There are few brands that have lived as dramatically in the public imagination as Victoria’s Secret.

For decades, it was not just a lingerie brand. It was a fantasy machine. The wings, the runway, the supermodels, the glitter, the lighting, the music, the impossible bodies and the annual fashion show all worked together to create one of the most recognisable brand worlds in modern retail. Victoria’s Secret did not sell bras in the ordinary sense. It sold a version of glamour that was glossy, theatrical and completely unsubtle. Subtlety was never really the point. This was a brand that entered the room wearing rhinestones and expecting applause.

And for a long time, the strategy worked.

Then the culture changed.

Or perhaps more accurately, the culture finally said what many people had been thinking for years. The fantasy was too narrow. The beauty ideal was too rigid. The brand’s idea of sexy felt increasingly disconnected from the women it claimed to serve. What had once looked aspirational started to look exclusionary. What had once felt glamorous began to feel outdated. The Angels, once the brand’s greatest asset, became symbols of a beauty standard many consumers no longer wanted to celebrate.

Victoria’s Secret faced a problem that every powerful brand eventually faces.

What do you do when the thing that made you famous becomes the thing that makes you vulnerable?

When a brand’s greatest strength becomes a liability

Victoria’s Secret built one of the clearest brand codes in retail. You knew what it stood for. You could recognise the aesthetic instantly. It was sexy, polished, glamorous, performative and unapologetically aspirational. In branding, clarity is usually gold. Consumers remember brands that stand for something specific.

But clarity becomes dangerous when culture moves against the thing you stand for.

By the late 2010s, the brand’s fantasy no longer felt universal. Competitors such as Aerie and Savage X Fenty built momentum by offering a broader, more inclusive version of beauty and confidence. They did not simply sell different products. They sold a different emotional contract. Instead of asking women to aspire to a single ideal, they invited them to feel good in their own bodies.

That mattered because lingerie is not just a product category. It is intimate, emotional and deeply connected to identity. When customers feel that a brand does not see them, the rejection is not purely commercial. It becomes personal.

This is where Victoria’s Secret got caught. The brand’s old strategy was still recognisable, but recognition was no longer enough. A fantasy can be powerful, but only if people still want to enter it.

The rebrand that tried to change the conversation

In 2021, Victoria’s Secret launched the VS Collective, bringing in figures such as Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Megan Rapinoe, Paloma Elsesser and Valentina Sampaio as part of a broader transformation. The message was clear. The brand wanted to move away from the old Angels era and toward empowerment, diversity and modern womanhood.

Strategically, this made sense. The brand needed to signal that it had heard the criticism. It needed to show that it understood the cultural shift. It needed to stop behaving as if one narrow version of beauty could carry the entire company into the future.

But this is where the Victoria’s Secret story becomes especially interesting for marketers.

Because in trying to correct its past, the brand also risked losing its distinctiveness.

There is a delicate line between evolving a brand and apologising for being that brand in the first place. Victoria’s Secret needed to become more inclusive, but it also needed to remember that its strongest asset was not moral seriousness. It was fantasy, glamour and desire.

The challenge was never simply, “Should Victoria’s Secret become more inclusive?”

Of course it should.

The harder question was: “Can Victoria’s Secret become more inclusive without becoming less Victoria’s Secret?”

That is much harder.

The pendulum problem

Rebrands often fail because brands swing the pendulum too far.

They move from one extreme to another and assume customers will admire the correction. But customers are not sitting around rewarding brands for ideological neatness. They respond to emotional coherence. They want the brand to evolve, but they still want to recognise it.

This is what makes Victoria’s Secret such a useful marketing case study. The brand had to solve two problems at once. It had to repair trust with consumers who felt excluded, while also preserving the excitement that had made the brand famous.

That is not easy. It is like trying to renovate a nightclub into a wellness retreat without losing the dance floor. You may need better lighting, more thoughtful design and a far more inclusive guest list, but if people walk in and feel like the music has disappeared, something important has been lost.

For Victoria’s Secret, the old version of sexy had become too narrow. But the answer could not be to remove sexy entirely. That would be like McDonald’s trying to solve health criticism by pretending it was never interested in fries. At some point, a brand has to know what business it is in.

