Victoria’s Secret Needs to Read the Room

Those of us trying to raise young women would sooner leave our daughter alone in a dressing room with Donald Trump than let them watch a Victoria’s Secret runway show.

There really was no danger of that—until last night.

My daughter Frankie was nine when they went off the air. Now she’s 15, and if I was going to watch the return of the Angels with anyone it was going to be her. The minute she came home from school, I grabbed her.

“Mom, please. I have so much homework.”

“Sorry. This is more important than homework. This is a cultural moment.”

I ignored her side eye slash eye roll and turned up the volume.

“I wonder if they’re only going to do skinny models,” she said. I was proud that she was disappointed at the thought of it.

So here’s the spoiler: They didn’t only “do skinny models.” But the models weren’t exactly a cross section of America, either.

The only things that caught my daughter’s attention were the musical performances.

“Who is that?” (Me.)

“It’s Lisa.” (Frankie.)

“…” (Me again.)

“Remember when I loved Blackpink in seventh grade? She was in that band.” (Frankie said in a way that was much less condescending than you’d think.)

When Tyla came on—this was around the black and gold colored lingerie and wing portion of the evening—Frankie stopped noticing the models altogether and wanted to see if Tyla was going to do something “super inappropriate” called the Tyla Dance. (She didn’t.)

“I’m impressed they got Tyla and Lisa.”

“OK, but is this good for women? The whole show, I mean.”

“Are you insane?” (She said this with love, I’m sure.) “Obviously, this isn’t good for women. They would never put on a show like this of basically naked men.”

“But it’s good to have women of all sizes, isn’t it?”

“Mom, you know that’s bullshit, right?” Usually she doesn’t swear. I swear. “They’re not celebrating women’s bodies. They have a few models who aren’t stick-thin and they’re pretending they’re body positive. It’s tokenism. It’s bullshit.”

So there you have it, in a bra cup: The 2024 Victoria’s Secret runway show was a parade of Kate Moss, Tyra Banks, Carla Bruni, skinny models, not quite as skinny models, and a bunch of people you thought were really retired. The runway looked like it was in an abandoned airplane hangar, or maybe a really big high school gym. Despite the towering wings (there were still wings), the models seemed dwarfed. I might be projecting but they looked really uncomfortable.