Six years after cowering to the “Great Awokening” and canceling the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the annual extravaganza celebrating the once-iconic lingerie brand is back, technically. Victoria’s Secret promised that this year’s show, unlike the glamour bonanzas of galas past, would “reflect who we are today,” and indeed, it did not disappoint, if that’s the metric it chooses to use. The 2024 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was dour and dull, a sad parody of the legacy it has no respect for, and in its attempt to reject the much-maligned “male” gaze, the female gaze was denied anything of interest as well.

While much will correctly be made of the fashion show, which bragged incessantly about banning male performers from the stage, casting transgender women as models in Tuesday’s farce, the most glaring difference between this show and the last decades of decadence was the clothes. The hot-pink push-up bras and bare bottoms scantily clad in lacy thongs were replaced by beige bralettes and literal palazzo pajama pants. There was hardly an underwire in sight, and, on a slew of 110-pound models ostensibly advertising, you know, lingerie, trapping tiny tatas in tired T-shirt bras without so much as a modest push-up doesn’t exactly resonate with the average woman, who, in the United States, rocks a 34DD.