We were Victoria’s Secret models — everything you saw was fake
They’re spilling secrets.
Jasmine Tookes, 32, and Josephine Skriver, 30, graced Victoria’s Secret catalogs for years — but even they could not recognize themselves at times while looking at their own images.
The two models recently opened up on the Real Pod podcast about their experiences as Victoria’s Secret Angels, delving into the reality of the industry and social media’s role in authenticating the fantasy.
When asked if they understood their impact on other women and society in the moment, Skriver replied, “It was a weird time because you realize you were getting a massive amount of eyes looking at you. You understood that with VS.”
“But we got signed right when social media exploded too, so it was this combination of everyone’s gonna know you for this glamorous side, like it takes two and a half hours in hair and makeup, personal trainers, this whole situation. Yet you now have the ability of taking them behind the scenes and showing them the more real you,” she added.
Skriver, who hails from Denmark, noted that it felt like people became obsessed with them and every detail of their lives overnight due to social media.
“Like they wanted to know what kind of toothpaste I used and I was like, ‘Really? That just seems boring,’” she recalled.
She said she wanted to show on social media how much time and effort went into maintaining her figure and being a model, even as the public assumed it was all so effortless.
Tookes admitted that she still sees Instagram comments “every day” from fans claiming that she’s “always so put together” and “so perfect,” but emphasizes that Instagram is just one version of herself.
“If you saw me waking up in the morning in my house, the middle of the day, walking around with spit up all over me from the baby, no makeup on, that’s my real life,” said Tookes, who gave birth to a daughter in February.
As the conversation continued, Skriver confessed that being fully immersed in the modeling world led her to assume that everyone knew that the images were “all fake,” featuring “a full costume” of body makeup and retouched to the point where the models barely resembled themselves.
Tookes agreed, explaining that people not realizing how edited the photos were “is so crazy because to me it’s so obvious when you look back at our old VS campaigns.”
Skriver went so far as to say that strangers and those closest to her struggled to recognize her in some photos.
“I would stand next to the big billboards on the street, and I could stand there for 30 minutes and not a single person could put the two people together,” she shared.
“I’m like, ‘I don’t even look like my pictures.’ Sometimes my mom would be like, ‘Is that you? I didn’t even know you could look like this.’”
In recent years, other stars have revealed the realities of being a top model in the early aughts.
Victoria’s Secret, meanwhile, has skipped its annual fashion show beginning in 2019, as viewership and earnings sunk during the #MeToo movement and other cultural reckonings, but recently unveiled plans for a “new version” of the once-popular show.
