Victoria’s Secret’s fashion show was supposed to usher in what chief executive Hillary Super called a "new era of sexy" after struggling to earn profit for years now.
Leading up to the 2025 event, Super, who’s been in the job for just over a year, described this new epoch as "very nuanced" and said the company had been debating internally what it means to be a "modern Angel" — the phrase it uses for the models who are the face — and body of the brand.
And there were models of all different sizes and skin tones. There was a transgender model and a nine-month pregnant model, who opened the show. There was WNBA star Angel Reese and Olympic gymnast Suni Lee on the catwalk, and musical performances from an all-female lineup of Missy Elliott, Karol G, members of the K-pop group TWICE and Madison Beer.
However, the main attraction and central to the VS business model remain the same as it ever was: near-naked sexy, slim women strutting up and down a runway. The new era of sexy looks pretty much just like the old. There was nothing nuanced about it.
In the recent past, Victoria’s Secret has tried to cloak the brand in female empowerment — a tactic used to rehabilitate its image after finding itself on the wrong side of the reckoning ushered in by the #MeToo movement.
VS roots were too deeply enmeshed with retrograde ideas about women to convince anyone that it really changed and accomodated woke ideas.
This year, there’s no need to pretend. The cultural U-turn that started with the anti-woke backlash of the early 2020s is now complete: What was taboo a few short years ago is admissible again. Back in fashion are outlandish standards of female beauty and traditional gender norms – tropes that companies like Victoria’s Secret helped create and perpetuate.
Marketing reflects the national mood. And that mood is now all about sexy chatbots and tradwives and facelifts for everyone. In corporate America, it’s the rollback of DEI policies and the widening of the gender pay gap. In Washington, it’s regressive gender policies and conservative girl makeup and a president who has reportedly said he likes the women who work for him to "dress like women."
It’s all manifesting in a return to hot-girl advertising on our social media feeds and TV screens. Sydney Sweeney, in a throwback to Brooke Shields’ 1980 Calvin Klein campaign, is writhing around in jeans for American Eagle Outfitters. Fast-food chain Carl’s Jr. had skimpily clad social media influencer Alix Earle peddling burgers in its Super Bowl ad.
"A commercial with a hot girl talking about hangovers and burgers! It feels like the 90’s again! The world is healing!!!" wrote one YouTube commenter.
It feels like we are living through a cultural reboot that’s trying to evoke nostalgia for a simpler time. But a good reboot feels modern and fresh; it builds on the original and is willing to grapple with its place in the past.
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