The return of the show

The return of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2024 was important because it suggested the brand was trying to find a middle path. The show came back with glamour, wings, music and familiar theatricality, but with a more inclusive cast and a clearer awareness that the old formula could not simply be replayed.

That return was not universally praised, and that is part of the point. Victoria’s Secret is now operating in a space where every move is interpreted through two competing lenses. Some people want the old glamour back. Others want proof that the brand has genuinely changed. Some want both, which is convenient for nobody except perhaps marketing writers.

The 2024 show was therefore more than an event. It was a test of whether Victoria’s Secret could combine nostalgia with relevance.

Nostalgia is powerful, but it is dangerous if it becomes denial. Relevance is necessary, but it is weak if it erases memory. The smartest brand reinventions do not choose between past and future. They reinterpret the past so it can survive in the future.

That is the job Victoria’s Secret is now attempting.

Why Hillary Super matters to the story

The appointment of Hillary Super as CEO in 2024 added another layer to the brand’s evolution. Her background included leadership at Savage X Fenty and Anthropologie, which is relevant because both brands understand lifestyle, identity and emotional positioning in different ways.

Victoria’s Secret does not just need operational improvement. It needs brand translation.

It needs someone who understands that modern customers do not reject sex appeal. They reject sex appeal that feels imposed, narrow or outdated. There is a huge difference. As we explored in the Sex Sells 2.0 piece, attraction still works, but the rules have changed. Desire now needs agency, self-awareness and cultural intelligence.

Victoria’s Secret’s opportunity is not to choose between old sexy and new inclusive. Its opportunity is to define a version of sexy that feels confident, broad and commercially sharp.

That is easier to say than execute. But it is the right strategic territory.

The psychology behind the comeback

The Victoria’s Secret comeback is really a story about identity repair.

When customers lose trust in a brand, they do not simply forget the old associations. Those associations remain in memory. The question is whether the brand can add new meaning without pretending the old meaning never existed.

This is where many rebrands become awkward. They behave as if audiences have no memory. But consumers remember. They remember the ads, the shows, the scandals, the criticism, the old tone. Trying to erase the past can feel dishonest.

A better strategy is reinterpretation. The brand says, “Yes, we know where we came from. But here is what that idea means now.”

That is what Victoria’s Secret needs to do with glamour. Not abandon it. Not apologise it into blandness. Reclaim it with broader meaning.

Because glamour itself was never the enemy. Exclusion was.

What marketers can learn from Victoria’s Secret

The first lesson is that brand equity is not always positive. A strong association can become a problem if culture changes around it. Victoria’s Secret had enormous awareness, but awareness alone does not protect a brand from relevance decline.

The second lesson is that inclusivity cannot feel like a costume. Customers can sense when a brand is making a symbolic correction without rethinking the underlying experience. Representation matters, but it has to feel connected to product, tone, service and culture.

The third lesson is that distinctiveness still matters. In the rush to become more acceptable, brands can become less memorable. Victoria’s Secret could not afford to become generic. The world does not need another polite lingerie brand with neutral lighting and a mission statement that sounds like it was written during a leadership offsite.

The fourth lesson is that reinvention must preserve emotional truth. The old Victoria’s Secret sold fantasy. The new Victoria’s Secret still needs to sell fantasy, but a more generous one. A fantasy where more customers can see themselves, without the brand losing its theatrical spark.

So, did Victoria’s Secret get it right?

The honest answer is that the story is still unfolding.

The brand clearly understood that it had to change. It also appears to understand that moving too far away from its own DNA creates another problem. The recent direction seems to be about blending inclusivity with a return to glamour, which is probably the most commercially sensible path.

Victoria’s Secret’s mistake was not that it sold sex appeal. It was that it sold too narrow a version of it for too long. Its challenge now is not to abandon desire, but to modernise it.

That is a much more interesting and difficult task.

If the brand succeeds, Victoria’s Secret could become a rare example of a company that lost cultural permission, listened, stumbled, adjusted and found a sharper version of itself.

If it fails, it will become another cautionary tale about what happens when a brand tries to please everyone and ends up emotionally unclear.

Either way, marketers should pay attention.

Because Victoria’s Secret is not just a lingerie story. It is a lesson in what happens when culture changes faster than brand mythology, and a reminder that the hardest thing in marketing is not becoming famous.

It is staying meaningful after the world changes its mind about why you were famous in the first place.