A Sex Metaphor, by Victoria's Secret

February 5, 1999

A Sex Metaphor, by Victoria's Secret

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

aybe this is really what sex is all about.
Squinting at a commemorative-stamp-size picture sent through cyberspace by the much-hyped Victoria's Secret's fashion show on Wednesday night, one could make out a bit of flesh peeking above a strip of lacy red. Then the image jerkily churned into a smear of ocher and burgundy: it looked as if a sheet had been pulled out of a copier too soon. And of course there was the inimitable sound: an otherworldly groan slipping into garbled murmurs, then violently erupting with hints of Carl Orff, house music and nightclub bacchanals gone bad.

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Ah, the glories of Internet broadcasts! So sexual in their teasing incompleteness, their unpredictable tumescences, their latex-garbed sound! In a few years, with appropriate advances in speed and data processing, the Web will provide an experience as seamlessly Lycra-like as television; it may even replace television. But in the meantime, most Internet connections allow only stuttering moving images to be seen in tiny windows. Thousands of dollars of silicon and software are proudly used to present bottled-sounding radio broadcasts, stop-and-start film clips and even a thumb-size video version of the President's grand jury testimony.
It looks as if the Victoria's Secret enterprise has eclipsed all events that have ever been broadcast exclusively on the Internet. According to the company that provided access, Broadcast.com, there were more than two million attempts to log on to the show, its previews and its reruns on Wednesday evening, exceeding the audiences for some television broadcasts. Access was often clogged and transmissions distorted even beyond low Internet standards, but it hardly mattered. Peering through that small, smudged window on the computer screen almost made one feel like Jimmy Stewart gazing across the courtyard with oversize binoculars in "Rear Window."
That may have been part of the point. Maybe the folks at Victoria's Secret knew precisely what they were doing when they spent $5 million promoting the live Webcast of their "Spring Fashion Show" at Cipriani's on Wall Street. This mail-order and mall-staple company spent three years designing its Web site (www.victoriassecret.com), which comes with sample videos and an interactive bra salon. The company's $1.5 million Super Bowl commercial led to a million visits to their Web site within an hour.
Those visitors were more than voyeurs: daily sales doubled or tripled. Then came the full-page ads for Wednesday's Webcast in national newspapers, including The New York Times, promising a high-toned coupling of high tech and high fashion along with a "seat on the virtual runway." There was even a bit of foreplay: pink ribbons were displayed at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday; Stephanie Seymour, one of the catalogue's stars, rang the closing bell. A seat on the exchange, a seat on the runway, a seat at the computer: money, sex and technology in happy communion.

A Webcast so teasing and unpredictable it could have been a tryst.

The 20-minute clip is now archived and is available for continuing visits, but why such a fuss in the first place? What was the appeal of high tech and high fashion when the Web already offers so much high tech and low fashion? Why turn to barely visible images of models in white teddies, when G-strings and bras are so quickly shed on other Web sites?
Well, there is the obvious: we are obsessed with undergarments -- they certainly played fascinating props in the current drama in Washington -- and the Web, catering to popular taste, is right at home with such matters. The medium has met the message: delay, provocation, unpredictability, furtive flickers of something hidden -- these elements of the Webcast are also part of the appeal of Victoria's Secret.
Gazing at this Webcast was like watching a striptease through a keyhole, catching glimpses of a fuller world that one squints at, trying to imagine in fleshy glory. Even the fashion show's camera work -- jumpy, skewed, jarringly shifting perspective -- never let the gaze settle too clearly on anything. This Webcast was, like so much else, media lingerie: teasing garb for an event one could only dream about. With all its awkward crudities, it kept a Web audience captivated as people hit the reload button on their browsers hoping to see through or past or under or beyond. Sex as partial disclosure: sounds like Victoria's secret.
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A Webcast so teasing and unpredictable it could have been a tryst.