2019 has been a big year for people saying dumb things and getting cancelled, but all of that pales in comparison to the announcement from Victoria’s Secret that they’re going to actually cancel their annual fashion show for this year.
Before being cancelled for this year, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show had been running since 1995, and what was once a massive moment in pop culture has become something that most people cringe over and side eye these days. The world collectively went from idolising nobody other than the very thin, very white models to realising that there are more body types and skin colours that deserve celebration.
It also reeeeeeally didn’t help when last year Ed Razek, Victoria’s Secret’s former chief marketing officer, told Vogue that he didn’t think that trans models should be in the show “because the show is a fantasy” and that they “attempted to do a television special for plus-sizes. No one had any interest in it, still don’t.”
There’s a reason he’s the former chief marketing officer.
That hasn’t been the only controversy either. More recently, we found out that the CEO, Les Wexner, was buddies with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and Bella Hadid came out a couple of days ago and said that the whole experience of modelling for Victoria’s Secret was a bit shit.
All of this combined with Victoria’s Secret’s refusal to get on board with any models who didn’t fit their very, very specific beauty standards have been hitting them pretty hard. In 2013, 9.7 million viewers tuned in to the broadcast of the show, which plummeted to 3.3 million last year.
Look, the world has moved on from thinking that the only way to be beautiful is to be an incredibly thin white woman who hasn’t had a glass of water all day before hitting the runway. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show should have been binned a long time ago, but it’s always better late than never.