Has Victoria's Secret fallen too far from grace?

7:35The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show struts back into our lives

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was once a pop culture juggernaut, but a couple of scandals and growing calls to diversify the runway led them to cancel the show in 2019 in order to spend time “evolv[ing] the marketing.” The lingerie company announced the show’s coming back in 2023, and Lisa Wong Macabasco will be on to talk about the show’s past and why the reaction to its return is mixed.

The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show was once a pop culture juggernaut.

But amidst scandals and growing calls to diversify the runway, the company decided to cancel the show in 2019, suggesting instead they would use the time to "evolve the marketing." Now, the iconic lingerie company has announced that the show will return in 2023.

Vogue writer Lisa Wong Macabasco joins host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show's rocky history, and why the reaction to its return is mixed.

We've included an excerpt below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: I want to maybe start by saying, what went through your mind when you heard that the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show was going to come back?

Lisa: I mean, I was frankly surprised. I felt like it was maybe too soon to be coming back. The mood among shoppers and the industry doesn't feel that different from four years ago, but I'm curious to see what it'll be like and what models will participate, who will perform; I'll definitely be watching.

Elamin: The fact that this show was canceled — the last one was 2018 — I think makes us maybe forget or move away a little bit from how important this fashion show was. How important was the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show to the brand?

Lisa: Oh, gosh, it was integral to the brand. There's no other fashion show broadcast on network television. There were 10 million viewers in 2010. It brought the brand directly into people's homes — and it may shock you to learn that people are drawn to scantily clad women and perfect bodies.

Elamin: Lisa, that shocks me. Ten million viewers, that's a stunning number to hear — the idea that it could command as many people as an episode of The Walking Dead. Why was the show canceled in the first place? 

Lisa: Well, there's a number of reasons. The big one is in 2019 it was revealed that Les Wexner, who was the longtime CEO of Victoria's Secret's parent company, L Brands, had very close ties to the convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and he had long enabled Epstein's access to wealth and women. Wexner stepped down in the wake of those revelations. Around the same time, there were also misconduct allegations by some of the models and executives to another executive, Ed Razek — he was the longtime architect of the show. And in 2018, he made some controversial statements to Vogue about why transgender and plus-sized models should not be part of the "fantasy" of the show. He had to apologize, and he soon retired. 

But even before that, the brand had really started losing relevance, especially in the wake of [the Me Too movement]. Women were losing interest in the sort of in-your-face sexuality, male gaze, airbrushed perfect, and Victoria's Secret had really built its brand on that. Rihanna also has a lingerie brand called Savage X Fenty. It launched right around that same time, [and] its fashion show cast models of all sizes and and colours, and those who are queer and trans and non-binary, and that really proved that you could have a lingerie show that was sexy and diverse.

Elamin: Right. I think that's an interesting thing to get into because Rihanna's show and Rihanna's brand Savage X Fenty gave us what I would consider to be a more modern take on what a fashion show is. When we look back on Victoria's Secret, of course it changed the lingerie game, but there's something to the idea that it got stuck in an early-2000s kind of conception of sexuality and who the show is trying to appeal to. How does a brand miss out on an opportunity to change with the times?

Lisa: Well, I think it's just because they had made so much money doing exactly that. If we go back 20 years, it really made lingerie cool for a lot of regular middle class shoppers. It felt more modern and accessible than something like Frederick's of Hollywood, cooler and sexier than Hanes, and if you remember, it came about during the same time as Sex and the City — late '90s, early 2000s — and it was a very similar vibe: female sexuality as empowerment. That was the Y2K style, with all the exposed thongs and bra tops and miniskirts. It didn't catch up with the diversity of ways that people really want to express their femininity and sexuality. And on top of that, it was sort of resisting this inclusivity that shoppers were really kind of clamoring for. 

Elamin: So we should be clear, though, they canceled the show in 2018, but it's not like Victoria's Secret goes, "OK, we're not going to try anything new." They've tried to rebrand a bunch of times over the past few years. Has any of it worked?

Lisa: I would say to be determined, erring on the "no" side. It had tried to reinvent itself in 2021, it launched this VS Collective campaign featuring a plus-size model, an LGBTQ activist who was also a trans model, and U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe. They also added a bunch of women to their board, and they added products like a maternity bra and a mastectomy bra, but I think people are still skeptical.

Elamin: Now we get this moment where the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is going to return. They used to call the people who walk the show, the "angels." Have you seen any reaction from the angels about the return of the show? 

Lisa: No, not from the angels themselves, but on social media the reactions to the announcement were really mixed. I think some people were cautiously optimistic, but I also think a lot of people agreed with Lizzo, the singer who has her own line of size-inclusive shapewear. She posted on Twitter that the news was a win for inclusivity, but if brands start doing this only because they've received backlash, what happens when the "trends" change again?

Elamin: What do you think Victoria's Secret needs to do in order to turn things around?  

Lisa: It's going to be tough. It's still the dominant player in the lingerie industry, but the reputation and the sales have taken a hit. Women have such a wide choice of lingerie now, and I think that's awesome. That's what we want. And Victoria's Secret played a big part in that; they made it cool to shop for lingerie. They wanted it to be empowering, and it made so many more people feel comfortable shopping for lingerie. So maybe the question is: do we need Victoria's Secret anymore really? I don't know. I really don't know.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.