Death knell of the model phenomenon, as Victoria's Secret ends the Angels

I've been writing about this topic off and on over the past 10 years, but the cultural phenomenon of models has been on the wane at least since the 2000s, perhaps going back to the '90s. The cover girl (or whatever she is in a newer medium than magazines) has steadily become an existing pop culture celebrity, typically an actress or a singer.

It's Cameron Diaz, or Demi Lovato, or Kim Kardashian — as long as it's someone the audience already knows, and already has a solid idea of what their persona or branding is. No mystery allowed. No allure. It can't be someone whose personal details, dating history, bla bla bla, is either secret or just not very interesting.

They must be a fully known quantity, otherwise the audience cannot cosplay as them, or form a parasocial attachment to them. Those goals are too hard to reach when the person you're trying to latch onto is a more shadowy figure. During the outgoing and rising-crime times of the 1960s through the early '90s, people tolerated and even preferred some ambiguity, shadow, and secrecy — all meant to pique your curiosity, and draw you over to them, to investigate.

In the cocooning and falling-crime times since then, a mysterious stranger is a threat, liable to produce anxiety rather than pro-social curiosity in the audience. So, mysterious strangers are out, fully fleshed-out characters are in.

Although they have been an endangered species for the past few decades, models have now become all but extinct, and not just because our first and only model First Lady is no longer in the White House. Victoria's Secret recently announced the end of their Angels program of supermodels. They had been one of the few holdouts for showcasing models rather than actresses, singers, and other non-fashion celebs. Certainly they were the most visible, influential, and enduring of the holdouts.

Really their only competition over the past 20-30 years in the model-spotlighting game was the American Apparel ad campaigns of the late 2000s. But already by the late 2010s, the former hipster audience for American Apparel was more interested in seeing known figures from the media/entertainment sector, such as podcasters, walk the runway and appear in fashion shoots (the Red Scare girls did both).

As an aside, that's why I find Aimee Terese more inspiring as a muse than others from online media / entertainment. She's reluctant to share personal details, she deliberately holds back, and sticks to one type of performer (podcaster and shitposter). It's more like what a model's job used to entail back in the '80s and '90s, creating some mystery, allure, and inviting our curiosity (but not our parasocial obsession about her backstory, character arc, etc.).

She likes being able to provoke and tantalize the audience just a bit, while still being able to slink back into the comfort of her own unrecorded and unbroadcast personal life. This lack of total definition of her persona allows her fans to imagine various forms that they could mold her into (e.g., as the giant neon ad girl from Blade Runner 2049).

By the same token, it allows her sad loser haters to project onto more of a narrative blank slate, conjuring up a spectre to haunt themselves with. It's no different from when detractors of models used to denigrate hot famous girls for whatever they imagined their personal faults were, since models were not fully known quantities and could not instantly and forever defend themselves. But normal people in an audience tend to give attack victims the benefit of the doubt, and dismiss the haters. In this anti-fragile manner, the crazy haters grow the fan-base of their target.

At any rate, with a lag of a few years, the mainstream is now catching up to the avant-garde, and VS will replace models with politically themed pop culture stars. As usual, the mainstream corporate approach is going far more over-the-top than the avant-garde in its wokeness (racial diversity, body size positivity, etc.), since inclusive representation is an ideology meant to distract from the deteriorating standard of living for most people who are not elite.

That's why most of the anti-woke left figures of the past five years have hailed from a peripheral or Bohemian niche of the cultural ecosystem, while woketards are working hand-in-glove with Wall Street banks and the CIA.

At the same time, this ideological spin is also a rationalization for VS. They were bound to kill off their models at some point or another, as the phenomenon has been fading for decades. What particular excuse they needed to do so, would have depended on the exact cultural circumstances. And since wokeness has been amped up over the past 5-10 years, they're running with that as their excuse.

If they had chosen last year to end it, they would've blamed it on coronavirus like every other elite actor. But now that that's winding down, it's back to wokeness. Whatever the excuse, it's good-bye to mysterious cultural figures for good.