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Wings! Fake tans! Low body mass indexes! For millennial women, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was an annual reminder of the myriad ways in which we were failing to adhere to exacting and exhausting beauty standards. When it was cancelled in 2019, few mourned it. But fashion loves a comeback story, and today the company unveiled Victoria’s Secret: The Tour ’23 on Amazon Prime Video, its first televised catwalk event in five years. According to the company, the feature-length film is the “ultimate expression” of their ongoing efforts to rehabilitate a brand that has been mired in scandal. Alongside long-standing criticisms over promoting an unrealistic body image, the company’s former marketing executive Ed Razek was also accused of behaving inappropriately with models in a New York Times report (he described the allegations as “categorically untrue, misconstrued or taken out of context”) and a recent Hulu documentary Angels and Demons explored troubling links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Visually, strategically, everything about it is the incarnation of where the brand is going,” Victoria’s Secret president Greg Unis has said. Instead of the usual structure, which was centred around a straightforward runway show, The Tour ’23 is roughly divided into quarters, each focusing on one of four locations: Lagos, Nigeria; Bogota, Colombia; Tokyo, Japan; London, the UK. In each city, a local designer has dreamed up their own fashion collection to be modelled by the likes of Naomi Campbell, Emily Ratajkowski, Adut Akech, and Gigi Hadid, who does double duty as the show’s narrator. In London, the chosen designer is Michaela Stark, whose corsets aim to celebrate a diverse range of body shapes, rather than constrict them. She agreed to take part in the VS show 2.0, she suggests, so that she could counteract the damaging messages put out by the original runways. “It was a big thing” when she was a teenager, she recalls, “but it was also that culture around it, of not wanting to eat after you saw it”. Her comments inadvertently raise a question that looms over the whole production: can you ever truly detoxify a brand practically built on the insecurities of a generation of women? Founded by Roy Raymond in the late Seventies, who felt awkward buying lingerie for his wife in his local department store, Victoria’s Secret began life as a women’s underwear shop aimed specifically at men. In 1982, Raymond sold the business to Limited Stores founder Les Wexner for $1m; Wexner went on to transform the brand, envisaging it as a more affordable version of the fancy European label La Perla. In 1995, when the company was facing competition from Wonderbra, the first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It proved successful enough to become an annual event. In 1999, the show was streamed on the internet for the first time, prompting the website to crash as 1.5 million users tried to tune in. Two years later, the VS show celebrated its inaugural TV broadcast, during which the National Organisation for Women (NOW) protested outside a New York branch of the shop. “Some people are terribly blase about this, that this is not a big deal, that we ought to be used to this kind of daily sexuality,” Sonia Ossorio, NOW’s vice president for public information, said at the time. “But I think we need to keep questioning the ever-extending sexualisation of women in mass media.” The following year, NOW branded the event a “softcore porn infomercial”. By then, the blueprint for future VS shows had been set. A lineup of models would don bras encrusted with millions of pounds worth of jewels and embarrassingly themed lingerie (never forget Cara Delevingne’s god-awful outfit circa 2013: a sort of miniature shell suit likely pitched in the boardroom as “sexy football fan”). Somewhere between the models, a famous singer would pop in for a brief performance; if they were a woman, they’d be decked out in a VS creation of their own (Taylor Swift got a particularly raw deal in 2013, too, when she had to wear a Union Jack-inspired number, complete with a tiny red, white and blue top hat). This glittering, over-the-top spectacle, much closer to a beauty pageant than a Fashion Week presentation, spotlighted the world’s most beautiful women – who were not just genetically blessed but worked hard, too, we were told ad nauseam. They had been preparing for the show like endurance athletes, sticking to carefully tailored diets and intense workout schedules. These wing-wearing “Angels” were selling a dream, one that we lesser mortals could supposedly buy into by picking up some synthetic underwear at our nearest Victoria’s Secret branch. But it was their painstaking fitness regimens, not the pants they were wearing, that were the real focus of fascination. In endless interviews, the models were asked to detail exactly how they whittled themselves down to “Victoria’s Secret ready” size – so that we could try and copy them. To combat the criticisms of objectification, the brand relied on its models to pay lip service to just how “empowering” the whole circus was, offering up their take on choice feminism. “There’s something really powerful about a woman who owns her sexuality and is in