Victoria’s Secret Lost Its Secret Fantasy
- tracyngtr
- Oct 21
- 4 min read
Victoria’s Secret’s 2025 show reveals a brand that has lost the fantasy that once made it desirable and the conviction that once made it powerful.
Victoria's Secret spent 2025 trying to satisfy everyone and satisfied precisely no one. The brand came back with a second attempt at redemption after its awkward 2024 relaunch, this time opening the runway with a visibly pregnant Jasmine Tookes in a pearl-studded net, followed by Ashley Graham in a robe, plus-size representation in carefully covered ensembles, and WNBA star Angel Reese making her debut. The response was predictable. Nostalgic fans mourned the loss of what made the show iconic, while progressive voices dismissed the gesture as too little, too late, pointing out that the plus-size models wore more fabric than their thinner counterparts.
The question Victoria's Secret refuses to confront is whether a fashion show can exist without a singular, unapologetic vision. When Karl Lagerfeld was asked in 1989 if he designed for every woman, his answer was definitive. "Nobody designs for every woman," he said. "Everybody designs for an idea of a woman, for what is in fact his or her personality of what’s going on in fashion. You design for that and other women can identify with it, like it or not like it, buy it or not buy it". Fashion is not a mirror. It is a proposal. It creates desire precisely because it presents something that does not yet exist in the everyday, something that demands reaching, striving, becoming.
The core issue is not inclusivity. The issue is that Victoria's Secret no longer knows what it is selling. A fashion show is neither a sociological experiment nor a public service. It is performance art designed to create fantasy, desire, and aspiration. The runway exists to present an idea so compelling, so polished, so elevated that it makes ordinary life feel insufficient by comparison. This is not cruelty. This is the function of luxury fashion, which has always operated on the principle that what is rare holds more value than what is common. When you remove that distance between the stage and the audience, you do not democratize fashion. You eliminate the very mechanism that makes people want to buy into it in the first place.
This brings us back to what made supermodels super. They were not relatable. They were not accessible. They were genetic lottery winners who also trained, disciplined their bodies, perfected their walk, and embodied a level of excellence that most people will never achieve. Naomi Campbell, Gisele Bündchen, and Adriana Lima were not supposed to look like the women shopping at the mall. They represented an ideal so refined that it felt worth aspiring to. The argument that this standard is harmful rests on the assumption that women cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, that seeing a thin model on a runway will inevitably destroy self-esteem. But this patronises the audience. Women are not so fragile that they collapse at the sight of beauty they do not possess.
What Victoria's Secret has done instead is try to make the runway a reflection of its customer base, and in doing so, it has misunderstood the entire premise of why people watched the show in the first place. The spectacle worked because it was not real life. The wings, the glitter, the theatrics, the bodies that defied ordinary human proportions — all of it was fantasy. Stripping that away in favour of representation does not make the brand more honest. It makes it more boring. And boring does not sell.
There is a place for inclusivity, and that place is in product development and marketing campaigns. Brands should make bras that fit different bodies. They should feature real women in advertisements. They should ensure that their stores welcome all customers. But the runway is not the place for this work. The runway is where fashion makes its most audacious proposals — where it declares, “This is the idea we are chasing this season.” If that idea is simply “everyone is beautiful,” then there is no idea at all.
Victoria’s Secret’s paralysis is proof that trying to please both audiences kills clarity. The show wants to be progressive and nostalgic at once, to recapture glamour while appearing morally rehabilitated. In doing so, it offers neither aspiration nor conviction.
The brand has not yet accepted that aspiration and inclusivity cannot function within the same frame. Aspiration relies on distance, on the sense of something beyond reach. Inclusivity shortens that distance until there is nothing left to chase. Without a clear point of view, Victoria’s Secret remains stuck between two eras — one it is embarrassed by, and one it does not truly believe in.
Fashion only works when it commits to an idea. As Lagerfeld stated, it is not supposed to reflect every woman, but to propose a vision that invites others to respond, to like it, to hate it, to buy in or walk away. Until Victoria’s Secret rediscovers that kind of conviction, its runways will keep circling the same problem: endless conversation and no desire, inclusivity with no aspiration, a brand that stopped being fantasy and still hasn’t found a new dream to sell.
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