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Victoria’s Secret is banking on bombshells all over again.
Over more than 20 years on the runway, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show catapulted the brand into the collective global consciousness, making household names of generations of its Angels while propagating a narrow, male-driven definition of sexy that left little room for diversity. In the face of cultural change and a dwindling audience, the show was canceled in 2019 with the promise that the company would evolve its marketing.
During the next several years it did that, bringing on a spokesperson collective that included Megan Rapinoe and Naomi Osaka and expanding its product offering and size range. In 2023, Victoria’s Secret produced a documentary that attempted to further reframe the dialogue around the brand—via the female gaze of women directors and creators. At the time, director Margot Bowman said, “I see this as an opportunity to create a new set of images that more people can find themselves in.”
In the background, though, the brand faced ongoing scrutiny. Matt Tyrnauer’s Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons documentary, and Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez’s book Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon, trained their spotlights on the company’s wrong turns, from the company’s former owner Les Wexner’s association with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein to its slow realization that it was letting trends pass it by.
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Tonight, the brand changed course again, and brought back the Fashion Show with no little fanfare. Cher, Lisa from Blackpink, and Tyla all performed with backup dancers, and the evening was capped off with fireworks. Its Instagram account declared “The Wait Is Over” as Candace Swanepoel strutted up Fifth Avenue in a black lace bralette, pencil skirt, and gold wings. In another social media clip, Adriana Lima got into a taxi and told the driver, with a lot of emotion in her voice, “I’m going home”—home, meaning the Victoria’s Secret runway.
“A part of our transformation is putting our customer at the center of everything we do, and our customers told us loud and clear that they missed the fashion show. That was the jumping off point,” said Sarah Sylvester, the brand’s executive vice president of marketing. The questions, as Ubers queued in the drop-off line at the Brooklyn Navy Yard location and the crowd mingled outside during a brisk pre-show cocktail hour, was would the show revert to form or would it be a more inclusive, welcoming space? And would the six years between the last runway and this one impact the overall aesthetic? The answers were yes and no.
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High fashion has a mixed record on inclusivity of late. While we see more models over 40, 50, and even 60 on the runways, size diversity efforts have plateaued or backslid, as Vogue Business has reported. Tonight, Kate Moss, Carla Bruni, Eva Herzigova, and Tyra Banks, all of whom are 50 or older, walked the show. Alex Consani and Valentina Sampaio became the first transgender models to appear on the VS runway, which was a sticking point with the former architects of the show. And the brand has never featured more mid-size and plus-size models, though it must be said that the straight-size models looked overwhelmingly slim.
While the cast wasn’t representative of all the ways that you can be a woman, at least it was an improvement over its past. And Bella Hadid made a rare appearance, which the internet loved. Sylvester said the show would reach “over 300 million people on 80 different [social] handles between our own, our partners, and our talent.”
As for the spangly lingerie, the enormous angel wings and their trusses, and the challenging spike heels, according to the brand what’s sexy now looks remarkably like what was sexy then. Speaking on Vogue’s The Run-Through podcast, Chantal Fernandez pointed out that Victoria’s Secret “set the standard that unless you were wearing a molded cup underwire bra you were not dressed for the outside world. And that idea has shifted so much. You see women now going without a bra or they’re wearing a soft cup, non-molded. You want a more natural look.” The campy, showgirl fun had a whiff of nostalgia tonight. If you do want something more natural, or modern, you’ll just have to buy your lingerie somewhere else.
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See more photos from the evening below:
