fail to see themselves represented on the runway, this may send the media message that they don’t deserve to take up space within this industry or as Victoria’s Secret consumers. Furthermore, because media is the “primary site of production for social knowledge [regarding] LGBTQ+ identities” (McInroy et al., 2017, p. 33), the content that is consumed by this community suggests that both transgender women fail to fit the patriarchal fantasy and are to remain excluded from the fashion industry’s beauty standard. This type of harmful thinking was already present within the Victoria’s Secret brand but was made explicitly clear by Razek’s comments in the 2018 Vogue interview, further revealing that the brand purposely failed to include plus-sized and transgender models in their show and simultaneously sent an incredibly redundant media message to their viewers.
Finally, while the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was incredibly popular before its
cancellation and is often credited as being the first brand to do a televised fashion show, they are no longer the only ones to do so. Famous singer Rihanna made her fashion show debut with her line Savage x Fenty at the 2018 New York Fashion Week. Her show, similarly to Victoria’s Secret, was live-streamed via platforms such as YouTube, but, unlike Victoria’s Secret, received a mass amount of positive feedback. While both brands focused on lingerie and undergarments, the major key differences lay in the models the respective brands chose to feature on their runways. As Lauren Alexis Fisher wrote in her Harper’s Bazaar article Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Show Was an Incredibly Stunning, Inclusive Celebration of Womanhood (2018), Savage x Fenty was a show that “celebrated women and sisterhood to the fullest extent” (para. 2). Rihanna’s initial goal when launching the lingerie brand was to ensure she created pieces “made for women of all body types” (Fisher, 2018, para. 3). Fisher noted in her article that “inclusivity was reflected on the runway of the brand’s first presentation [...] - something many other fashion brands could benefit in learning from” (2018, para. 3). While the show did feature both trans and plus-sized models, it took inclusive casting a step further and included two pregnant women - one who ended up giving birth later that night. According to Fisher, this was an intentional casting choice that said “pregnant women’s bodies are beautiful and they’re allowed to feel sexy too” (Fisher, 2018, para. 5). The praise and success of Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty show not only sends a positive media message to viewers, but it also shows brands such as Victoria’s Secret that inclusive and diverse casting seldom hinders the success of the show or the brand - rather, in this case, it only further enhanced its success. This further challenges Razek’s belief that because trans and plus-sized women are not a part of his ‘fantasy’, there is no interest in seeing these women on the runway.
To summarize, in this essay I argued that the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show intentionally failed to include plus-sized models and transgender models as indicated by chief marketing officer Ed Razek, who also acted as the mastermind behind the annual VS Fashion Show. Ahead of its cancellation in 2019, Razek made explicitly transphobic and fatphobic comments in a Vogue interview, where he noted that nobody would want to see trans models or plus-sized models in their show, as it was not apart of their ‘fantasy’ and due to a lack of interest from the public. Not only is this incredibly disrespectful and harmful to plus-sized women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, but it also sends unnecessarily negative media messages to those consuming this type of content.
While the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show had been widely popular for several decades, the brand failed to adapt to modern thinking. As a result, consumers turned to shows such as Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty brand to support, as they ensured diverse casting with several trans models, numerous plus-sized models, and even two pregnant models all walking in the 2018 show. As a result of Razek’s controversial comments in the 2018 interview, the show was effectively cancelled in 2019 and has yet to return.
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