Vogue | Sexy Isn’t a Look—It’s a Mindset. Three Spring Fashion Collections Helped This Writer Find It

When I was a skinny, shy 10-year-old, my idea of sexy boiled down to one woman: Jessica Rabbit. She was an apparition of hourglass curves and long red hair coiffed like Veronica Lake’s, who worked the room in a sparkling, siren-red dress that seemed practically drawn onto her body. Technically, it was.

The irony that Ms. Rabbit was a cartoon figure sprung from the 1988 film, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” was hardly lost on me once I matured enough to recognize her embodiment of sexy was the stereotypically fantasized kind. It was the sort of sexy that drove men cuckoo, their wide eyes entranced and all awoooooogah, while other women watched on, filled with jealousy or envy. And the younger me fell for it. Jessica Rabbit, the fleet of swimsuit-clad lifeguards on “Baywatch,” Frederique van de Wal and her cohort of lingerie-clad Victoria’s Secret models…they all represented my juvenile understanding of what sexy was, informed by the reactions they elicited from the opposite sex. …

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