There is something very uncanny about watching a relic of pop culture try to resurrect itself, and that is exactly how the world felt about the Victoria’s Secret 2025 Fashion Show. The show, staged in New York after years of business rebranding and promised reinvention, was highly anticipated this October. But it instead delivered the uneasy spectacle of a once-dominant brand desperately trying to convince the world—and itself—that it is still relevant.
For over a decade, the Victoria’s Secret fashion show was the glitziest, most televised event in fashion—a glossy, hyper-feminine show of angels, wings and bombshells that drew hundreds of millions of viewers each year. But after public backlash against VS’s exclusionary ideals and tone-deaf responses, the show was shelved in 2019. Victoria’s Secret took five years off and brought the show back to the stage in October 2024, but there were still plenty of improvements to be made. The brand’s comeback last year has carried the weight of a social rehabilitation, and everyone patiently awaited the show and what it was going to bring to us this year.
The 2025 show certainly looked different than its predecessors. Out went the old guard of identical silhouettes, in came a diverse cast of athletes, influencers and models of various sizes and backgrounds. Performers like Karol G, Missy Elliott, Madison Beer and TWICE gave the night a pop, cosmopolitan soundtrack as the angels strutted the runway.
Even with all of its good intentions, the event felt hollow. The production had the shine of a corporate apology tour, with the choreography neat, the costumes lavish, but the soul missing. Watching it was like watching something incredibly uncool try to regenerate itself with hashtags and brand-safe feminism.
The casting, too, told its own downfall. Gone are the days of supermodels commanding the runway with the poise of seasoned performers. In their place came a smattering of celebrity guests and social media personalities whose charisma and charm did not shine like those of the true models. Fashion modeling, especially for VS, is a craft of posture, presence and rhythm, and too often this year, these skills were replaced by the stiffness of people simply being relevant because of their following count on Instagram. The show, clearly trying to turn something uncool into relevant again, turned into a fiesta of influencers that would only harm the brand’s reputation.
The result of this was a flattened experience. The runway was populated by people that everyone recognized, but did not admire. The old fantasy of the Angels may have been exclusionary, but it was also unique and admirable in itself, and this version, in trying to correct its wrongdoings, felt directionless.
Victoria’s Secret nowadays is often entangled in a cultural no-mans-land. It wants to reclaim its prime while also embracing a rhetoric of empowerment. But, in the process of balancing both, the risk of pleasing no one is great. The show’s visuals—the toned down wings, muted sets and pastel palettes—were a devastating step down from the show’s original glamour. The “inclusion” message felt delivered more as branding than conviction.
The tension for the future of VS is tangible. Can a lingerie brand built on glitz and glam reinvent itself as a symbol of authenticity? Can a company that was once synonymous with the male gaze now accurately sell the idea of empowerment without it being incredibly ironic?
But, despite the presumed fakeness of the reinvention of VS, the most striking thing about the show was perhaps how dated the whole thing was. Not because of what was on stage, but primarily because of what wasn’t. In an era where fashion brands experiment with digital runways, performance arts and genuine storytelling through models and clothing, the VS show still felt like a television special from a different decade.
The 2025 VS fashion show was less of a rebirth than a spectacle, summoning the past of a cultural downfall that once defined glamour in fashion shows. It wasn’t necessarily disastrous, but it was simply uncertain. The clothes shimmered, the models smiled, but beneath the sequins and feathers, there was an unmistakable missing scent of nostalgia—not the genuine kind, but the desperate kind that lingers when a brand refuses to let go of what once was.
If VS wants a real comeback, it will need to stop asking how to be cool again and start asking what, in the present time, it actually wants to represent.