charge” – model Karlie Kloss was peddling this line to the media as late as 2018. “A show like this celebrates that and allows all of us to be the best versions of ourselves. Whether it’s wearing heels, make-up or a beautiful piece of lingerie – if you are in control and empowered by yourself, it’s sexy.” Naturally, it was very convenient that this “best version of ourselves” aligned with the oppressively narrow conventional standard of sexiness Victoria’s Secret was selling. By the late 2010s, though, as the fashion industry began to (slowly) address its diversity problem, Victoria’s Secret started to seem more and more like an anachronism. As other brands took small steps to spotlight plus-size models on their catwalks and in their advertising campaigns, the VS show remained the preserve of the extremely thin. They had been preparing for the show like endurance athletes, sticking to carefully tailored diets and intense workout schedules Placing white models in culturally insensitive outfits (see: Kloss walking down the runway wearing a Native American-inspired headdress) only added to the glaring PR problem, which was later exacerbated when the brand’s marketing boss Ed Razek made controversial comments about transgender people and plus-size models to Vogue in 2018. “It’s like, why doesn’t your show do this? Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in your show?” he said, apparently recalling questions from critics. “No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy.” Elsewhere, he claimed “no one had any interest” in seeing bigger bodies on the VS catwalk. Razek later apologised, admitting that his “remark regarding the inclusion of transgender models in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show came across as insensitive”. His comments about plus-size bodies went unaddressed. In 2019, against a backdrop of plummeting TV ratings and declining sales, the brand confirmed that the VS show had been cancelled; instead, they said, the company would focus on “evolving” their marketing. The news came just a few months after the revelation that Jeffrey Epstein had provided financial advice to Victoria’s Secret founder Wexner – and had exploited his personal connection to the brand as a means to lure in young women. “Being taken advantage of by someone who was so sick, so cunning, so depraved, is something that I’m embarrassed I was even close to,” Wexner said to investors. “But that is in the past.” He left the company the following year. Since then, Victoria’s Secret has made some high-profile attempts to rectify past missteps. The company brought in a majority female board of directors; they ditched the “Angels” concept in favour of the new “VS Collective” whose ranks include actor Priyanka Chopra, US football star Megan Rapinoe, and plus-size model Paloma Elsesser. Last year, an ad campaign featuring a more diverse array of women was accompanied by the slogan “we’ve changed” – supposedly into something “ever-evolving” and “real”. How much has Victoria’s Secret “changed”, really? The latest show features a handful of plus-size models, Elsesser included, but many of the old VS cohort are present and correct, including Candice Swanepoel, Lily Aldridge, and Adriana Lima. The nods to body diversity can’t help but feel a bit cursory when the overriding vision is still one of impossibly thin women parading up and down a runway – albeit a runway that now snakes around a Brutalist building in Barcelona as opposed to a swanky New York City hotel. The outfits too, are more arty, less skimpy this time around and mercifully there hasn’t been the usual media battery of stories on extreme exercise and diet in the run-up – but that doesn’t mean those practices have ended altogether. “We haven’t forgotten our past, but we’re also speaking to the present,” the brand’s chief creative director Raul Martinez said before the film’s launch. In an era when more inclusive, dynamic lingerie labels, like Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty, reign supreme, the VS show can’t help but seem like a relic. And as long as its legacy of impossible body standards lives on for many of us, any attempts to dress the spectacle up as empowering feel very hollow indeed. Read More Naomi Campbell and Gigi Hadid lead first Victoria’s Secret runway show in five years Victoria's Secret overhauls its racy fashion catwalk in its latest moves to be more inclusive Chioma Nnadi at Vogue: All hail the era of the Black female fashion editor Naomi Campbell and Gigi Hadid lead first Victoria’s Secret runway show in five years Kim Kardashian debuts buzz cut and thin eyebrows for new photo shoot Travis Kelce wears ‘1989’ inspired outfit after leaving NFL game with Taylor Swift

