Oh, to be the gum on Adriana Lima's shoe
on the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and models as comfort
The first model I really fell for was Adriana Lima. To this day, I can’t see her face without grabbing my inhaler, Lana’s “Million Dollar Man” coiling hazily from a snake charmer’s pungi: You said I was the most exotic flower. I don’t even have asthma.
All little girls start out gay before some latch onto the promising teat of male attention, never quite relinquishing its milk. Adriana defined my coming of age. I wanted to see her naked. I wanted to look in the mirror at my naked, prepubescent body with its doughy middle and gangly limbs and see her. I wanted us to fall in love and take over the world, both striking enough to leave journalists tongue-tied.
“Where is Brazil?” I’d ask my parents in hand-me-down Tweety Bird pajamas with a SpaghettiOs stain down the chest.
Last week was the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. I had no idea it was happening and when I found out on Instagram, I snatched the remote from Andrew to play the recording. The kicker here is that it was Andrew’s birthday, which he mostly spent attempting to unclog the shower drain and calling the plumber; you’d think I’d give him control of the TV. Nonetheless, I rationalized my demand with something like, “this could be a nice little birthday gift, the go-ahead to watch hot women strut in lingerie without my evil glare.” He did not put up a fight.
There are no civilized words to describe my response to the fashion show; I was simply hootin’ & hollerin’ from top to bottom. The way I breathlessly rattled off names, bios, and parasocial “I’ve MISSED you”s, you would’ve sworn that was my high school clique. That this was our reunion. Candice. Alessandra. TYRA. Tyra with those hips! Those melons! That hair! Those eyes that can only say one thing to those of us who spent formative years under her violent spell: I will devour you.
Looking back on the show, two salient moments really pulled me inward. Made me think I fucking love models and also, why the fuck do I love models?
I
Adriana Lima closes out Modern Heritage, the collection that purportedly “embodies the brand.” Who better for the task than my love, my muse, my bitch? Torching the runway in a plaid second skin and iridescent purple wings, Adriana blew a kiss without breaking her smile—the femme fatale that fell from the sky. I kept thinking, her swingy ponytail’s gonna get caught on her hoops! And then I thought, alas, my perfect job: the sucker hired to detangle Adriana Lima’s hair from her earrings.
Adriana was preceded by model of the moment Anok Yai which, again: who better for the task? And as they crossed paths, those pink lights obscuring the truth, the cracks in the facade of anachronistic charm—that this Amazon-sponsored event holds as much cultural integrity as Cyber Monday—I felt the past and present collide. The escapist fantasy of beauty kissed me gently on the forehead. Indeed, I fucking love models.
II
Kate Moss opens Heroes, “a collection with superpowers reflecting your everyday runway” and I want to strangle their marketing team. But what matters here is Kate. Kate, slinking down the catwalk in all black to “I Love Rock & Roll.” Kate, the indestructible waif, held together by vodka and esthetic interventions and damn, if that’s not mother.
Search Kate Moss on TikTok and you’ll find hundreds of videos set to this audio:
“She’s had plenty of drug problems, and dated some questionable men. She’s blamed for promoting anorexia AND heroin use. She’s Kate Moss, and she’s a rockstar trapped in a supermodel’s body.”
And that’s it, you know? That’s why the fuck I love models. The ones who bring our disaffected literary characters to life, who slither through the world barred out and stone-faced with their cigarettes and their black iced coffee and their heinous 00 skinny jeans that still sag.
It’s one thing to be a beautiful girl who gets paid to be beautiful. It is another, more delicious thing to be a beautiful girl who gets paid to be beautiful and chooses to be bad. To take your role of garden rose and instead, be a vine—climbing up shady walls of concrete, leading us into the cold, dark night.
Pregnancy, man. Every day is like Choose Your Own Adventure: Alien Invasion! You become way less judgemental of your own media hygiene knowing comfort is a luxury you deserve in whatever fucked-up form it presents itself. Anything I share for the next five months can and will be punctuated with, “and I will not be taking questions at this time!”
I binged “The Super Models” on Apple TV in one sitting. (recommend)
I watch crude TikToks of Slavic Dolls stomping through the early aughts. (not so much)
YouTube interviews, “What I eat in a day” memos, you name it.
I am a HISTORIAN of PROBLEMATIC BEAUTY and I WILL NOT BE TAKING QUESTIONS AT THIS TIME!!!
In a 2020 piece for Vulture, Rachel Handler explores the comfort she gets from pictures of the Olsen twins smoking. She tells us that, while flu-stricken, Googling “Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen smoking” helped her escape her body.
Models have the Olsen Smoking Effect on me. Watching people whose job is to control their body makes me forget that right now, I can’t control mine. Observing their mystery and power and allure while I become an unkempt potato, loafing around a one-story New Jersey bungalow reminds me to laugh at myself—that we are all just characters on a show, existing in different seasons.
Now, I could bore you with some desperate excavation of my own “girlhood”—cheerleading competitions, calorie counting. Feed you buzzy hypotheses about how it all comes alive on the runway:
The MIMETIC DESIRE for a certain type of beauty!
The DEATH DRIVE of ultra-thinness!
The PERFORMANCE of gender!
Those approaches might win me some readers of a certain intellectual class. But I’m not interested in pandering, in convincing you that I am Good and Well-read. Because as much as I want to be those things, I want to be honest.
And I honestly love models because I’m a human being who loves pretty things and wants hot women to step on my neck.
I will not be taking questions at this time.
The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is my Roman Empire
I too love problematic beauty and models. I feel seen, thank you gorgeous.