Do you remember when Victoria’s Secret, and its famous fashion show, was a byword for sexism and outdated, punitive body standards? You won’t have to think back too hard. But the company has strategically rebranded itself in the past few years – mostly in response to a few serious scandals, including its former CEO’s deep ties to Epstein – and its comeback has coincided with the fashion industry’s wholehearted return to thinness worship. In an age of GLP-1s and fascist aesthetics, the fashion world has ditched even its most half-hearted overtures towards body positivity. Vogue Business has been tracking plus-size representation in fashion shows since 2023; this year had the thinnest runways since they started keeping records.
By comparison, and it’s a low bar, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2026 looks progressive. Its plus-size representation doesn’t crack 10%, but working with a handful of models like Ashley Graham, Precious Lee and Devyn Garcia differentiates it from almost all high-fashion brands. It’s not just size diversity at stake, either; seeing shots of Alex Consani, Anok Yai and Paloma Elsesser together at the show should read as nothing more than good casting, but in the current climate, they do provide the brand a certain glow of moral health.
For those unfamiliar with the recent backstory of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show: it was on hiatus from 2019-2024 while the brand did some serious PR work. One of the reasons for that was that its then-Chief Marketing Officer Ed Razek claimed, in 2018, that casting trans and plus-size models would disrupt the ‘fantasy’ the VS Fashion Show was selling. The show has since cast two trans models: Valentina Sampaio, who was hired as a campaign model in 2019, and Consani, arguably the most high-profile trans model in the world, has now made three consecutive appearances there.
Even if just as an emergency, reputation-saving measure, Victoria’s Secret has rehabilitated itself somewhat successfully. It has clawed itself out of the bin of post-MeToo cultural irrelevance, insisting that it can represent a kinder vision of beauty and aspiration. There are, obviously, limits to this. The most common focus of the press after the show was Kylie Jenner making her VS debut in the $50 million Fantasy Bra, a diamond-encrusted garment that hadn’t been worn at the show since 2018, and which has usually been reserved for veteran Angels. The show is still a celebration of wealth and highly restrictive feminine beauty standards; it still sells a puzzling fantasy of rarefied sexuality, one that has always felt ambivalent about whether it’s actually selling sex or not. But something has changed. The whole thing is a little cuddlier, I suppose. There are fewer ways to fail at being an Angel than there used to be.
It’s difficult to know what to feel about Victoria’s Secret in 2026. On the one hand, who cares? Victoria’s Secret primarily exists so that 19-year-olds who don’t know their bra size can purchase wildly ill-fitting matching sets to wear on terrible dates. Who wants to devote brainspace to how their cultural role is changing in 2026? On the other hand, it is such a casually cruel time to be a woman in the world, and to be anything other than rail-thin, and it interests me when there are little pockets of awareness that inclusivity can, sometimes, sell – particularly in prestige fashion locales that have previously been associated with regimented exclusivity.
“The VS show’s strategic rebrand has, perhaps, stumbled on something important. Many women have grown tired of watching women suffer, and of attaching themselves to brands that are bywords for that suffering”
I have a theory for why I find the VS show compelling now, in the context of a new glut of thinness, of worryingly thin celebrities, of thinness monopolising the runway. I like the feathers and wings. I like that they look like they might get to sleep after the show, to lie alone or with others in a soft, cloudy bed, and get fed grapes. I like that being half-naked is a state of vulnerability and shame and that VS makes it aspirational. I know that’s a more ridiculous fantasy than anything else, one that forgets the sheer punishing physical work of being a model and of maintaining a model’s body of any kind, but it’s what I like, more than the sex appeal even; I like the glimmer of pleasure in rest and relaxation, the fun of wearing the wings. It’s a fantasy that only really works if different kinds of bodies can partake in it, if trans women and plus-sized women and dark-skinned women can access the delicate fairy-world of intimacy and sleep. Meanness works well in fashion and beauty culture to create a sense of exclusivity and aspiration, but there are things meanness cannot do.
I have oscillated between feeling pleased by the Victoria’s Secret show’s slightly increased body diversity and being furious about being pleased, as if I’ve been offered a couple of almonds to sate a day-long fast. But while any claims about the beautiful half-naked women show actually being feminist and empowering have been significantly exaggerated, the VS show’s strategic rebrand has, perhaps, stumbled on something important. Many women have grown tired of watching women suffer, and of attaching themselves to brands that are bywords for that suffering. Even weak gestures towards inclusivity from within a highly exclusive structure admit to a wider hunger for the real thing. Perhaps that’s the only thing that can stop fashion’s cyclical love-affair with hyper-thinness: remembering that it costs you every part of the Victoria’s Secret dreamworld, from your sex life to your sleep.