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After several years of emphasizing comfort, Victoria’s Secret is pivoting back to sexy. CEO Hillary Super, who took over last September, said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal that the underwear company had made a mistake by pulling back from the showy lingerie and suggestive advertising on which it made its name.
Under Super’s direction, the brand has rolled out new additions to its “Very Sexy” collection, which features harness-inspired underwear, bejeweled “maximum lift” push-up bras that promise an increase of two cup sizes, and a thong with a tassel that dangles down one’s crack. The company is still presenting plenty of new comfort-driven basics and athleticwear, but it’s also adding lace teddies, costumes fit for a Halloween sex party, bras that quit before they reach the nipple, and a crotchless, cup-less leotard. (I use that term lightly.) On social media, the brand is pushing sheer lingerie, aggressive push-up bras, flouncy floral designs, and undergarments with blingy straps emblazoned with the company name. Victoria’s Secret is also leaning back into the glitzy flamboyance of its annual lingerie fashion show, which returned last year for the first time since 2018.
I hate to be the person who always brings up Donald Trump in conversations about thongs, but it’s no coincidence that the end of Victoria’s Secret’s brief period of soft-touch sexuality has come at this precise moment. The past few years in fashion have heralded a return to both traditional femininity (ruffles, ballet flats) and shameless sexiness (clothing with cutouts), a two-pronged trend that has only accelerated during Trump 2.0.
A partial referendum on the feminist triumphs and atmosphere of sexual caution of the #MeToo era, the new mode is also visible in the so-called Mar-a-Lago face adopted by women in the MAGA extended universe, which wears its garish makeup and medi-spa modifications as points of pride. Taut and filler-plumped, the Mar-a-Lago face somewhat resembles a push-up bra itself. Trump is concocting a world that rewards unabashedly manufactured caricatures of femininity. Who better to capitalize on the moment than a company that has, for generations, made the straight-faced argument that the sexiest thing in the world is a stiff, sculpted undergarment that hides our softest body parts behind a forbidding wall of foam?
The original decision to dilute the raciness of the Victoria’s Secret brand, made by former head Martin Waters, came in 2019, when market research showed that its customers were looking for easy-wearing undergarments at low price points. Amid renewed scrutiny on Jeffrey Epstein—a close associate of former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner—and a 2020 New York Times exposé on the sexism and sexual harassment suffered by employees and models, the company was battling a reputation for being “inappropriate and off-color,” Waters told the Journal. In came a spate of products that seemed more fit for relaxation or exercise than brazen, sexually charged trysts, dovetailing with the rise of athleisure and the surge in demand for bralettes that came with the pandemic. Ad campaigns brought in models of varying body types and focused on the garments’ comfort and value.
The shift was an initial success, but eventually flopped. When Super took over from Waters last year, Victoria’s Secret was struggling, with sales on the downswing for more than two years. Having lost its hold on the mid-market American underwear drawer in a more crowded marketplace, it was ill-positioned to compete with new retailers like Kim Kardashian’s Skims, which sells sleek, neutral-toned basics, and other brands that offered a range of larger sizes.
Both Super and Adam Selman, the executive creative director she tapped in the spring, have held top spots at Savage X Fenty, Rihanna’s affordable, size-inclusive lingerie brand. The new CEO says she is banking on a new interpretation of sexiness, one that appreciates a certain degree of comfort—a new bra boasts a more flexible underwire—and keeps the current body-positive outlook that was scorned by leaders of Wexner’s era. At the same time, she has tried to revive the hyperfeminine, male-gaze-oriented fantasy sold by Victoria’s Secret for decades before Waters restrained it. So far, it seems to be working: The company’s stock has risen almost 8 percent since Super took over, and in the most recent quarter, sales were up 3 percent over the same period last year, beating analysts’ estimates.
To the untrained eye, Victoria’s Secret’s new offerings don’t look much different from the old ones. In fact, the shift might be too subtle for casual consumers to clock on their own—more about the brand’s photo-shoot vibes and product merchandising than any dramatic about-face in design. Perhaps customers will be wooed by the fantasy of looking like a seductive model wearing a cutout bodysuit, even if they end up buying a pair of plain bikini briefs and a T-shirt bra from the back of the store.
But the concept of a consistent purveyor of thongs and padded bras pivoting toward and away from “sexy” along with the cultural tides is a bit ridiculous. Even in its theoretically more reserved phase, Victoria’s Secret never stopped manufacturing skimpy special-occasion undergarments. When a Business Insider reporter visited a London store in 2021, expecting to see evidence of the toned-down strategy, she noted that storefront advertisements depicted models in simple, laid-back bras and underwear. As soon as she walked in, however, she found displays promoting the strappy, nipple-baring bras and racy lingerie that the brand was supposedly de-emphasizing.
The difference between the ubersexy pre-2018 era and the more muted years that followed is much clearer in Victoria’s Secret’s advertisements. In the olden days, the company vibe was less Dove, more Carl’s Jr. (Like Victoria’s Secret, the burger chain, whose infamously racy ads were championed by a CEO who now serves in the Trump administration, toned things down in 2017 before announcing a return to overtly sexual commercials this year.) Models in Victoria’s Secret spots acted like eels on the deck of a fishing boat: writhing on the floor, sliding off of furniture, glistening with sea spray and bearing the dazed, open-mouthed look of the oxygen-starved. The underwear was beside the point; what was being sold was a uniform collection of smooth, lithe, underwire-thin bodies oozing sex.
