Victoria’s Secret could do with one hell of a rebrand

The lingerie giant is back with a new philosophy - and a new group of women at the helm. From what I saw at the last show, they’ve got work to do, says Phoebe Luckhurst
VS 2.0: the new Victoria’s Secret gang
Caroline Costello/Evening Standard

Unearth your $15m Fantasy bra: Victoria’s Secret is back. Or on second thoughts don’t, because the brand - once synonymous with sequin encrusted (very) smalls - is rehabilitating its image. Gone will be the crystals and the sexualised hyper-pageant of Amazonians (past ‘Angels’ include Gigi and Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Gisele Bundchen). In their place, there will be a new ‘VS Collective’, a group of women who will work with Victoria’s Secret on “collaborations, business partnerships and cause-related initiatives”, and - hopefully - underwear that doesn’t look like it would give you a UTI. (Surely it can’t be good for there to be a crystal ‘up there’ - although I suppose Gwyneth Paltrow might approve.)

The group of modern, next gen Angels includes US football star and LGBTQIA+ activist Megan Rapinoe and actor and producer Priyanka Chopras Jones, as well as models Valentina Sampaio and Paloma Elsesser. "I’ve known that we needed to change this brand for a long time,” chief executive Martin Waters told The New York Times this week. “We just haven’t had the control of the company to be able to do it." Rapinoe put it punchier, describing the company’s past image as "patriarchal, sexist, viewing not just what it meant to be sexy but what the clothes were trying to accomplish through a male lens and through what men desired".

VS has been through a tumultuous few years - a change in ownership, falling revenues (although the company still generates billions in sales) and it hasn’t held its annual Victoria’s Secret fashion show - an almost £10 million showcase of its underwear and Angels - since 2018.

I was at that show, held in New York, reporting - if that’s the word - for this newspaper, where I saw some of the world’s most famous women stalk a catwalk with diamantes vaguely covering their vaginas. Buttocks were everywhere; body hair nowhere to be seen. The version of beauty on display was limiting and exclusive (of course). Before the show began, they broadcast a series of soft-focus videos of the Angels talking about how ‘empowered’ they felt as women to be repping the brand. It felt like a cynical land grab - an insulting nod to the #MeToo movement that had exploded around the world the year before.

Final call: Gigi Hadid in the last Victoria’s Secret show in 2018
AFP/Getty Images

And sure, the women were being paid enormous sums to do it, and who am I to assert they didn’t feel ‘empowered’ doing it? Still, to me, it felt relevant that the audience was made up of plenty of men. In my (inexpert) opinion, several of the girls also looked very unwell. At the afterparty, they were trotted around like prime thoroughbreds to meet the teen sons of VS investors. I left after 30 minutes.

So yeah - I’d say the whole thing could do with one hell of a rebrand. Women like Rapinoe, Chopras Jonas, Sampaio and Elsesser wouldn’t put their names to something they didn’t believe in; Rapinoe’s comments suggest that the brand is attuned to the (manifest) problems of its previous incarnation. Still, companies repositioning themselves by marketing feminism to the masses must always be viewed with plenty of caution: capitalism doesn’t care about women, it cares about money.

Nonetheless, the success of brands like Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty, Les Girls Les Boys and ThirdLove - which have always used diverse skin colours and body shapes, and crucially don’t use crystals where they should use cotton or lycra - have become the norm, and put the pressure on. Millennial and Gen Z women want underwear on their terms - not a (teenage boys’) ‘fantasy’.

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