Tales from the Back Row by Amy Odell

Author:Amy Odell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

6

Models

adventures at the victoria’s secret fashion show

Three hundred and sixty-four days out of the year, mail is nothing more to me than desk herpes. Impervious to treatment, it piles up, causing people who walk past my workstation to fear for my hygiene. Only one day out of the year does the mail become something much, much more—carrier of a rare golden ticket to a fantastical fabled thing that will amaze you, change you, and, mostly, make you feel really, really fat: the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show!

The VS show is independent from Fashion Week, and the invite is not just any invite. The metallic rectangle is practically lacquered. It’s made of such heavy foam-board-like paper stock that once you finish with it, you can reuse it as a cheese board.

When my first-ever invite arrived I RSVP’d immediately. Then I G-chatted my friend Justin.

“i have the golden ticket!!” I wrote.

“i hate u get me one,” he replied.

“can’t! admits one. bla bla. should i start dieting now or forever hold onto my breakfast pastries.”

“go barf in the bathroom IMMEDIATELY.”

. . .

“jk jk!”

Roughly 70 percent of the thrill of receiving the invite is the same as that of any other fashion show: just knowing you are Important Enough to be invited. She who goes to the VS show can say:

“I saw Jay Z live, but not the whole concert, just his set at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.”

“No, I can’t do dinner, I have to cover the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.”

There’s an “I’m in, you’re out” aspect to it that gives you bragging rights I won’t pretend to be above—although I really wished that Justin could have come because you need someone to banter with you about why the models are wearing inflatable emojis that look like baby pool floats and generally look like the Village People if the Village People were lingerie models. I worked as a fashion blogger for several years before I got invited. One year, a print editor tossed me her invite before my time came. I was so excited—until I saw the bolded fine print about invitations being “non-transferrable” along with some other scary language that suggested armed officers would handcuff, arrest, and strip search any thug assistant who tried to enter under her superior’s name.

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show isn’t really a fashion show—it’s a holiday-time commercial disguised as an hour-long Vegas showgirl spectacular. Only instead of seeing synchronized dance moves and flexibility, you witness the girls walk, smile, wink, blow kisses, and playfully bump butts with the singers. It tapes in November before Thanksgiving and then airs about a month later on national television. Leading up to the taping and then the broadcast, VS keeps the fashion press busy for months by feeding them every little fact about the production, the costumes, and the diet and exercise routines the models undertake to prepare for the show. The media finds its own stories too, like how year 2010 was the first that an Asian model was cast, which

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