After 2018, the mood shifted. The commercials still featured sultry-eyed models arching their backs in lingerie sets, but some of them wore larger sizes, and they now posed under voiceovers cheerfully intoning, “If my bra could talk, it would say ‘You’re ready for anything.’ ” Women played paddleball on the beach instead of squirming in the sand. They binged on room service and did the Macarena. Even when they donned lacy underthings in a Parisian apartment, they remained fully upright.
So far, the videos produced under Super have more in common with this subtler take on sexy than with the preceding era that hit viewers over the head with its stilettos. Beachgoing models are having fun in sturdy-looking swimwear; a stretching hiker advertises “the world’s best sports bras.” Plus-size models have stuck around. Some photo shoots are taking a more straightforwardly sexy, leather-clad point of view, but comfort is still in the conversation.
To the extent that Victoria’s Secret is actually changing its products and ads to evoke a sexier quality today, it will fit neatly alongside current cultural demands for women to revert to old-fashioned gender roles. Right-wing commentators have been pushing the narrative that feminism has made women unhappy, that they reach their highest purpose when they’re toiling in the home or performing femininity for a man’s pleasure. Men who have flocked to Trump and various misogynist podcasters are being told they’re right to treat women like sexual objects to be subdued and possessed. When Sydney Sweeney hosted Saturday Night Live last March, conservatives celebrated the alleged death of wokeness via a renewed cultural reverence for blond women with big boobs. The aesthetics that embody this political backlash are flouncy and lace-trimmed, with high heels, sister-wife long hair, and cleavage. They span an eclectic spectrum, from the Christian college student gyrating in a sorority rush video to the housewife influencer in a peasant blouse to the sheath-dressed MAGA-bot.
Fashion tastemakers have absorbed the message. From the tradwife boom to Sabrina Carpenter’s babydolls and bejeweled bodysuits—custom designs from Victoria’s Secret, no less—garments that pair vintage girlishness with subservient sexuality (see: Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album cover) are some of the hottest looks of the moment. The trend is by no means exclusive to the political right, but it has found a natural home there. Among certain right-wing women, there is no conflict between the impulse to court heterosexual desire with revealing outfits and the traditionalist imperative to reserve actual sexual activity for marriage. The anti-feminist young conservatives of Evie magazine, who run articles arguing that “Sexiness Is an Essential Aspect of Any Healthy Society” and “Outer Beauty Matters,” publish sex advice solely from the perspective of wives seeking to please their husbands. They also sell a “raw milkmaid dress” featuring a slit that runs higher than midsummer corn and a comically low neckline designed for maximum overflow.
In this context, Victoria’s Secret’s return to sexy can be read in part as an overture to red America and those who might have considered the company unforgivably “woke” for retreating from brash sexuality in the first place. But in-your-face sexiness is back in style in more progressive milieux, too. Bra straps are hanging out of tank tops again; thongs are back to whale-tailing above low-cut jeans. For years now, see-through clothing has also been inuring the general public to the sight of previously obscured body parts. This “naked dressing” trend comprises sheer tops and bottoms that usually demand attractive undergarments, directing renewed consumer attention to lingerie that is made to be seen.
Victoria’s Secret is gunning for the overlap in this unlikely aesthetic coalition. Within it, there are right-wingers bent on keeping women in submissive, sexually available roles, who wish eternal damnation on those who have sex outside the confines of heterosexual partnership and demand mandatory childbirth from those who fornicate within it. There are also progressive young people who, reaching for dopamine bursts to break up the slog of 21st-century life, are dressing sexier than ever in public and on the internet but having little actual sex. What do they have in common? There’s precious little polling data, but I’m guessing it’s G-string underwear.
Though it seems like a simple sell, it may be tough for Victoria’s Secret to thread this political needle. In promotional content for this year’s fashion show, which airs Oct. 15, it is featuring six “Angels” who will walk the runway, including some of the brand’s biggest names of all time (Adriana Lima, Lily Aldridge) alongside plus-size model Yumi Nu and trans model Alex Consani, one of two trans women who walked in the show for the first time upon its return last year. The brand’s Instagram page seems particularly taken with Consani, who has starred in multiple featured reels. On her own account, she posted an image of the tucking tape she used during the promo shoot.
Can Victoria’s Secret ride the conservative-driven wave toward dated notions of feminine sexuality while promoting models who use tucking tape beneath the underwear they’re selling—women whose access to gender-affirming care (which Republicans are banning across the country) was an essential step to becoming lingerie models in the first place? People of all political stripes want to be sexy. But the question of what sexy means—and for whom women should be dressing themselves, and what they’re allowed to do with the bodies they’re baring—is fraught with political meaning. At Victoria’s Secret, sexy is now straddling a generation of feminist politics: one foot in the inclusive present, one foot in the idealized feminine past. Sounds like a perfect position from which to show off the Sunset Ombré Shine Strap Rose Lace Crotchless Brazilian Panty.