On Wednesday night, the Victoria’s Secret fashion show returns for the second time after its much-touted relaunch was met with mixed reviews. This time, it promises to have all the glitz and glam of the old format — a response to criticism that in moving so far away from what it once was, it lost what made it “fun”. In 2025’s fraught cultural context, can it find its place?
Commentators had wondered whether or not the brand would even stage a show in 2025. Internally, there was no question. Adam Selman says it was one of the first things he was asked after joining Victoria’s Secret as SVP and executive creative director in April. “Day two, [the team] was like, what do you want to do with the show?” Selman recalls. “I wanted to tap into joy and playfulness and emotion. I felt like VS as of April was a little serious. I wanted to make it more youthful — not by age, but by spirit.”
There were several learnings from last year’s show. Some commentators (who would rather the Victoria’s Secret of the 2010s carry through to today, unchanged) cried “too much” inclusivity; others critiqued the lack of actual diversity and the tokenisation of plus-size models. Across the board, viewers lamented the lack of fun; the whittling down of the big, bold shows of the past to a sleeker, more boring iteration. Where was the fantasy?
This was the main feedback that Chantal Fernandez, co-author of Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unravelling of an American Icon, heard at the Penn District watch party (which the brand is hosting again this year). Chatting with fellow attendees, she was surprised at the number of young fans who were hoping for something closer to the “campier” shows of the 2010s. “Perhaps last year it took itself a bit too seriously,” Fernandez says, echoing Selman’s read of the company he joined six months ago.
“It had too much of a high fashion angle, and I’m curious to see if this year they have a little more humour with it — a little more costume, a little more Life of a Showgirl, so to speak — and embrace the campiness of it,” she continues. “There’s a younger fan who has seen those edits of the British soldier costume from years past, or Gigi Hadid as a firefighter, and really loved and remembered — and wanted — that.”
It’s this that the team — made up of a flock of new names — is focusing on. Not the firefighter costumes, but the fun. “We’re trying to make this even more sexy, more glamorous, more luxurious than ever,” says chief marketing officer Elizabeth Preis, who was appointed in May. Selman agrees: “It’s the spectacle. It’s supposed to be big, it’s supposed to be fun and we want it to be fast.”
Alongside Preis and Selman is new-ish CEO Hillary Super, who joined just prior to last year’s show from Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty. This year, stylist, art director and photographer Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele is styling the runway, after Emmanuelle Alt, former editor-in-chief of Vogue France, did so last year, while Pat McGrath will be doing the makeup for the first time.
This is the right direction, says Eloise Gendry-Hearn, senior creator specialist at marketing agency The Digital Fairy, who thinks Victoria’s Secret needs a deeper understanding of what consumers used to enjoy about their shows — which, she says, is not the “scarily thin models”, but the OTT, camp viewing events that built out the brand’s visual identity.
Last year, this sense of fun was difficult for VS to achieve, because the brand was still penitent, Fernandez flags, returning to a live show format for the first time since it came under fire in 2018 and 2019 for former executive Ed Razek’s controversial Vogue interview, as well as the exposure of then-owner Leslie Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, respectively. “The brands that are most successful with marketing these days have a sense of humour, and it was hard for Victoria’s Secret to do that for a long time — coming out of this downswing period where they were being more apologetic,” Fernandez says. “It’s hard to be tongue in cheek while trying to be apologetic.”
Fraught times
The brand may be better positioned to lean into humour this time around, but the moment is not without tension.
The rise of conservatism is shifting beauty standards and Ozempic’s reign is in full effect, as ultra-thinness continued to permeate this season’s runways and microdosing GLP-1 drugs is inching towards the norm. In some ways, this aesthetic and cultural shift aligns with the Victoria’s Secret show of old. “In the Ozempic era, with views on inclusivity going through a radical shift, it feels like the stage is set for the VS show to make a return,” Gendry-Hearn says. Nikita Walia, strategy director at brand and venture studio Unnamed, regards the show as a reflection of the broader cultural mood. “We’re in a period of regression,” she says, “conservative politics rising, body norms getting narrower and inclusivity being reframed as an overcorrection.”
But this is also what the show was criticised for in the past.
Fernandez expects that the brand won’t stray too far into conservative territory. “I imagine they don’t want to align themselves politically. They really don’t want to have an American Eagle x Sydney Sweeney moment,” she says. “They want to play both sides and keep it more neutral.” This is tricky, Fernandez notes, but views the brand’s embrace of models beyond the ultra-skinny as a reflection of leaning somewhat away from the mood (and the skinniness) of the moment. The exclusion of larger sizes is, after all, bad for sales.
And Victoria’s Secret needs sales. During a turbulent seven years, performance has fluctuated, as newer brands — most notably Skims — continue to vie for market share. While Victoria’s Secret beat analyst expectations in the most recent quarter, growth was at a mere 4 per cent. The brand would do well to expand its sizing beyond XXL. (It currently partners with intimate brands who offer extended sizes on its website, the brand flags, and says it is “constantly evolving and innovating” its collections.)
Victoria’s Secret executives are tight-lipped about this year’s talent, beyond promising some OGs and newness. Selman says he wants to work with those “in the zeitgeist and the cultural conversation”. Regarding size inclusivity, he points to his own work. “I do have a history of being very inclusive and diverse and I’m not going to lose that,” Selman promises. A nod to his time at Fenty? “That’s an important part of it, [but] I don’t want to ever be heavy-handed about that either — I don’t want to tick boxes.”
