Four years later, Victoria’s Secret is back with the feature film “The Tour.” In this feature film, the up-and-coming designer presents a collection based on her own ideas in four of her cities: London, Lagos, Bogotá and Tokyo. About femininity and the female body. Familiar faces from the brand’s past will appear, including Adriana She Lima and Naomi She Campbell. So are Hailey Bieber, Emily Ratajkowski, and Paloma Elsesser. So do many visual artists, poets, artisans, musicians, and multi-hyphenates. And so do a surprising number of dogs and horses. Just like the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show of old, you will be able to watch it in your living room. Available on Amazon Prime on Tuesdays.
If that sounds a little vague and unfocused, that’s because it is. The film is part extended fashion show as a music video, part gonzo experimental documentary, and part open mic hour narrated by Gigi Hadid, who is disgustingly unfunny. And perhaps more importantly, by abandoning all remnants of the old format, the brand is confusing its message about how exactly his philosophy has changed. Watching “The Tour,” Victoria’s Secret’s hilarious, cartoonish sex appeal itself is more problematic than its insistence that only a select few types and sizes of people are sexy. Some may wonder if he was thinking that way. (To its credit, “The Tour” will feature even more diverse models.)
But one designer’s take on this challenge – Xue Zhenfan, a 44-year-old Taiwanese designer based in Tokyo whose designs are named JennyFax – is that the famous The breakthrough came as a gentle and funny rebuttal to the history of lingerie brands. I stood for it. In conclusion, this is a good start.
After three other dream-shot chapters with gently narrated dialogue about inspiration and the creative process, the Tokyo section of “The Tour” arrives like a splash of cold water. Frenetic and surreal, the production opens with a quirky mock TV interview and a long dance sequence to techno accompaniment on a community theater-style stage, starring a pregnant peasant woman and a carrot freshly plucked from the soil. Masu. And manicured stiletto nails creaked along the varnish of a silver car stuck in traffic.
Models of all shapes, sizes and ages emerge from the stuck cars wearing Shue’s bizarre and otherworldly designs. Some models wore colorful lace bra straps and panties hanging off their bodies at odd angles, while others wore molded plastic dresses that expressed their love handles and soft tummies. One model wears a lumpy pink plastic dress over a shirt dress with the unmistakable pink two-tone pattern of Victoria’s Secret’s iconic shopping bag. Another woman wears only lacy black Victoria’s Secret panties and a bra, sewn together in layers to create a relatively modest silhouette. Still others have the bra fastened around her waist, hanging diagonally as if it had been interrupted mid-wear.
Soon, they’re running into each other, running in slow motion through traffic, with desperate shapes on their faces as if there’s a place they desperately need to go, and these ridiculous outfits are slowing their speed down. He has a desperate look on his face, as if he is delaying it. This whole spectacle seems to ask the question, “What if Victoria’s Secret fantasy had to face real life?”
Xue’s clothes are known for having the following characteristics: “Weaponized eccentricity” and a mixture of girlhood innocence, sassiness, and even grotesqueness. When she received a call from Victoria’s Secret, she was surprised, but inspired.
Typically, “inspiration always comes from my childhood. From my childhood or my teenage years,” Xue said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But I was thinking maybe I did something right, and that’s why this offer came. Now in her mid-40s, Xue wanted to face head-on the changes she has made both physically and emotionally.
“Because no matter how hard you try, you can’t go back to being 20, so it’s a little frustrating at first,” she added. “But I think I’m starting to understand that this is natural. … Not just for me, but for all women.”
Schuh said she wasn’t that familiar with Victoria’s Secret’s actual designs when she started the project, but the company’s reassurance that she didn’t have to use any existing products made it easy to use Victoria’s Secret products. This has further increased his interest in the subject. She ultimately uses the classic Victoria’s Secret bra and panties deconstructed and taken out of context, dressing her up as a child wearing underwear she doesn’t yet fully understand over a T-shirt. She said she remembered playing with it.
In contrast, to create a plastic dress, Xue looked to her experiences in adulthood as inspiration and used her own body molds. Wearing her tight-fitting beige T-shirt, Ms. Schue scanned and photographed her own figure and used that scan to determine the exact size and shape of her own torso. Created her 3D her print dress.
“I just wanted to make a little joke,” Xue said. She says that in the fashion industry, people have a particular idea of what a “regular size” body type is. “What if…the regular size… my body? ” She saw a certain comedic value in the idea of a model with a completely different body type than Schue wearing her body for a day.
It was a long road for Victoria’s Secret to regain consumer trust.Pale palette, calm thinking VS Collective Project, introduced in 2021 Collaborations on products, content, and programs with Megan Rapinoe and Naomi Osaka did not garner much attention. The almost appropriate use of the word “empowerment” still sounds as hollow as a breezy “Hey, lady!” A message from the girl who used to tease you during recess and now wants what you have. In other words, it remains to be seen whether and how Victoria’s Secret can recover in a world filled with other brands that voluntarily adopted an inclusive stance long ago. Thing.
But Fang’s grinning approach, a direct but playful subversion of what Victoria’s Secret once stood for, ultimately reflects how real people look and move through the world. A cynical and calculating one might offer a hint.