HOW VICTORIA'S SECRET GOT ITS SEXY BACK

DETERMINED NOT TO REPEAT THE BRAND'S PAST MISTAKES, CEO HILLARY SUPER IS SHEDDING THE BODY-SHAMING AND THE PERFORMATIVE BOX-CHECKING—BUT NOT THE WINGS, GLAMOUR, AND GLITTER.

- BY EMMA HINCHLIFFE

SPECTACULAR. FANTASTICAL. UNSTOPPABLE. SEXY.

At Victoria's Secret these are not just adjectives; they're the emotions the nation's leading intimates brand is trying to evoke in customers. “More than anything, we're in the business of feelings,” says CEO Hillary Super.

But many women who grew up with the brand say it has fostered a very different set of feelings in them: Inadequate. Objectified. Fat-shamed. Invisible. As the singer Jax put it in her popular 2022 song “Victoria's Secret,” the mall-staple lingerie store was “made up by a dude,” and it has been widely seen as “Cashin’ in on body issues/Sellin’ skin and bones with big boobs.”

It may be hyperbolic to blame a seller of undergarments for a generation of women’s body issues, but it’s hard to overstate Victoria's Secret's clout in the 1990s and 2000s. In its heyday the brand—with its ubiquitous catalogs, boudoir-style shops, and glitzy runway show—played a key role in defining American beauty standards, promising women they could be bombshells like its famous models, known as Angels. Together with younger sister Pink, it ruled its category, with a third of the North American intimates market and a peak of $8.1 billion in sales in 2018.

What some viewed as aspirational, others saw as harmful to the self-esteem of women and girls. The inevitable backlash came with the rise of body positivity and diversity in the 2010s, and later the #MeToo movement. The uniformly thin, mostly white models who walked Victoria's Secret runways and posed provocatively in its catalogs began to look outdated, and the brand’s beauty standards were seen as far too narrow.