In this op-ed, Teen Vogue style director Alyssa Hardy explores the complex legacy of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, and how the brand has learned important lessons other fashion brands seemingly haven't.
Wednesday night’s 2025 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show marked a significant milestone for the brand. It wasn’t a special anniversary or an evening of historic firsts — it was much more subtle. We saw a runway filled with wings and beautiful models who have big hair and bigger smiles. Headlines about the looks and preparation to create them dominated the internet and social media (even ours). It all seems… familiar. The brand appears to have done something a lot of people didn’t see coming: pushing beyond the bad publicity that rocked the last seven years and landing softly back in the zeitgeist. It is once again a lingerie brand whose biggest marketing tentpole is a fantastical display of aspirational beauty.
In the broader context of the fashion industry, this show ranks higher than most in terms of size diversity. According to Vogue Business, only .9% of runways in the spring-summer 2026 season featured plus-size models. Victoria's Secret has also included trans women in its last two shows, notably Alex Consani and Valentina Sampaio, a marked change from the problematic standards set by former chief marketing officer Ed Razek. (Still, the vast majority of the models were straight size and cisgender.)
In 2025, though, it shouldn’t be commendable to have a diverse cast of people representing your brand; it should be the standard. When we see a cast of athletes, models, and celebrities not only showing joy in their bodies but also being celebrated for them, the difference is clear — and somehow, a brand that was formerly in active opposition of change is among the few that have even included plus- and mid-size people.
From a show perspective, it was, as designer Adam Selman told Vogue this week, “fun.” In many ways there was deep nostalgia that the brand was clearly playing into with Angels like Adriana Lima and Candice Swanepoel strutting on a raised runway with ridiculously large wings attached to their backs. Pink confetti filled the air and the performances had a production quality reminiscent of shows from 2016 and before.
But do these necessary changes and this move to normalize the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show into a lauded spot in our culture again mean that the brand can truly move on from the legacy it created? Should it?
The first time I watched the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, I was seven years old. Whether I grasped it or not, seeing thin bodies, bombshell hair, and impossibly beautiful women held up as the standard of fashion and womanhood nestled into my psyche (and that of millions of other young people) for decades. It was a joke that these women were so beautiful, but an accepted one. For most of the show’s history, from 1995 to 2018, that was literally the point. “Fantasy” illustrated by cis women, 5’8” and taller, whose abs were prevalent by whatever measures necessary, was supposed to be an unattainable but desired goal.
But from 2018 to 2022, deep issues within the company spilled into the public, and the insistence on a particular type of woman representing the brand turned sinister. In 2018, Razek’s fatphobic and transphobic comments started the first wave of backlash. In 2019, the New York Times exposed the relationship former CEO Les Wexner had with Jeffrey Epstein, which included the allegation that Epstein used his connection with the brand to lure women. Then, in 2022, garment workers alleged that the company refused to pay them the owed severance wages from layoffs during the pandemic; Victoria’s Secret later settled for $8.3 million.
The brand is still trying to push forward since those problems came out. There is a new CEO, a new creative director, and a new standard for advertising. The show is back where it always was, loud and dominant in the news, this time with a wider range of Angels. (But the standard of what’s angelic hasn’t changed all that much, as we still have bombshell hair, pretty makeup, and neutral nails.) It is arguably still a fast-fashion brand, producing large quantities of garments, though it has taken some small steps to address carbon emissions and raw-material supply chains.
But the VSFS is a marketing event: It is meant to get consumers to buy into a product, and after a series of missteps, the brand seems to have learned a lesson about inclusive sizing that other fashion brands still seemingly reject — a costly error, according to recent research. So if that’s the measure, then sure. It has certainly stepped away from the dark shadow it had cast and into something basically reminiscent of the space it held before, just with some corrections (notably not on the overt consumerism side). It's not a noble feat to be inclusive; it’s good business. We don't need to praise or assign moral superiority, and probably, we should push for even better. And if anything, we probably shouldn’t look to brands that have done active harm to be the guiding light.
