How did we know? In the months-long lead-up to the event, street posters, a zine and social media posts announced “WE ARE BACK”. That evening, golf carts printed with “WE ARE BACK” darted around the Brooklyn Navy Yard, ferrying models, influencers and guests from one building to another. The drivers were dressed in sweatshirts with “WE ARE BACK” down the sleeve.
Back from where? From woke purgatory, perhaps. Tuesday’s show was the first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show since 2018, after a string of controversies - including the relationship between its then-owner, L Brands chief Les Wexner, and his longtime money manager Jeffrey Epstein - and declining sales led to the show’s cancellation in 2019. The following year, the New York Times published an exposé detailing harassment within the lingerie company.
In 2021, Victoria’s Secret was spun off from L Brands; Wexner has publicly denied awareness of Epstein’s sins. Last year, the brand offered “The Tour”, an earthier, feminist-lite event that showcased the kinds of models, including plus-size and trans women, who were essentially banned from earlier shows, wearing clothes (not quite lingerie) by four international up-and-coming designers. (“The Tour” later streamed on Prime Video.) If that was an unsubtle attempt to pander to contemporary cultural mores, social media fans were dissatisfied with its pivot away from cheesecake, blockbuster femininity. “The Victoria’s Secret Show Could’ve Been an Email,” The Cut jeered.
Adriana Lima wearing a pink plaid monstrosity. Photo / Jonas Gustavsson
Tuesday’s show was like a tragic-comic parable about an angelic figure who makes a deal with the devil for one last night of freedom, only to find the compromise means her dream takes on a flimsy, nightmarish quality. It had all the features of those suburban haunted houses advertised on the New Jersey Turnpike: fog machines and their glycerin bouquets; women in wonky animatronic costumes; groups of people in black pleather leggings doing intimidating dances; and supernatural humans covered in oil and walking herky-jerky zombie-style, including one shouldering a creepy clown-like appendage that read “VICTORIA’S SECRET” in a balloon-animal typeface that put the curse in cursive.
Original Victoria’s Secret models such as Doutzen Kroes and Adriana Lima (wearing a pink plaid bodysuit that not even Gwen Stefani in her most deluded Harajuku Girl era would have put on) hobbled in impossible shoes, some with their toes clawing out from the fronts of their stilettos, gripping desperately at the firm ground beneath them. Remember, these are the best models in the world, women I’ve seen work spray-on dresses, tiny scrims of fabric and a lifelike lion’s head. Scary!!! There were people or ideas you thought were practically dead - Carla Bruni’s modelling career, Tyra Banks as a girl power icon - brought back to life, but looking a bit off.
Cher. CHER! Photo / Jonas Gustavsson
Three platforms that rose from beneath the stage brought us the pop star Lisa on a motorcycle, Gigi Hadid in saccharine pink wings that wrenched violently up and down, and Ashley Graham, then made them disappear. (Women, served on a platter, then swallowed whole, wheeee!)
There were far too many women who have dated Leonardo DiCaprio, all in one place. (In Eric Adams’s New York, isn’t that some kind of fire-code violation?)
The styling prowess of former French Vogue editor Emmanuelle Alt, known for her down-to-earth skinny jeans and stiletto boots, was imperceptible. Of course, the clothes - well, “clothes” - were never the point. Think about Godiva, another mall staple: you went because it was there, right between Victoria’s Secret and Sephora, not because it was good. But nearly every garment looked so uncomfortable, like costumes made by children out of construction paper and twine.
Bella Hadid in the kind of gargantuan cape that every woman should don to seduce her lover. Photo / Jonas Gustavsson
The one bright spot was Cher, wearing sparkly cargo pants, singing Believe. By the end, Banks emerged on that platform and seesawed down the runway in leggings and a corset, swinging her cape around like a shot putter winding up for the throw as pale pink confetti rained down from the ceiling.
Wait a minute, you’re probably thinking: didn’t we say goodbye to all this un-feminist female objectification? And is Victoria’s Secret rebranding again?
This show was more of a de-branding. “Rebrands are sort of the new ‘collab’,” said Bramble Trionfo, a creative director who has worked with Savage x Fenty, Rihanna’s body-positive challenger to Victoria’s Secret, as well as Schiaparelli, Supreme and Claire’s. “These brands are spending a ton of money to ‘rebrand’, and they’re changing nothing. So, really, all it is is an aesthetic facelift.
