Ever since the comeback of the iconic Victoria’s Secret Runway shows in 2024, after a six-year hiatus in December of 2018, people have struggled to reshape the image that the brand has tried so hard to keep on trend. In the 2000s, the very idea of a Victoria’s Secret “Angel” was surrounded by the mystique and untouchable energy of a woman skinny enough to cut you with her bones. It was the prime example of chic and sensuality, and it was lingerie turned high-fashion, accompanied by nine-inch heels and 10-inch hair blowouts.

This was the era of celebrity guests like Shawn Mendes, Maroon 5, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, and many other recognizable household names. It was the perfect mix of enough glamour and glitz that people overlooked the controversies that kept this thriving enterprise alive, with just enough scandal here and there to make it seem like a cultural event rather than a parade of unattainable bodies. But, this facade of perfection quickly fell apart. All of a sudden, women started to realise that the very ideal of the lingerie itself could only attain to a certain archetype of woman, with a certain cinch in her waist and a knack to pull it all off, with just the right amount of dollars in her pocket to spare. When women, rightfully so, started calling out the unattainability of the secret that the brand was so desperately trying to keep exclusive, the glitz could no longer cover it all up.

That was when the shimmer started to dull. What was once marketed as aspirational began to look like a relic of a controversial past: a glossy fossil of an era that worshiped sameness under the guise of beauty, and one that survived under the impression that everybody would always want to attain that standard. The “Angels” were no longer celestial; they were symbols of the fashion industry that refused to evolve. It was no longer empowering for women and younger girls who looked up to them to see bodies that looked more like blueprints than people and pretend that all of that was just as easy as buying a matching set. The public had changed their gaze, and the fantasy cracked under the obvious weight of reality, as well as the shift in society towards the language people used to talk about their bodies.

By the time Victoria’s Secret tried to rebrand and introduce a more inclusive vision to cope with this cultural shift, the reaction was not rejection so much as recalibration. People wanted to celebrate the change, but the truth is that the excitement never reached the same fever pitch it once had. When the runway filled with more diverse and realistic figures, the applause somehow got quieter and the coverage more restrained, as if the cultural energy that once fuelled the spectacle had already been spent elsewhere. I want to make it very clear that it is not that the inclusivity was not appreciated or hailed as a rightful direction that the fashion industry should have taken ages ago. It just was not held up to the same standard that the old glamour once was, considering the amount of mixed reactions of the most recent runway show this brought up, it was clear that something in the drafting room did not land the way it wanted to with the public.

When I take on the lens of criticism towards Victoria’s Secret as both a brand identity and a fashion house, it is important to distinguish between the subjectivity of clothes in terms of fit and expectation of style versus the objective truth that all bodies should be considered beautiful and worthy of representing themselves on a platform. The recent runways have been an interesting shift - not because of diversity, but because of how the brand itself is approaching it. On their best day, Victoria’s Secret has championed the ‘natural’ body look, and has incorporated changes such as the VS collective – a group of diverse women athletes, activists as ambassadors – and extending their sizing range to an XXL, taking into consideration the 68% of women who wear clothes size 16 and up. Yet, even with those changes in place, and everything looking like it is heading in the right direction, Victoria’s Secret still falls short on a very important component of what makes a show iconic: the ‘it’ factor that it needs to exist outside of just being a runway.

What people loved about the Victoria’s Secret runway shows of the 2000s was not only the addictive air of unattainable beauty, but also the amount of production put into place to complement the models so well, placing them on an even higher pedestal. They were selling a fantasy, and they were doing a great job at making it look like one. Because it is not enough to place the model on the runway, you have to make her walk her walk in a space littered with enough glamour, from lighting to the lingerie itself, and even the set decor, to make it seem like there is an iridescent shimmer in the air, rose-tinting everybody’s glasses, until there are hearts in their eyes.

Even when audiences knew how curated and constructed it all was, the spectacle felt effortless. That was the whole point of the spell from the get-go. The brand convinced viewers that these moments were not manufactured at all, but rather the natural state of those chosen bodies, albeit in an extremely limited range of sizes. In contrast, the newer shows, while admirable in their attempts at broader representation and more grounded storytelling, still struggle to recreate the same cultural pull that cements them as truly iconic. Inclusion alone cannot substitute for perfected vision, and a runway cannot rely solely on sincerity to carry a fantasy, one which once thrived on the very craft of myth-making. The shift is not a failure of diversity. It is simply a failure of well-executed imagination. The spectacle that once defined Victoria’s Secret has been traded for something unsure of its own purpose, suspended between the grey area of reclaiming the past, while simultaneously trying to reinvent the present. Without a clear aesthetic direction, the lingerie becomes secondary instead of symbolic, and the show loses the very narrative power that once made it feel like a cultural event. It is what made some of the 2025 looks feel flat and incomplete, almost as if put together by another brand entirely. When visual language becomes blurry, it is the brand’s fault, not the body’s.

To evolve, Victoria’s Secret has to find a way to embrace broader beauty standards while crafting a world that feels aspirational, dramatic, and intentional. Otherwise, nostalgia will remain the only thing keeping the runway alive, and the problem with that is nostalgia can only carry it on its back for so long before it starts distorting into a remembrance funeral of what it once was.