“This whole starvation-camp situation before you have to walk that catwalk is ridiculous.
“It’s a running joke that they see curvier girls every year and never cast them,” she says. She went to a Victoria’s Secret casting six years ago – but was not hired. Model Robyn Lawley has appeared in Sports Illustrated and on the covers of Vogue Italia and Australia, as well as modelling Ralph Lauren, H&M and Chantelle lingerie. Photograph: Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty Images Wings of desire … Gizele Oliveira walks the runway at this year’s Victoria’s Secret show. Indeed, they are far beyond the reach of most models, which is why the 50 or so who are picked for the VS “family” each year must endure months of dieting and exercise. The show’s strict weight and body fat requirements, endlessly speculated on in the media, would be far beyond the reach of most adult women. It is no wonder that many of the models exercise obsessively. It means exercise: training, toning, boxing, skipping, using the hashtag “#trainlikeanangel” and working out in invite-only classes with names such as the Skinny Bitch Collective. “Hard work” is a term you hear a lot around Victoria’s Secret models, or “Angels”, as those who have signed an exclusive deal with the brand are called. “Did we include them because it was the right thing to do or because it was the politically correct thing to do? Do they take the place of somebody who worked for a year for the opportunity and cried when they found that they got it?” “I’m always asking myself: if we do that, what is the reason we did it?” he said. In the same interview, he said there was no interest in portraying a wider range of sizes and shapes. Earlier this month, Ed Razek, chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret’s parent company, L Brands, was forced to apologise after telling Vogue that he didn’t want transgender models in the show because it would spoil the “fantasy”. When the show airs on 2 December, if you are a young woman with access to the internet, Victoria’s Secret will be impossible to avoid. Its three highest-profile models – Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid and her sister Bella – have more than 163 million Instagram followers between them, and some of the biggest names in entertainment – from Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Ariana Grande to Sting and Lady Gaga – have played the Victoria’s Secret catwalk. And, despite a recent fall in sales and the resignation of its CEO, Victoria’s Secret still has a bigger global market share than any other lingerie brand. Last year, it was watched by more than 1 billion people worldwide, claimed to be a 45% increase on the year before. The show’s uniformly tall and thin models seem an anachronism in a world that increasingly celebrates body diversity.
One of them bent over in a thong and I saw it all.” The underwear is so skimpy, you can literally see everything. One fashion editor told me that the year she covered the show was the “worst job I’d ever done. In 2002, the US’s National Organization of Women (NOW) protested at the event, calling it a “softcore porn infomercial”. Almost from the beginning, it has been under fire. Launched in 1995, the Victoria’s Secret runway show has been broadcast on US network television every December since 2001, an extraordinary feat for a high-street underwear brand.
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