Victoria’s Secret 2015 Fashion Show: The Images, The Rumors, The Controversy

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Another year, another Victoria’s Secret event taping happened last night for what will air on December 8th as the 2015 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show: it’s just amazing how time flies and how brilliant marketing policies place this particular show in the year’s (commercially speaking)

Months of preparations, weeks of starvation, days of excitement, hours of post-processing will undoubtedly produce yet a magnificent show for television! Feathers and lace, sequins and glitter, how much of the legendary Victoria’s Secret shows designs are model-friendly, customer-friendly and how much is just smoke in tv mirrors? Let’s scroll down and find out!

Who walked first? Behati Prinsloo. Who wore this year’s Fantasy Bra? Lily Aldridge (the piece, signed by Mouawad, worth a whopping $2 Million was generously adorned with diamonds, blue topaz, pink quartz and yellow sapphires all set in gold). How many models? 47. How many looks? 75. Who performed? The Weeknd, Selena Gomez and Ellie Goulding.

The most impressive segment, as far as Victoria’s Secret shows are concerned, was the final one of all six. Suggestively titled ‘Fireworks’, the scene involved angels catwalking with LED-powered wings! That is not to say that ‘Ice Angel’, Exotic Butterflies’, ‘Boho Psychedelic’, ‘Portrait of an Angel’ or ‘Pink USA’ were less amazing, but all their crystals, feathers, lace or tassels would never shine as much as a handful of LED powered lights!

A total of 75 looks, 47 models for a show that’s going be aired in nearly 160 countries. These are the world’s most famous models (and some of the best paid too)! Only Adriana Lima could rip more applauses than newcomer Kendall Jenner, so we might say that Victoria’s Secret is in deep marketing trouble. Last year Doutzen left her winged catwalk days behind. Same with Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevingne. Not to mention beautiful Jourdan Dunn cancelling last minute (there’s still speculation about Jourdan and Rihanna’s cancellations).

And despite of the 11 newcomers, only 2 (Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid – was Gigi wearing Angel wings?) could attain a reasonable popularity to raise pulses and cheers. Year after year, Victoria’s Secret’s casting for their legendary fashion show makes sure the girls who want to participate have a certain height and weight but also the appealing features of the ‘girl next door’. At such point that I’m actually having troubles telling the girls apart and even news outlets mistook Barbara Fialho for Izabel Goulart.

This year, the pale blond girls were clearly upstaged by beautiful diverse models: Cindy Bruna, Jasmine Tookes, Joan Small, Lais Ribeiro, Leila Nda, Leomie Anderson, Maria Borges, Ming Xi, Shanina Shaik, Sui He, Yumi Lambert. Not even 25% or the total, but that won’t stop us from hoping things will get better! There’s an alarming lack of charisma on Victoria’s Secret runway and that has serious potential to hurt the business. So if the rumors were true, and they decided to cut deep in this year’s girls’ salaries, they might need to reconsider the move for next year’s show. The post-processing team will have to work harder to add extra charm and appeal, even to retouch the performances for next month’s CBS airing.

Put together all the fashion shows in the world, this annual VS one has more viewers than all of them combined. That should tell us something about the state of the fashion in our present times society. And if we won’t add wings and shiny LEDs to our runways, we might lose this industry to its own preciousness and elitism. Commercially appealing shows like this one will continue to cash in while the rest of them will continue to praise the art on an empty stomach.