The seemingly endless boxing road for Saul Canelo Alvarez continues in Las Vegas on Saturday night. Alvarez is the boxing wunderkind, turning professional at just fifteen, winning a world title for the first time in 2011 and now, at 33, set to have his 24th world title fight. Alvarez has fought 63 times, the type of number that a champion will simply not repeat in the future. At the T-Mobile Arena, the big house of fights just off the strip but now firmly established as the city’s number one venue, Alvarez defends his four super-middleweight world titles against Jermell Charlo. It is a tricky fight, the latest risk in the long career of the Mexican idol. Charlo holds the four belts at light-middleweight and is naturally the smaller man; he has lost just once in 37 fights, but is smart, slick and fresh. Jermell has an unbeaten twin called Jermall, who holds a middleweight world title and was Alvarez’s first choice. However, Jermall had not fought since 2021, is dealing with a lot of personal issues and had to refuse the offer; Jermell jumped straight in. A fight with Jermall next year will make perfect business sense if Alvarez wins. If he loses, there will be a rematch with Jermell. Every move that Alvarez makes is smart – he is a fighting industry, a man with the ability to demand and receive whatever he wants. Alvarez last fought when he put on a masterclass over the championship distance to beat Islington’s John Ryder in Guadalajara in May. It was a delayed homecoming for Alvarez, a night to enjoy with over 200 members of a mariachi band serenading their fighting icon as he walked to the ring in front of 50,000 devoted fans, all howling under a night sky of stars. Ryder, incidentally, was the eighth British boxer that Alvarez has beaten in world title fights. Charlo is clever enough to create problems for Alvarez, but the weight will be a factor; Alvarez is naturally a stone heavier and on the night in the ring he will be a lot more. Charlo will rely on speed and Alvarez has struggled on occasion with slick movement. Charlo has beaten some quality fighters, but Alvarez poses his own unique problems and simply imagining that some extra lateral movement and fast feet will be enough is a fantasy. “He (Alvarez) makes good fighters do exactly what he wants,” said Joe Gallagher, who took Liam and Callum Smith to fight Alvarez. “He makes really good fighters doubt their own ability.” Alvarez has lost twice in his career; in 2013, Floyd Mayweather was simply too wise, too good and won on points. It was not close. In the first half of 2022, Alvarez jumped back to light-heavyweight, where he had previously won a world title, and was given a surprise boxing lesson by the brilliant Dmitri Bivol. It was an odd fight, and it was obvious that Alvarez had not done his homework. The rematch was expected, but Alvarez has fought twice since and there appears to be no rush to get revenge. Bivol is still waiting and happy to fight Alvarez again; everybody wants to fight Alvarez – he is boxing’s cash cow. There is no doubting that Alvarez is a throwback fighter, a man from a distant time when boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson had 201 fights, Roberto Duran 119 and even Muhammad Ali had 61 fights. There will not be men of that quality with that quantity of fights ever again. Alvarez might just be the last man standing. “He’s a great fighter, but I can beat him,” insisted Charlo. “I know how to beat him. I have the motivation and the skills. He will want a rematch; I know he will. This is my time.” Alvarez is calm, he is always calm before a big fight, and he seems just a bit more focused for this fight. “People have been saying negative things about me for a long time, expecting me to lose in every fight,” he said. “I ignore what they say – this feels different, I’m chasing history.” Alvarez has his place in boxing history secure, he is now chasing greatness and a win against Charlo will add to his legacy. It will not be easy, Charlo is being underestimated, but it will happen and probably against a chorus of screams. Read More Canelo vs Charlo live stream: How to watch fight online and on TV this weekend Canelo Alvarez trainer hits back at ‘sack of potatoes’ sparring partner ahead of Jermell Charlo fight Joe Joyce now faces a harsh truth – he needs protecting from himself Who is fighting on the Canelo vs Charlo undercard? How to watch Canelo vs Charlo online and on TV What time does Canelo vs Charlo start in UK and US?

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Team Renegade, where UFC welterweight champion Leon Edwards trains, has told The Independent that Ian Machado Garry was ‘refused entrance’ to the gym because he did not ‘add to the team’s culture’. The gym’s statement comes after Machado Garry told The Independent last week that he was not allowed back at Team Renegade, where he recently trained with Edwards, due to ‘doubts and insecurities’ in the welterweight champion and his coach. Team Renegade said: “Sometimes the coaches allow fighters to come in from the outside, but this is very much a privilege and not the norm. If the coaches feel it’s not adding to the team’s culture, a fighter is refused entrance. Ian Garry’s more nomadic approach to preparation has given him great results, but it’s not in line with what we are creating at Team Renegade. This has nothing to do with one specific fighter or a specific coach.” Machado Garry, who has trained at numerous gyms in various countries in recent times, is ranked 10th at welterweight in the UFC. The Irishman is unbeaten and will fight former teammate Vicente Luque at UFC 296 on 16 December – on the undercard of Edwards’s title defence against Colby Covington. Machado Garry, who turns 26 in November, said in an interview with The Independent on Friday (27 October): “Leon Edwards, his head coach asked me not to come back to Renegade; told