Fucking Day: 2001 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show (Patreon)

The year is 2001. You’re Victoria. You have a secret. The secret is that you wear underwear. You’ve decided to share your terrible secret with the world by putting a bunch of models in their underwear on national television, pelting them with snow, forcing them to listen to opera, and subjecting them to a quirky, horny, gay man. The 2001 Victoria’s Secret fashion show is born.

I only recently learned the Victoria's Secret fashion show was a televised event, but apparently, this is a thing that is known to certain groups of people very well because when I asked my husband if he knew that, he said yes faster than the speed of sound. 2001 was the first year the show was on broadcast television, and it's a time capsule to a weird kind of playful horniness I don't think we see anymore.

The vibe is, "We're so naughty looking at all these ladies in their underwear, but it's ok because it's fashion, wink." The banter feels like it was written by a four year old who's just learned that screaming BOOBIES embarrasses adults for some reason. And the overly intricate production work is giving us Andrew Lloyd Webber presents: Butts.

To further underscore this sprightly sexiness, the show had Rupert Everett host, and he made some definite choices in how he played his role. By that, I mean he ate one of Heidi Klum's leg hairs. He hosts as if he's doing a parody of straight men. Like he's pissed off at them, and he's saying this is what you look like, you absolute goblins. Feel shame!

You might be surprised to hear there's a deep lore to the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Rupert refers to it in his introduction as a sultry Super Bowl of underwear, and there are some sports-like qualities to it. They have famous returning players like Heidi Klum, Tyra Banks, and Giselle Bundchen. There's a song to open and a halftime show. Instead of winning a ring, or a trophy, the best player gets to wear the "fantasy bra," which has millions of dollars of jewels sewn into it. It's designed to fulfill every woman's fantasy of wearing a bra that's both uncomfortable and tacky as hell.

The fantasy bras are offered for sale each year, but supposedly only two have found buyers, and who those buyers are is a closely guarded secret probably because no one wants to be known as the dude who wanted to sniff the fantasy bra so bad he was willing to pay twelve million dollars. If they don't sell, they're disassembled and put into other jewelry pieces that aren't sparkly boob covers that would both shear your nipples off and also totally show under a T-shirt.

As well as bras, the Super Bowl of underpants includes interviews with all of the models at the top of the show, complete with fun facts varying wildly from stuff like "Enjoys the beach" to "Collects Chinese furniture from the Hong Dynasty." My personal favorite being, "Would love to travel to the moon." Keep in mind this is in 2001, way before Blue Origin was hucking whoever Jeff Bezos just had dinner with into space. If you ask a panties model for a fun fact about herself, she either goes way too small or way too big. It's, "I wear sandals in winter" or, "I'd like to be the president of Tunisia."

The 2001 show kicked off with a montage of sitcoms joking about people masturbating to the Victoria's Secret catalog, intercut with extreme closeups of women's torsos, butts, and boobs. There are several butt/boob montages throughout the show, and they gave me a real appreciation for how hard modeling is. Imagine you're Heidi Klum, and your job is to sit in a chair and swing your hair around so someone can edit the word COOL over your boobs, and people will think, you know what, that does look cool!

Fucking super cool. Imagine being Tyra Banks, and a director tells you to dance with a houseplant and make it sexy. Or rub your face on this chair like a cat but in a hot way. These are all real things women have to do for Victoria's Secret, and they all look fabulous doing it somehow. If I dance with a houseplant, I'm getting my medication adjusted, but when Tyra Banks does it, I want to buy her underwear? Sexuality is weird.

Another fun little feature of the preshow is the mirror camera. We get occasional glimpses into the models backstage fixing their hair and adjusting their clothing directly into the camera. You would assume the models were informed there was a camera in that mirror, but model Anouck Lepere seems to suggest otherwise, in a brief scene where she yells at someone off camera about the mirror.

"Imagine if you don't know and you're standing there in your little underwear, your bra, and you're lifting your breasts in front of that mirror, and it's like on television!" She says, clearly upset. Mid-speech the camera cuts to a woman doing exactly this into the mirror camera, to respond DUH; that's why the mirror cam is awesome! What's wrong with you? Are you not a pervert? Do you even eat human leg hair!?

After 20 minutes of pre-show consisting of little Rupert Everett bits, montages, interviews with the models, and a small segment on how the show is put together, we're ready to begin. Andrea Bocelli,  the famous blind opera singer, kicks off the Olympics of staring at women. The theme of the outfits for the first half of the show is Santa Claus is Cumming meets I Recently Saw The Matrix.

The actual fashion show part of this performance is the length of all fashion shows, which is, like, ten minutes? Tops? Most of the excitement for the show is based around the pageantry of it, so the fashion show is the boring part. After a commercial break, we return with the only logical performer to follow Andrea Bocelli, Mary J. Blige, singing her hit song "Family Affair."

Naturally, she begins by yelling, "It's a family affair in here tonight!" Is it, Mary? I'm not bringing my grandma to the underwear parade but only because I worry about Heidi Klum becoming unbalanced by the weight of all those bra gems, plummeting from the stage and smothering her in her $12 million bosom.

Because there hasn't been nearly enough spectacle, three women in angel wings descend from the ceiling. There's now a full gospel choir in white robes on the right side of the stage and a full orchestra on the left. It starts to snow. We're finally ready for another five minutes of fashion show, and the opportunity to be crushed to death by a different woman from a much higher height.

The second half of the show includes each model wearing a different set of wings and white lingerie. This is the section where the fantasy bra appears, and they weirdly don't make a big deal out of it. It's not the first or last piece of the show, and they don't announce it. It kind of looks like Heidi Klum got really into bedazzling. The only reason I knew this was the fantasy bra for the year was thanks to the devoted fans of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show Wiki.

For the show's final moments, they ignore the full gospel choir on stage in favor of a recording of the Alien Ant Farm cover of the song "Smooth Criminal," a truly 2001 move. It then cuts to the mirror cam backstage, where we see models removing their wings. Rupert Everett does his outro for the show with his shirt unbuttoned and his pants unzipped.

Today, the Victoria's Secret fashion show no longer exists. It's left behind a void in the lives of models everywhere. If a model rolls across the floor in her underwear like a sexy potato escaping a countertop and no man is there to get horny, is it even hot?

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