Wings and the Annual Exercise in Impossibility

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is not a fashion show. Anyone saying otherwise is working for the brand. It’s a spectacle—a very specific kind of American entertainment that packages desire as aspiration and aspiration as personal failure, broadcast annually into living rooms everywhere as though this were a completely normal thing to do.

The 2013 New York edition was a clean example of the form. Karlie Kloss, Cara Delevingne, Martha Hunt on the runway, all wings and sequins and the kind of physical confidence that photographs beautifully and reads, from a couch at home, as a mild indictment of your own existence. Cara Delevingne was already developing something beyond modeling by that point—the eyebrows, the energy, the sense that she was slightly too chaotic for an environment built entirely on control. She was the most interesting thing in the room and she knew it.

Taylor Swift performed, which in 2013 made complete sense. She and the show occupied the same cultural frequency: massively mainstream, carefully calibrated, operating just below the threshold of self-awareness. Fall Out Boy were also there, wandering through the rhinestone architecture with the slight air of men who’d wandered onto the wrong set. Patrick Stump performing to a runway full of angels is a specific mid-2010s artifact I can’t quite decide how to feel about even now.

What the show always sold was a version of femininity that was simultaneously aspirational and anatomically implausible. The wings helped—give someone wings and suddenly the rest of the proportions feel like they belong to a different category of being altogether. The whole thing was calibrated to produce a very particular cocktail of arousal and inadequacy, and it worked, every year, on basically everyone watching.

I watched it. Same reasons as everyone else. Let’s not pretend there was anything complicated about it.