New York
CNN
 — 

The message on Tuesday night in Brooklyn was simple: after a six-year hiatus, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is back, and the lingerie brand’s future is being shaped by women.

The presence of the female gaze was felt throughout the evening with a production that featured an all-women musical lineup, and a diverse cast of models wearing more sophisticated — and in some cases, more comfortable-looking lingerie, including leggings and sheer coverups.

Lisa from K-pop supergroup Blackpink kicked off the event with an opening performance, and Gigi Hadid rose from the stage floor on a catwalk that looked like the love child of the “Barbie” movie set and an ’80s video game. Hadid, along with other models, wore the brand’s signature angel wings (this year, faux feather versions were PETA-approved).

There appeared to be more Brown and Black faces on the runway than at any time in the show’s history, many of whom wore natural hairstyles, as well as some plus-sized and older models walking.

The crowd screamed as Adriana Lima — one of the original Victoria’s Secret “Angels” — charged down the runway alongside some of fashion’s most in-demand models: Bella Hadid, Alex Consani and Paloma Elsesser. Kate Moss, who turned 50 in January, made her Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show debut, with her daughter Lila also modeling.

Then there was Cher, the undisputed highlight of the evening, who delivered a show-stealing performance of “Believe” and “Strong Enough.” Fashion journalist Roxanne Robinson told CNN: “the models could have been naked, and no one would have noticed.”

For decades, Victoria’s Secret was the self-proclaimed arbiter of sexy, becoming ubiquitous in American malls in the 1990s with popular products like the “Miracle” pushup bra. The brand defined femininity with barely covered supermodels in catalogs and campaigns as well as on its annual catwalk.

First streamed online in 1999, then televised in 2001, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show became a sex-charged spectacle of lingerie watched by millions in 200 countries at its peak, with performances by Destiny’s Child, Justin Timberlake and Kanye West.

But its time-worn playbook — of largely White, rail-thin models — lost its luster in the late 2010s. The brand found itself fending off accusations of sexism, ageism and a refusal to cater to women of all shapes and sizes, particularly following inflammatory comments about transgender and plus-size models made by a marketing executive at its then-parent company, L Brands, in 2018.

By that year, the fashion show’s viewership had already plummeted, from 9.7 million in 2013 to 3.3 million. At the same time, new brands like Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty, took bites out of Victoria’s Secret’s market domination by offering inclusive sizing and more diverse casting in its campaigns and events.

In 2019, L Brands, canceled the show indefinitely, but last year, Victoria’s Secret (now a publicly traded company) attempted to revive the format through the documentary “Victoria’s Secret: The Tour,” which spotlit four collections by independent designers and artists from Lagos, Bogotá, London and Tokyo. Narrated by Gigi Hadid, the film features models such as Naomi Campbell, Quannah Chasinghorse and Winnie Harlow. Two years earlier, the brand tried trading “angels” for “ambassadors,” giving the new roles to soccer player Megan Rapinoe and actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas.

“I think the last couple years have been marked by a bunch of different attempts of throwing things at the wall, seeing what sticks, and as a result the messaging is a bit muddled,” said fashion and beauty journalist Chantal Fernandez, who charted the rise and unraveling of the lingerie giant in the new book “Selling Sexy” with co-author Lauren Sherman.

For a company known for its upbeat and glamorous visual language and tone, “suddenly, their imagery looked like any other mall brand… and I think part of it was not having a clear idea of how to modernize this idea of what is sexy now, which is a really tricky question today,” she added in a video interview with CNN.

Tuesday’s multi-racial, -size and -generational cast is Victoria’s Secret’s latest pitch at a rebrand, while bringing back some of the kitsch and camp of the once iconic show, now streamed live on its social media platforms instead of heavily edited as a television special.

Sarah Sylvester, Victoria’s Secret executive vice president of marketing, called it an acknowledgement of “the parts of our DNA that we love and that are important to us, and realizing that we also are able to evolve and be more modern and more inclusive,” she told CNN in a video call ahead of the show.

Critics have accused the brand’s efforts to project an image of inclusion as being inauthentic. When asked whether the show was a way to address the negative headlines since 2019, its chief design and creative officer, Janie Schaffer, replied: “Yes, in short, absolutely.”

She said that Victoria’s Secret was listening to their customers, who wanted the show to return. “Our customer is crying out for the show,” she said, adding that they are well-placed to deliver it with Victoria’s Secret’s “group of really experienced, strong women in the business that can really get the balance of the brand right.”

But did Victoria’s Secret gambit work? It may be too soon to tell, but early indications suggest the show hit the right tone.

Seeing Tyra Banks was “very nostalgic for me,” said celebrity stylist Law Roach. Banks, who closed the show, wore a formfitting bodice and leggings and silver cape. “I think it is a work in progress, right?” he said of the company’s attempted rebrand, before adding: “It is a good start.”

In the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Duggal Greenhouse, where the show took place, former Victoria’s Secret Angels walked the runway alongside models whose body types, age and sizing were not represented by the brand a decade ago.