Talent announced prior to the show includes veterans Lily Aldridge, Adriana Lima and Candice Swanepoel; returning from 2024 are Alex Consani and Paloma Elsesser; while first-timers include influencer Quenlin Blackwell, actor Barbie Ferreira and basketball player Angel Reese.
Old look, new values?
This time around, the brand is looking to balance nostalgia with forward-looking innovation, execs say. In doing so, can Victoria’s Secret gain favour with new audiences while appeasing existing fans?
Both Preis and Selman discuss the balance of speaking to these existing customers, while inviting in new audiences — some of whom, they say, may have shopped the brand in the past, but took a pause in recent years. “We’re seeing quite an interesting resurgence in customers coming back to us,” Preis says. While embracing the old look, there will be more variation in the show, Selman promises. “We have amazing innovation, we have solution-based products, but then we also have really sexy, glitzy fashion lingerie as well,” he says, adding that the aim is to showcase the entire range.
In 2025, the glitz will be front and centre. After nixing Victoria’s Secret Angels in 2021 — and replacing them with the ostensibly more diverse VS Collective — the Angels will be back, in some form. “We are looking at all of the elements of our brand — Angels being one of them — and thinking about how we transform them to better reflect our customer that we have now, and the customers we want to bring to the brand,” says Preis.
It begs the question: does everything need to be re-hashed? In Walia’s view, the Angel may be too loaded to be reborn. “It’s a symbol of a very specific, very exclusionary fantasy: disciplined, thin, hyper-feminine. You can diversify the cast, but you can’t diversify the mythology,” she says. “They could dimensionalise the Angel to be something beyond a single aesthetic fantasy, and perhaps that would evolve the idea.”
The latter is Selman’s goal. “The idea of angels and wings are synonymous to the brand, so it would be insane to leave that to someone else,” he says. “We’re reclaiming [and recontextualising] that. It’s not about the wings defining her, it’s about her deciding where she wants to take her wings and how she wants to wear them.”
Ana Andjelic, author and brand executive who wrote about Victoria’s Secret in a recent edition of her The Sociology of Business newsletter, believes this all-out embrace of ‘confidence is sexy’ is dated. “This is so 2010 — we know that, we’ve been there,” she says of the brand’s ‘championing all women’ messaging. “It’s not enough to say, ‘You have your own sexy, your wings are going to take you wherever you want’. Tell me where.”
Ironically, to establish this specificity, Fernandez sees value in looking to the VS early days. “One of the most surprising things that I discovered writing the book is that Victoria’s Secret had shown different ways to be sexy — different to the aesthetics of the brand I grew up with,” she says. She describes a very different Victoria’s Secret pre-2000s, before the brand became “MTV-ised”. The Victoria’s Secret team used to have an internal ‘Wheel of Sexy’, with different adjectives it aimed to reflect through its marketing and designs. “Over time, the slices of the pie got less and less.” Can the new team widen it back out?
Selman is thinking along these lines — looking back not just 10 or 15 years, but further. “I’m really thinking about this as a true house, like a maison,” he says, having pored over old VS catalogues. “Victoria’s Secret has been around for 50 years. We have an incredibly rich history and we have amazing stories to tell.”
The trick will be whether the brand can convincingly embrace all the glitz and glam of the recent past, while offering a desirable product that young consumers want to buy into. “It will be difficult for them to carve a reinvigorated profile that attracts attention from a new customer, without alienating the die-hard VS fans that have bought into their girly wonderland,” Gendry-Hearn says.
A starting point
The show is, of course, not the end game, and execs are aware that they need to regain mindshare beyond this one moment. “The point is to get people to think about the brand, connect with the brand, and then get them to the store,” Selman says.
Preis references a recent collaboration between Victoria’s Secret sub-brand Pink and fashion label LoveShackFancy as an example of efforts to drum up conversation. “We really are thinking about ways that we can get in front of new audiences,” she says. For Selman’s part, he wants to pull back the curtain and inject more storytelling from inside the company into the brand’s communications. “I hope you start to see that throughout the year, of how we can start telling different stories and why we do what we do,” he says.
What’s lacking alongside more buzzy moments is a cohesive brand vision, Andjelic says. She argues that the brand’s aesthetic across advertisements, stores, socials, website and product is fractured and largely unchanged from 10 years ago.
When it comes to the brand vision, Selman’s goal is for customers to be able to close their eyes and immediately see Victoria’s Secret. He rattles off the design codes: lace, sparkles and the brand flower (a peony), alongside the wings. He’s also mulling what it might look like beyond the bedroom. With the lingerie dressing trend in mind, Selman hopes that those watching will think about how to style the look while out and about. “Hopefully, we can start delivering that next year with actual product as well,” he adds, referencing slip skirts and bras with cardigans over the top as possible developments.
Step one is Wednesday’s show, where Selman hopes viewers will establish a connection with a brand they may once have loved. “I want them to look at us in a modern way. I want them to know that we still have an amazing heritage and we’re not leaving…” he starts, before pausing. “We’re definitely leaving some things behind, but we’re also taking the best with us. I want people to want to be more involved and to think about us more.”
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