Growing up, Victoria’s Secret has always been an iconic name. I remember girls everywhere flocked to own Victoria’s Secret products: bras, thongs, perfumes and pyjamas. Victoria’s Secret was able to build an empire for itself, unquestionably known worldwide.
The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was a highly anticipated annual event. It was a spectacle known for its extravagant costumes, star-studded musical performances, and supermodel ‘Angels’ strutting the runway, making it a pop culture event year after year.
Despite the chokehold that the brand had on me and other girls at the time, Victoria’s Secret left very little room for people who didn’t fit a very specific body type, to feel seen and represented. As a bigger-chested girl, I am fairly familiar with being left out by fashion brands. However, it stung me a little more that a lingerie brand had kept their sizes limited for so long. I remember so vividly being taunted that I would ‘never be a Victoria’s Secret Angel’, but that the girl who said so ‘easily could’. From a young age, we have absorbed this harmful rhetoric that beauty is defined by size. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how hurt my plus size counterparts felt about this issue.
The question, then, branded into my brain was ‘Why can’t a Victoria’s Secret Angel look like me?’
This is why I was excited to hear about the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show rebrand.Their motive was to embrace body positivity and inclusivity, with “52 models from 25 countries”. At last, this brand with the power to shift beauty standards, finally came to their senses and included those who needed representation the most.
Upon watching the 2024 Fashion show, I found that it lacked both flair and inclusivity. For a company boasting how much they’ve changed and how revolutionary they’ve become, very little has authentically improved.
So what went wrong?
The show prefaced with a speech fettered with thinly-veiled desperation to convince us that “tonight on this runway, it’s all about the women”, and that the “women [will] take the reins and the spotlight”.
This leads me to the obvious pitfall of the 2024 Victoria’s Secret Fashion show: its pretentious diversity. Of the fifty-two women handpicked to walk the runway, only two were transgender and five ‘plus-size’.
It felt as though they scouted curvier models and called it a day in the plus size department. Models: Devyn Garcia, Paloma Elsesser, Kill Kortleve and most famously, Ashley Graham represented the plus-size cohort. However, we are still seeing these ‘socially acceptable’ forms of plus-size bodies, with fat forming in the ‘right’ places, giving an hourglass figure. Despite this, they were able to push the illusion of these models being representatives of the plus-size community as they were placed in direct contrast with their skinnier counterparts.
What really disappointed me was that these models were so obviously set apart in their looks, as it feels there was more effort put into the unattainably skinnier models that we are so used to (and quite frankly tired of) seeing. The ‘plus-size’ models were styled in sarongs, skirts and briefs, as opposed to the classic string thongs and elaborate lingerie.
The wings, we were once enamoured with, let us down immensely. There were some gorgeous wings and wing concepts, but this made them all the more disappointing when accompanied by tackier wings, taken straight out of a halloween store.
For example, Gigi Hadid’s wings were grand and gorgeous, however, they were so poorly executed in practice that they’d keep toppling to the sides during her walk.
To combat this, the styling team had decided to construct thick backpack-like straps to be held onto by the models, so that they could regain control of the wings’ balance. The silver straps were a shoddy attempt to hide a fault in the show, pulling us out of that old luxurious element we used to get.
Even the hair was disappointing. Where were the show-stopping blowouts and voluminous hairstyles? Notably, the women with curlier hair were styled into these brushed out, poofy hairstyles. Given that this show is trying to rebrand itself as inclusive, they so easily destroyed the curls that these women have tried so hard to keep in their routines. I feel as though this is a lazy stylist’ way of claiming it’s more dramatic and emulates the volume of a blowout. What it really is, is sheer laziness and ignorance, as I saw one too many slick-back hairstyles on their fellow straight-haired models, proving that the stylists weren’t prioritising dramatic hair looks.
There was an inherent lack of refinement within the 2024 show. Don’t let their star-studded cast (such as Cher and up-and-coming Tyla) fool you, Victoria’s Secret has considerably declined in financing. This is due to the shift in consumer taste. We, as consumers, are becoming more educated and aware of what we would like to invest in. We have shifted towards brands more focused on body positivity, comfort and inclusivity, such as ‘Aerie’. Aerie gained a lot of trust through the ‘#AerieReal’ campaign, featuring untouched photos of diverse women, resonated with consumers who felt alienated by these unrealistic beauty standards set by brands such as Victoria’s Secret. Before this sudden boom of consumer consciousness, Victoria’s Secret produced almost 2/3s of their parent company’s revenue, valued at $28 billion. However, the brand, as of late, is said to be worth around $2.2 billion– a remarkable fall.
We have witnessed the downfall of a brand that commercialises toxic beauty standards. I suggest that Victoria’s Secret’s only path to redemption is an organic and legitimate reinvention of their show, dismantling the industry and what it does to young girls around the globe.