Behind the Angels

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is one of those annual spectacles that’s easy to be snobbish about and impossible not to watch. The 2016 edition went to Paris—of course it did—with Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, and The Weeknd providing the soundtrack while Gigi Hadid, Kendall Jenner, Sara Sampaio, and the rest walked out in wings and lingerie that costs more than most cars.

I’ve made peace with the fact that I will always watch it. There’s something almost hypnotic about that combination of beauty and spectacle, engineered to a degree that should feel cold but somehow doesn’t. And the backstage footage that surfaces afterward is better than the show itself. The runway is choreography—precise, polished, slightly unreal. Backstage is where they’re just people, in a room that happens to contain an impossible density of extraordinary-looking women.

Gigi’s on her phone. Kendall is trying to get a candid of someone. Sara Sampaio is making the photographers lose their composure without appearing to try. There’s a version of this that sounds dehumanizing when written down, and maybe it is, but watching it I feel less like a voyeur and more like someone who wandered into the wrong room at the right moment and decided to stay. That kind of concentrated physical perfection in such a candid, cramped space—you don’t find it anywhere else.

The show is theater. Backstage is something closer to the truth of what it actually is: extraordinary people waiting for their cue, just existing. It’s the only kind of documentary I’d watch twice.