Angels and Demons: Revealing the Dark Side of Victoria's Secret
The current resurgence of Y2k fashion has prompted recent documentary reassessments of the biggest brands of this era, from Von Dutch to Abercrombie & Fitch. Now their mother of all is getting the docuseries treatment with Victoria's Secret: Angels & Demons, a three-part film about fashion, sex, power, money and misconduct that's sure to titillate when it premieres. premiering this week.
After all, the multibillion-dollar lingerie juggernaut was an inescapable cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s and early 2000s, known for its high-octane fashion shows, its suggestive mail-order catalogs, its impossibly long mouthpieces dubbed Angels, and its lacquered stores (and iconic pink-striped shopping bags) ubiquitous in malls and across the city landscape. American fashion in general. But behind the glitz and glitz touting women's empowerment through face-to-face sexuality lie allegations of bullying and harassment of employees and models; executives dismissive of launching more diverse and inclusive models; and former billionaire CEO Les Wexner's disconcerting ties to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The series charts the rise and fall of the megabrand , telling the story both inside (courtesy of two former CEOs, other key employees, never-before-seen damning inside videos, and a few angels themselves) and outside: the changes cultures of the late 90s, post-Clinton/Lewinsky, Sex and the City that ignited the brand's particular brand of aggressive sexuality and those that presaged its decline decades later in the wake of #MeToo.
>It was around this time that the controversies surrounding the brand appeared on director Matt Tyrnauer's radar. "In a meeting I had with a fashion company in 2019, it emerged that some Victoria's Secret models were rebelling against the brand on social media," he told the Guardian. Before that, he admits, "I hadn't really paid attention to the brand." (He didn't even know about the Angels until he started researching this film: "My first reaction was, 'This is the worst, stupidest, most insulting, most backward and most retrograde marketing idea I've ever seen." And yet it worked to such a degree that perhaps no other fashion marketing campaign ever has." -type="model.dotcomrendering.pageElements. VideoYoutubeBlockElement" class="dcr-10khgmf">[embedded content]
Indeed, Tyrnauer, a former Vanity Fair editor who previously directed Studio 54 documentaries , Roy Cohn and haute couture designer Valentino, tends to operate in more rarefied circles. But, "this struck me as an example of yet another crack in the foundations of the top-down establishment at old, where models, who were once completely controlled by brands, actually bit the hand that had fed eu x,” he says. "I like to make stories about closed worlds and systems, and I thought to myself, 'There's something here.' Wexner, now 84, helped Epstein to wealth and women by granting the financier sweeping powers over the corporate titan's finances, philanthropy and private life.Epstein even posed as a talent scout for Victoria's Secret in 1997, luring a model into a Santa Monica hotel room where he groped and manipulated...
The current resurgence of Y2k fashion has prompted recent documentary reassessments of the biggest brands of this era, from Von Dutch to Abercrombie & Fitch. Now their mother of all is getting the docuseries treatment with Victoria's Secret: Angels & Demons, a three-part film about fashion, sex, power, money and misconduct that's sure to titillate when it premieres. premiering this week.
After all, the multibillion-dollar lingerie juggernaut was an inescapable cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s and early 2000s, known for its high-octane fashion shows, its suggestive mail-order catalogs, its impossibly long mouthpieces dubbed Angels, and its lacquered stores (and iconic pink-striped shopping bags) ubiquitous in malls and across the city landscape. American fashion in general. But behind the glitz and glitz touting women's empowerment through face-to-face sexuality lie allegations of bullying and harassment of employees and models; executives dismissive of launching more diverse and inclusive models; and former billionaire CEO Les Wexner's disconcerting ties to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The series charts the rise and fall of the megabrand , telling the story both inside (courtesy of two former CEOs, other key employees, never-before-seen damning inside videos, and a few angels themselves) and outside: the changes cultures of the late 90s, post-Clinton/Lewinsky, Sex and the City that ignited the brand's particular brand of aggressive sexuality and those that presaged its decline decades later in the wake of #MeToo.
>It was around this time that the controversies surrounding the brand appeared on director Matt Tyrnauer's radar. "In a meeting I had with a fashion company in 2019, it emerged that some Victoria's Secret models were rebelling against the brand on social media," he told the Guardian. Before that, he admits, "I hadn't really paid attention to the brand." (He didn't even know about the Angels until he started researching this film: "My first reaction was, 'This is the worst, stupidest, most insulting, most backward and most retrograde marketing idea I've ever seen." And yet it worked to such a degree that perhaps no other fashion marketing campaign ever has." -type="model.dotcomrendering.pageElements. VideoYoutubeBlockElement" class="dcr-10khgmf">[embedded content]
Indeed, Tyrnauer, a former Vanity Fair editor who previously directed Studio 54 documentaries , Roy Cohn and haute couture designer Valentino, tends to operate in more rarefied circles. But, "this struck me as an example of yet another crack in the foundations of the top-down establishment at old, where models, who were once completely controlled by brands, actually bit the hand that had fed eu x,” he says. "I like to make stories about closed worlds and systems, and I thought to myself, 'There's something here.' Wexner, now 84, helped Epstein to wealth and women by granting the financier sweeping powers over the corporate titan's finances, philanthropy and private life.Epstein even posed as a talent scout for Victoria's Secret in 1997, luring a model into a Santa Monica hotel room where he groped and manipulated...
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