me I’m not allowed to train there. “I have to word this correctly, because I don’t wanna be… Firstly, I wanna put out there that Ash and Tom, who run Renegade… I don’t wanna give any negatives without saying a positive. I don’t want any s*** with any gyms. The guys at Renegade… it was a great energy. Tom and Ash were very welcoming, lovely and nice to me. It was nothing to do with them. “Leon and his head coach had an issue with me training on the mats and recently have asked me not to train there, because, ‘Leon doesn’t want any insecurities or doubts on his own mats, within the gym,’ which I don’t fully understand. “I get that we’re both in the top 10 and you might see me as a threat, but I’m not a threat to you right now; I’m not fighting for the title right now. His coach said the words: ‘Ian is a threat, I cannot have Leon having any doubts or insecurities.’ “That makes me think someone is weak minded and can’t have another contender training on the mat. That’s why gym conflict is annoying. For me, why not have that other elite guy on the mat? Why not train with him? Why not have him push you? Why not learn and grow from each other? “It’s very irritating, because I’m a young fighter who wants to be the best in the world, who wants to train with the best in the world, and Renegade is the best gym in the UK. I went there to learn from the guys around Birmingham and who have essentially proven that it’s the best gym in the UK; I didn’t go there to train with Leon, I went there to train with that gym, because they’re amazing. Now I’m being stopped from going to a gym, because I might potentially fight Leon in 18 months. My attitude is: If that’s the case, why not have this conversation in six months? “I love the guys at Renegade. They’re really nice and welcoming, I rang them beforehand to make sure everything was good. Then, after the second day I was there, they were like: ‘Oh, we can’t have you back, Leon and some of his team don’t want this.’” Edwards won the welterweight title in August 2022 with a stunning head-kick knockout of Kamaru Usman, who had beaten the Jamaican-born Briton on points in 2015. Edwards, 32, then retained the title against Usman in a trilogy bout at UFC 286 in March. Edwards was a decision winner against the Nigerian-American in London. The Independent’s full interview with Machado Garry will be available to read later this week. Click here to subscribe to The Independent’s Sport YouTube channel for all the latest sports videos. Read More UFC’s Ian Garry: ‘Leon Edwards and his coach said I can’t train at their gym anymore’ Ngannou display against Fury the ‘biggest upset in boxing’, claims Hardy When will Conor McGregor return to the UFC? Ngannou display against Fury the ‘biggest upset in boxing’, claims Hardy When will Conor McGregor return to the UFC? The Independent’s pound-for-pound UFC rankings

Chelsea have made progress in talks to sign Moises Caicedo but Brighton are now holding the London club to a demand of £90m basic fee. The Blues would then have to add a further £10m to be made up in bonuses and expected clauses. The saga has continued with little movement throughout the summer, as Chelsea have proven reluctant to go beyond £80m. While Brighton, who rarely deviate from their initial asking price, have seen the nature of the talks revolve around pushing Chelsea to go closer to their valuation. There has now been some breakthrough on the structure of a potential deal though, but the expectation is that the Stamford Bridge hierarchy will eventually have to go further and make a £90m-plus offer. Chelsea are hoping to get it done before Sunday's season opener at home to Liverpool, as Mauricio Pochettino is eager to add more energy to his midfield. Chelsea have meanwhile made a £48m bid for Romeo Lavia, as they hope to beat Liverpool in the race for the the 19-year-old Southampton midfielder. Pochettino may look to partner Enzo Fernandez with Conor Gallagher to take on Jurgen Klopp’s side following a string of departures this summer. The Blues lost N'Golo Kante on a free transfer, Mateo Kovacic joined Manchester City and Ruben Loftus-Cheek signed for AC Milan. Mason Mount, who would ideally not have played so deep for the Blues anyway, joined Manchester United, while Denis Zakaria departed after his loan expired, returning to Juventus. Nonetheless, the Blues have a number of youthful options, with Lesley Ugochukwu signed from Rennes, Carney Chukwuemeka and Andrey Santos, who arrived this summer after returning to Vasco da Gama on loan following a deal to sign the Brazilian in January. Caicedo’s arrival would also allow Fernandez to push further forward and influence the game in the final third. The Argentine World Cup winner swapped the No.5 jersey for the coveted No.8, previously worn by Frank Lampard, this summer. Read More Chelsea make Romeo Lavia bid in attempt to beat Liverpool in transfer race West Ham enter race for Folarin Balogun as Arsenal set transfer price Barcelona explore sensational Neymar return as PSG set price for Brazilian superstar Chelsea make Romeo Lavia bid in attempt to beat Liverpool in transfer race Chelsea confirm Axel Disasi signing to cure defensive woes Chelsea agree deal with Brighton to sign goalkeeper Robert Sanchez

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