Ashley Graham — a plus size model and body positivity advocate — made her Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show debut wearing a black lace body suit, sheer robe and wings with golden flower accents. She told People that she was excited at the show’s “full representation” and that the brand accommodated her request to wear more.

“The first thing they gave me was this tiny, tiny little underwear, and I said, ‘Hello, I just had three children,’” she told the magazine exclusively. “Even though it was like two years ago, but I was like, ‘Is there any more we can put on?’ So then I got a bodysuit and I feel really sexy in it, and then when the wings came out, that’s when I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I feel like an Angel. This is hot.’”

Victoria’s Secret was founded in 1977 by American businessman Roy Raymond, and was bought by billionaire Leslie Wexner five years later in 1982 for $1 million. By the early 1990s, the brand generated $1 billion in annual revenue and became an American lingerie empire, having deftly shifted its marketing message and product through the culturally conservative Reagan years to the ’90s and ’00s where sexuality was increasingly commercialized.

“The brand is a window into the American consumer psyche,” Sherman explained in a video interview. Its marketing campaigns were incredibly effective in taking the magic and mystique of high fashion and making it “more approachable, more commercialized,” Fernandez added.

But earlier iterations of the fashion show were often peppered with inappropriate jokes at the models’ expense, with its in-studio audience being largely made up of gawping men.

In its 2009 show, a personal trainer is seen critiquing the bodies of girls aspiring to become Victoria’s Secret catwalk models. After one of the contestants tells him she likes “everything” about her body, he replies to the camera: “she is in for a rude awakening.”

But while the brand was increasingly criticized online for promoting an unhealthy beauty standard, it was also generating billions in sales at its height in the mid-2010s, and accounted for more than half of the US lingerie store market, according to Sherman and Fernandez’s book “Selling Sexy.”

As beauty norms shifted and social media platforms amplified criticism at the end of the decade, the brand appeared to be struggling to evolve with its consumer. Sharleen Ernster, Victoria’s Secret former executive vice president of design from 2011 until 2013, told CNN that some in the company’s leadership ignored pushes to promote their comfortable wireless bralette, or even expand into maternity wear or diverse sizing.

Ernster, who had worked in the company for 13 years, believes the Victoria’s Secret emphasis of sexiness over comfort ended up hurting its bottom lines. “It was a big miss,” she said in a phone call.

She said the company’s former CEO, Wexner and L Brands’ former chief marketing executive Ed Razek “were not willing to move the brand from that perfect supermodel vision… (to) engaging an authentic customer and gracefully aging with the customer.” The brand’s leaders “were used to no-one saying no and thinking they were right, and everyone sort of just living in a bubble,” she added.

Razek did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. Wexner did not provide comment.

Then the bubble burst with tumbling sales and declining viewership. Criticism reached its peak in 2018, when Razek told Vogue he didn’t believe transgender models (whom he referred to as “transsexuals,” a term seen as outdated and offensive to the LGBTQ community) belonged on the brand’s runways “because the show is a fantasy.”

He also admitted to some pitfalls: “Yeah, we made some fashion mistakes. We were late to the party on bralettes; we were late to the party on downtown influences in our looks.”

The explosive interview, in which Razek also said there was no public interest in a plus-size Victoria’s Secret catwalk, sparked public outrage and model mutiny, with Kendall Jenner, Lily Aldrige and Karlie Kloss reportedly writing Instagram story posts in support of the trans community.

Razek later apologized in a statement posted on X (then Twitter), saying that his remarks came off as “insensitive” and that the retailer “would absolutely cast a transgender model for the show.”

Also hurting the brand was Wexner’s business ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender. Wexner previously described Epstein as his former personal money manager and ended his relationship with Epstein in 2007.

The billionaire has apologized for his association with Epstein, who died by suicide in prison in 2019, but the relationship was damaging to the company’s image. He eventually stepped down in 2020 as CEO when Victoria’s Secret was valued at just $1.1 billion (down from $28 billion five years prior) and taken private.

Rise and fall and rise again?

The brand remains well-known in the US’s lingerie market, but it is far from the days of its Y2K cultural dominance. It has spent the last four years overhauling its hyper-sexualized image in a bid to regain cultural relevance and win back young consumers.

A former executive of the company, who asked for their name to not be published, defended the rebrand attempts to CNN, saying the new leadership was facing significant challenges. “There had already been a five- or six-year decline, erosion in the fundamentals of the business,” on top of fixing the company’s reputation. “And by addressing that, we also were able to create a world where women could feel comfortable with the brand rather than put off by it,” they added.

Will Victoria’s Secret soar to the heights it enjoyed a decade ago? The monoculture, which the retailer so deftly navigated back then, does not exist anymore, says Sherman of social media changing consumer habits.

“We all live on our tiny corner of the internet, so they’re (Victoria’s Secret) going to have to find their tiny corners, and the people who live there, to love them.”

This means that success today is very different from 2004 or 1994, she said there’s a desire to see Victoria’s Secret “achieve relevance again — and that is also harder than ever to do.”