In the 2014 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, there is a quiet moment before the models walk the runway in their costume lingerie: The women huddle around the corporate executive Ed Razek, a man instrumental in choosing them for the final lineup. He is in his 60s, graying, with a rich person’s tan; the women glow with body shimmer and would tower over him if he were not standing on a low stage. “This is simply the most special runway in the world,” he tells them, “and it has no equivalent.”

In 2012, the casting director John Pfeiffer made participation in the show seem like women’s collective daydream. “You have no idea,” he insisted. “Every girl wants to do this. Even if they pretend they don’t want to do it, everybody wants it.” Earlier he explained that there were only a select few who would ever meet the company’s standards — women who were “just perfect.”

Did every girl want to be a Victoria’s Secret model? It was almost an accusation, or a pre-emptive challenge to people who might consider themselves above the spectacle. The brand understood that while sex appeal can be dynamic, conventional beauty is flat and conclusive. Victoria’s Secret leaned into traditional beauty standards, exploiting them to the apex. For a while, this investment paid off.

The company started as a single store in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1970s and was acquired by the retail magnate Leslie Wexner in 1982. By the 1990s, after Wexner changed the marketing scheme to sell to the women who would be wearing the goods and not their husbands, Victoria’s Secret was America’s most successful lingerie retailer. Its first show, an attempt to rub shoulders with the fashion world, was a modest presentation at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1995, where models wore chic lingerie and high heels, mostly under robes and cardigans. A commercial introduced in 1996 for the “Angels” underwear collection played so well that the company doubled down on the theme, contracting a small number of women to be exclusive models for the brand. From the beginning, these Victoria’s Secret Angels were meant to be more otherworldly than aspirational.

It’s hard to reconcile the earlier events with what the show eventually became: a showcase for multimillion-dollar jewel-encrusted “Fantasy Bras,” increasingly impractical slip-on wings and high-production performances from ultrafamous musical acts. From its first televised event in 2001, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show became appointment viewing for a significant number of Americans, peaking in 2011 with an audience of more than 10 million. In its most popular years, the show coded its models’ thinness in the language of fitness-speak. The brand invited women to “train like an Angel,” even as the fantasy was about being born into an effortless body.

In 2018, during the height of the #MeToo movement, Victoria’s Secret was in a defensive position, managing declining sales and hamstrung by its own legacy. “The show is a fantasy,” Razek told Vogue, defending the brand for its decision not to cast plus-size or transgender models. In the course of two years, Wexner was investigated internally for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and left the company, Razek retired, the show was canceled and years of sexual harassment claims against Razek were revealed (which he denied). Models like Erin Heatherton and Bridget Malcolm, meanwhile, spoke to the high personal cost of participating in the show and the mental toll of never being seen as thin or angelic enough. In 2021, the chief executive admitted that the company had “lost relevance with the modern woman.”

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