“It’s a way to get attention,” Trionfo continued, “and it’s a way to not lose your existing customer.”
Even Kate Moss came to play! Photo / Jonas Gustavsson
For all its issues, Victoria’s Secret is still the American behemoth when it comes to lingerie: Skims, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear start-up valued at US$4 billion ($6.6b) as of 2023, has only five stores to Victoria’s Secret’s nearly 1500. (Many Skims products are made in the same factories as Victoria’s Secret’s.)But the company is certainly not at its cultural peak of the 1990s and 2000s, when it had a vice-grip on women’s minds and lingerie drawers and defined the American ideal of sexuality.
A new exposé, Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon, tracks its downfall, but authors Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez seem to conclude that, despite its troubles, Victoria’s Secret will continue to huff onward. And most customers either alreadyknow the dubious history or, more likely, simply do not care.
“I find them ironically accessible,” said Magdalene J Taylor, a writer and critic who focuses on sexuality. “I’ve long thought that their products were passable, maybe slightly overpriced for what they are. But Victoria’s Secret is kind of the only option for a lot of women for an in-person shopping experience unless you’re lucky to have a [lingerie] boutique near you.”
Live, laugh, lug around a pair of angel wings on a too-big runway. Photo / Jonas Gustavsson
And, crucially, many women feel that what the brand represents is not sexiness but something else: escapism. As Sherman and Fernandez write, the brand’s catalogues and fashion shows promoted a homogenous vision of the spiced-up cisgender committed relationship.
“The original Victoria’s Secret Angel look was meant to be more beautiful than it is sexy: this Apollonian ideal of beauty and goodness rather than the human Dionysian sexy,” Taylor said. “Victoria’s Secret beauty is very much associated with ideas of perfection and an inhuman angel quality. Sexy, to me, has a more human, lived element to it.”
“It’s not about sex,” Trionfo said. “These girls aren’t [having sex]. And that’s part of the appeal. That’s why they’re called Angels. They still get to keep their innocence.”
Irina Shayk (left), Josephine Skriver, Taylor Hill and Jasmine Tookes triumphantly take the runway during the finale of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Photo / Jonas Gustavsson
This show sought to pitch those old-fashioned ideas as fresh female empowerment. A voice-over promised that the show was “where women take the reins and the spotlight” and encouraged us to “clap, cheer, be loud and proud”. Cheers erupted, though it was unclear whether these were genuine - from an audience of several hundred influencer-types in chintzy cocktail dresses and slightly sweaty suit guys - or piped in.
But this was simply window dressing. And, in truth, many people are reluctant to say goodbye to the values Victoria’s Secret represented in its prime. “If you look at pop culture, everything that we are liking right now is stuff we’re not supposed to like,” Trionfo said. Pop stars are blond, thin White women, such as Sabrina Carpenter (who wears Victoria’s Secret on her current tour) and Taylor Swift. And the closest thing we’ve got to the next Oprah is another thin blonde, the podcaster Alex Cooper, who got more time with Vice-President Kamala Harris than most traditional media outlets.
“We’re not supposed to be into these cookie-cutter things, but we’re eating them with the biggest spoon,” Trionfo said. “And that’s what Victoria’s Secret is giving us: something that we are really scared to want, to desire, that we’re really scared to like. But we want it. We just do.
“We grew up with the Victoria’s Secret Angel,” Trionfo continued. “That was our standard. Then Kim [Kardashian] came along, and Kim changed our entire beauty standard. But now Ozempic came along.” The standard is now “fuzzy, and it’s confusing”.
“Victoria’s Secret’s authentic truth is being super thin and walking down a runway and being objectified by men,” said Tariro Makoni, a creative strategist who works with beauty brands. “The reason why true authenticity sells is because it’s willing to exclude a population. And that excluded population has the choice to find it aspirational that they’re being excluded, or not.”
If Tuesday’s runway nodded toward diversity of female beauty in terms of body type, it also told a singular story: one of bad lingerie, of wannabe-hot clothes that hobble the human body, of a certain cheapness that feels so American that it’s practically patriotic. Maybe in America, we just don’t know how to be sexy. And maybe we don’t want to be.
