The lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret is giving itself the ultimate makeover. It’s shedding its signature sexy fashion show, replacing its Angels with diverse ambassadors and ditching the tanned fantasy of thin models thrilled to wink at their audience of gawping men. It’s also overhauling its marketing campaigns with more diverse models, reworking the store layouts to include a wider range of sizes and launching a new line of mastectomy bras. The effort is part of a larger strategy to make the company more relevant to women in an era where sexy and sexual objectification have been rejected.
A decade ago, Victoria’s Secret was one of the biggest names in lingerie and, with its annual fashion show, was at the center of the “body positive” movement (a belief system that encourages self-acceptance regardless of body size). But the company lost its luster in the late 2010s after multiple controversies. A leaked recording of then-chief executive Ed Razek complaining about the use of plus-size models and a backlash against the brand’s refusal to add more diversity to its lingerie offerings made it clear that VS wasn’t changing with the times.
In 2022, the privately owned company was facing declining sales and a public backlash over ties between founder Leslie Wexner and sexual assault advocate Jeffrey Epstein. It decided to jettison the lingerie show, revamp its product line and swapped out its iconic supermodel Angels for a group of activists and entrepreneurs such as Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Naomi Campbell and soccer star Megan Rapinoe. It also released a three-part documentary series on Hulu called “Victoria’s Secret: The Truth Behind the Lingerie Show” that shook up the company’s image.
But the effort wasn’t enough, and same-store sales continued to fall. Last year, the company fired Razek and named John Mehas as CEO in an attempt to turn things around.
Mehas has been on the job for just over a year now, and he has big challenges ahead. The first major test will be the upcoming fashion show, which airs on Sept. 26, less than a month after the release of the documentary. The televised show is typically a sexy spectacle, featuring a troupe of sexy models sporting the latest collection in lingerie and surrounded by otherworldly sets with pink lights and a slew of dancers.
But there’s been a lot of criticism in recent years that the VS fashion shows have become a reductive parade of quasi soft porn and impossible beauty standards. The company has attempted to address this with the launch of a series of arty-looking campaigns that focus on activism and diversity, including disabled, transgender and plus-size models.
The upcoming show will be a crucial litmus test for Mehas. The company will likely have to do a bit of inclusivity-washing (including some diversity for the sake of it) but it will also need to ensure that any new model is well-cast and represents the brand’s new image. If the brand can successfully pull it off, the reimagined fashion show could be the start of a long-overdue comeback.