Six years after cowering to the “Great Awokening” and canceling the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the annual extravaganza celebrating the once-iconic lingerie brand is back, technically. Victoria’s Secret promised that this year’s show, unlike the glamour bonanzas of galas past, would “reflect who we are today,” and indeed, it did not disappoint, if that’s the metric it chooses to use. The 2024 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was dour and dull, a sad parody of the legacy it has no respect for, and in its attempt to reject the much-maligned “male” gaze, the female gaze was denied anything of interest as well.
While much will correctly be made of the fashion show, which bragged incessantly about banning male performers from the stage, casting transgender women as models in Tuesday’s farce, the most glaring difference between this show and the last decades of decadence was the clothes. The hot-pink push-up bras and bare bottoms scantily clad in lacy thongs were replaced by beige bralettes and literal palazzo pajama pants. There was hardly an underwire in sight, and, on a slew of 110-pound models ostensibly advertising, you know, lingerie, trapping tiny tatas in tired T-shirt bras without so much as a modest push-up doesn’t exactly resonate with the average woman, who, in the United States, rocks a 34DD.
This, from the brand whose most famous bra, the Bombshell, became an American staple with the promise of adding no fewer than two cup sizes!
As the saying promises, if you go “woke,” you’ll go broke. Since the brand’s relaunch on the New York Stock Exchange, Victoria’s Secret stock price has cratered from a 2021 peak of nearly $75 per share to less than $28. Consumers are punishing the brand not just because it went full Bud Light in chastising its base for loving all the supposedly problematic reasons Victoria’s Secret became famous in the first place but also because it has irrevocably abandoned what differentiated it.
When Victoria’s Secret was founded in the ’80s, women already had half a dozen retailers within driving distance to find a no-nonsense pair of granny panties with a wireless, padding-less, and sexless bra to go with anything but a night out. In the post-Amazon era, women have thousands of other options for the practical undergarment set that firmly reminds would-be suitors their bodies are on sexual hiatus. Women went to Victoria’s Secret specifically because it catered to the male gaze because — get this — most women actually enjoy catering to the male gaze.
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The subtext of the fashion show styling was hardly subtle. The uniform spray-tans of years past gave way to painfully pale navels and unforgiving spotlights shone on cellulite. Bouncy cascades of curls were chopped and flattened into the sort of asexual bobs favored by Karen in human resources and your least favorite substitute teacher from middle school. Sure, most of the models still advertised the washboard abs and androgynous anorexia we get to see on other elite runways, but the whole point of Victoria’s Secret was that it once celebrated curvy derrieres and buxom decolletage.
Maybe Victoria’s Secret got what it wanted with the “inclusivity” of expelling voyeuristic male audiences, but I’m one woman who’s turned off from the brand for good, and should the stock continue to tumble, we’ll see I’m far from the only one.