Why a struggling Victoria’s Secret pulled from its old playbook for its new fashion show

As the pink lights dimmed, signaling the start of the 2024 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard earlier this week, the voice of Tyra Banks filled the room. The former America’s Next Top Model host—a mainstay of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues and a frequent wearer of Victoria’s Secret angel wings back in the lingerie brand’s early-aughts heyday—announced to the waiting crowd, “Tonight, on the runway, it’s all about the women.”

The runway show, Victoria’s Secret’s first since 2018, was an attempt to recapture the brand’s former glory. Banks was back on the runway—in a black bustier, sparkly leggings, and a silver cape—as were other original “angels,” including Candice Swanepoel and Adriana Lima, and more recent ones including Gigi and Bella Hadid. But the show also made contemporary nods to inclusivity. It cast a handful of plus-size models, such as Ashley Graham, and had Alex Consani and Valentina Sampaio, who are both transgender, walk the runway. Kate Moss (50) and Carla Bruni (56), meanwhile, provided age diversity. 

The show—which streamed on Amazon Prime Video and YouTube and reverberated across social media, thanks to the savvy model castings and performances by Cher, Tyla, and Black Pink’s Lisa—was engineered to be the triumphant return of Victoria’s Secret after years in the wilderness. The brand spun off into its own company three years ago and, in August, got a new CEO: Hillary Super, from rival lingerie brand Savage X Fenty. As Banks declared, Victoria’s Secret wanted to frame itself—and the show—as by and for women.

Life After Les

The brand’s feminist positioning for the runway show was a little more honest than it had been during the previous iterations. The last Victoria’s Secret show took place when the company was still owned by L Brands and under the tight control of then chairman and CEO, Les Wexner. Under Wexner, the brand projected a particularly restrictive blend of sex, fantasy, and femininity to the world, especially via its hit fashion shows, where lithe supermodels would strut the runway in strips of fabric and wings, accompanied by performances from the likes Justin Beiber, Taylor Swift, and The Weeknd. 

Behind the scenes, the company was a stew of workplace toxicity, and worse. Wexner had a close relationship with billionaire and criminal Jeffrey Epstein, who had served as his money manager and attorney, while reportedly using his affiliation with Victoria’s Secret to coerce, assault, and traffic young women. Epstein passed away in prison in 2019, and Wexner stepped down from L Brands in 2020. That same year, longtime chief marketing officer and Victoria’s Secret fashion show architect Ed Razek resigned after commenting in a Vogue interview that the company would not cast plus-size or transgender models on the runway because “the show is intended to be a fantasy.” The New York Times later reported that Razek was responsible for a widespread culture of bullying, harassment, and sexual misconduct at the company.

In 2021, Victoria’s Secret tore out the seams. It spun off from L Brands to become an independent company (Wexner sold his majority stake and holds no shares of the new company), and instead of using models like Alessandra Ambrosio and Adriana Lima as spokespeople, it tapped soccer player Megan Rapinoe, tennis star Naomi Osaka, and actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas. Sales perked up—momentarily—then plunged. In 2023, the brand made $6.2 billion, down roughly 20% from the $7.5 billion it took in in 2020. For the first six months of 2024, earnings are down 2% year-over-year. 

So last year, the company hit Ctrl+Z, and went back to selling aspiration and fantasy while trying to hold only whatever goodwill it had generated from its more inclusive campaigns. It largely started using well-known models in its marketing. And it made plans to relaunch the show. “Our customer was very clear that they missed the iconic show,” says Sarah Sylvester, vice president of brand marketing for Victoria’s Secret, who has been with the company since 2005. She says the company wanted to find a way to “empower and uplift women and their voices.”  

Secret Shoppers

What motivates the company’s target shopper—millennials and Zoomers—is harder to discern. In the years since the last Victoria’s Secret show, the body positivity movement (along with Me Too) unended the fashion industry. So while Victoria’s Secret was on hiatus, Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty brand held its own runway shows, which captured the zeitgeist with elaborate sets, innovative choreography from Parris Goebel, and models and performers who embodied racial diversity and body inclusivity. (The last Savage X Fenty show was in 2022, but Rihanna has teased that she’s considering a comeback show as well.) 

Victoria’s Secret took a page—and a CEO—from Savage X Fenty for this week’s show, but many social media watchers saw it as performative: an attempt to retrofit the older, iconic format with some diverse models, but the same old emphasis on rail-thin bodies.

Graham has been on a media tour explaining that she wanted to work with Victoria’s Secret after executives pledged to her that the company was trying to make products with more inclusive sizing. “When I talked to the head of Victoria’s Secret and they ensured me that their hope and their plan is to have extended sizes, I said yes so that there could be more women that could see themselves represented on the runway because we did not see that during Fashion Month,” Graham told People before the show. But Victoria’s Secret still offers only a small collection of underwear in extended sizing. Savage X Fenty and Skims, meanwhile, have offered a full range of sizes since the brands’ debuts in 2018.

A lot of the promotion for the show—New York City taxi toppers, a Bryant Park subway station takeover, and social media posts of backstage tidbits shared by models—was similar to previous years, with a few key changes. Gone are the “Train Like an Angel” videos where models would describe their ultra-restrictive diets and workout routines ahead of the show. Instead, Sylvester says the company tried to show more unpolished behind-the-scenes clips, most of which seemed to be of models getting their makeup done.

“We are letting the models come as their true selves. If some people are deciding to work out [ahead of the show], great for them. If they don’t, whatever makes them feel comfortable on the runway,” Sylvester explained, a few days before the show. “What they eat and what they’re wearing is such a small part of who they are. We really like the idea of sharing more about who they are as women. They’re mothers and they’re entrepreneurs; modeling is just one part of who they are and what they do.” 

PJs and wings

While in previous years, models often wore kitschy costumes—campy takes on leprechauns, cheerleaders, or Snow White, for instance—this year, every outfit (aside from the wings) was shoppable. There were also live links to the products on social media streams. The Swarovski-embroidered fantasy bra, a hallmark of past shows, was also gone (presumably because it’s not shoppable). Sylvester says that the company made a point of showcasing a wider—and perhaps, more approachable—range of clothes. One model, she notes, walked the runway in pajama bottoms, a first for Victoria’s Secret. Never mind that a pink thong peaked out of the pants, and they were paired with a bra and wings.  

Sylvester says the company surveyed consumers to see what they wanted: “We heard a lot of people really love the show, they just wanted it to be a little bit more modern.” The word “modern,” she adds, “is kind of fun because that left it up for us to interpret.” 

It seems like the company is still working on what modern means. “[The show] is really all about women and empowering them, and [that] it’s okay to be sexy and have fun, whatever that means to you,” Sylvester says. 

Victoria’s Secret stores have also been “modernized” in recent months with mannequins in different sizes and tech-enabled dressing rooms. In contrast to the dim boudoir atmosphere that previously existed there, the Victoria’s Secret in Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal now has brighter lights. For a brief period of time, the walls displayed photos of Naomi Osaka and Megan Rapinoe. Now, a thin Gigi Hadid wears a bikini in the window—just like she did in 2018.