Michaela Stark’s hometown in Brisbane, Australia is more than 9,000 miles away from Victoria’s Secret headquarters in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, but it came with its own connection to the intimates juggernaut.
“Miranda Kerr, one of the past Victoria’s Secret Angels, went to my high school. It felt like a connection to the Victoria’s Secret shows,” the designer and model says. “I remember being like 14 and having sleepovers at my friends’ houses and watching the shows. We’d get so excited and so drawn into the fantasy of it—the wings, and the whole atmosphere of the show.”
But the associations also came with a serious implication. “You’d watch it and then the day after, you’d be like, ‘Oh my God, I have to diet I have to look like these girls,’” she says. “Miranda was like the pinnacle of beauty at my school.”
Stark was initially uneasy when she was approached by Victoria’s Secret to join the “VS20,” a group of artists from across the globe tasked with reimagining the lingerie company’s fashion show. The part-documentary, part-fashion show features artists from four different cities: Tokyo, Lagos, Bogotá, and London, where Stark is based.
For the show, Stark made three custom couture looks for herself and models Jade O Belle and Ceval. Together, the three resemble fairies. Stark donned a pair of pink wings that double as an oversized bow, which she paired with a lace and ribbon train. Her corset, whose cups have a lace-up element that forces the wearer’s breasts to spill out, is complete with a pair of beaded belly chains and matching beaded panties, embellished with flowers and butterflies. Jade O Belle wore a white corset and underwear with lavender detailing, and Ceval wore a green and yellow ruffly number. While each of the VS20 brought their own vision to the table—from silky slips to spiderweb knits—Stark was the only one to approach the human form in an avant-garde way, where the body itself is just as crucial to the final product as the clothing.
“My initial feeling was skepticism. But as I got more involved, I got more and more excited that I felt like it was truly a project where I was able to take my own vision for my own work,” she says. But the experience became something healing for Stark, who has struggled with body dysmorphia. “It was almost therapeutic in that sense because I was literally using these clothes that were an emblem of beauty standards to liberate the body,” she says.
Stark’s work is a far cry from the stereotype of ultra-thin models strutting in angel wings and bras embellished with millions of dollars worth of precious gems. Instead, she plays with the human body, contorting models (and often herself) so that their chests and stomachs overflow from the garments. Stark’s art captures a feeling of extreme discomfort, a hyperbolized version of what she experienced as a young teenager. “I remember putting on clothes and feeling like nothing fit right, and it would all cut into me, and as I started to go through puberty, a boob would literally fall out, or my stomach would come out.”
Stark aims to turn that feeling on its head with her art. “Through my work now, I actually have taken on that exact feeling of feeling super uncomfortable in my own skin and feeling like everything’s popping out in the wrong way, and I’ve made clothes and imagery that literally represents that exact feeling, but I’ve tried to make it beautiful, and delicate and very feminine,” she says. “It twists my mind around to saying like, ‘There’s actually nothing wrong with like, if the clothes don’t fit you like that’s actually quite normal.’”
There is a thread of fantasy that runs through both new and old iterations of Victoria’s Secret, something that Stark latched onto during her design process. She acknowledges that the “dream girl” illusion is something that fueled body dysmorphia in young women and girls, so when it came to her own interpretation, Stark focused on what the angels were wearing rather than what they looked like.
“I tried to take the fantasy element of the brand and what made the brand so fun, and what made young women across the world really want to engage with it,” she says. “So I had this idea to bring back the wings into the show and use them as an emblem of Victoria’s Secret, an emblem of fantasy, and emblem of this idea of the angels.” Stark got to spend two days in the brand’s archive, trying on wings and taking inspiration for her creation. She wound up with an enormous pink bow with periwinkle trim that doubled as a pair of angel wings.
But some of the Victoria’s Secret fans are unable to accept the label’s new direction. Since the brand released imagery of her creations, Stark has been subject to much hate online, most of it fatphobic vitriol. She received thousands of negative comments, and even had her personal Instagram account deleted.
“This was an entire new level of crazy, where [trolls] quite literally acted as a collective to take down my socials—and effectively my voice as an artist—because they can’t handle my body,” she wrote on her since-recovered Instagram account. “I am quite shook by the response, and felt it needed to be addressed because it proves why this kind of work is important. It’s horrendous to see people’s anger over our bodies, and it’s even more horrendous to see people backing up the old idea of the angel, as if that didn’t cause a generation of body issues and dysmorphia.”
It’s clear that the thousands of angry Victoria’s Secret fans and trolls alike are missing the pure intentions of Stark’s work. “[It is] just to simply show the beauty of women of all sizes—trans and plus size—doesn’t necessarily have to it is a political thing,” she says. “But it can also just be like, ‘Look at how beautiful these women are.’”
