The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show started with a baby bump.
Model Jasmine Tookes, nine months pregnant, walked onto the stage in full VS angel wings. She looked undeniably glamorous, radiant in gold. It seemed to be a statement from Victoria’s Secret under its new CEO Hillary Super: sexy is back—but sexy is different this time.
The entire show, a full-scale extravaganza that aired live from Brooklyn last night, set the tone for Super’s strategy to revive the brand. Victoria’s Secret used to promote a top-down vision of sexy decided by men in charge, with the male gaze in mind. After that blew up, there was a short-lived attempt at what could be called a “woke” era. It included a collective of women known for their achievements, including soccer star Megan Rapinoe and Olympic skier Eileen Gu. But most of them didn’t have much to do with lingerie.
The strategy Super put on display last night met somewhere in the middle. Rather than shove Victoria’s Secret’s sexy past into a corner, the show embraced it. Longtime VS ‘Angels’ from Bella and Gigi Hadid to Lily Aldridge and Alessandra Ambrosio catwalked down the runway, looking much as they might have 15 years earlier. The difference was they weren’t the only women there. There were some plus-size models, too, like Ashley Graham and Paloma Elsesser. (Plus-size representation on the runway has steadily declined over the past years as thinness reigns supreme again; Vogue Business keeps a size-inclusivity tracker.) Some of the models are in their 40s now and probably wouldn’t have been on a Victoria’s Secret runway in the brand’s previous era. While the white, blonde beauty standard was certainly present, it wasn’t the only type of beauty we saw.
There were some non-models, too; notably Angel Reese, the WNBA star, and Olympian Suni Lee. Karol G performed, and walked the runway with the title of her hit song “Latina Foreva” broadcast on the screen behind her. This time, the women from other fields seemed to enjoy sexiness, modeling, and lingerie.
To me, the show seemed inspired by the Skims casting playbook. In recent years, Kim Kardashian’s brand, which has captured market share from a struggling Victoria’s Secret, has had its pulse on culture, with campaigns featuring everyone from the Italian stars of The White Lotus to the Mahomes family and promoting apparel ranging from lingerie to loungewear. But although Skims has experimented with the runway, it hasn’t come close to a fashion show that captures the Victoria’s Secret heyday. And Victoria’s Secret now seems ready to reclaim some of the ground it ceded.
Inside the venue, the crowd was eating it up. Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Sedaris were sitting front row, with Parker whipping out her phone to film Reese. Plenty of Wall Street analysts were there too, scoping out whether this strategy will work.
Super told the Wall Street Journal before the show that her predecessors’ decisions to tone down sexy were “made out of fear.” Her immediate predecessor was CEO Martin Waters. While consumers probably won’t know who’s running Victoria’s Secret, a $6.2 billion business, they might be able to tell that a woman is in charge. And that could be exactly what the brand needs. Female shoppers don’t seem to want sexiness dictated by male executives, nor do they want male execs scared to embrace it; they can define ‘sexy’ themselves—with fewer rules about what it means.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
"The spirit of D.C. is alive and well."
— Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, arguing at the MPW Summit that the spirit of her city is high, despite the challenges of living with the federal government's overreach she's also called out.