Victoria’s Secret: The Marketing Cost of Killing the Fantasy

A year ago, we asked whether Victoria’s Secret had found its way out of the woke woods. The numbers suggest its comeback is working. But this week’s casting row raises a familiar question: has the brand forgotten what its customers wanted in the first place?

Romee Strijd was a Victoria’s Secret Angel from 2015 until the fashion shows stopped in 2018. This summer, she trained for the brand’s return, attended auditions in September and waited. The answer was that she was “not the right fit for this year’s show”.

Her TikTok about the rejection has attracted more than 3,000 comments, many questioning why an established Angel was overlooked. “You ARE the show,” wrote one fan. On X, another complained about the decision to choose social media stars over professional models. Frida Aasen and Lais Ribeiro have also said they weren’t selected. When a brand built around a distinctive identity starts changing the people who embody it, customers may begin to question what that identity actually is.

The comeback worked

Under CEO Hillary Super, Victoria’s Secret has returned to glamour and spectacle after years of trying to reposition itself. Super has spoken of achieving diversity “without being performative”, and the financial results suggest the change in direction is paying off.

First-quarter net sales rose 15% to $1.56 billion. Second-quarter profit nearly tripled, gross margin increased by 320 basis points and full-year guidance was raised. New customer growth reached double digits, led by Gen Z, while the brand gained share among 18 to 24-year-olds.

The lesson is not that inclusivity was the problem, or that brands should ignore changing expectations. It is that Victoria’s Secret had lost sight of what made it distinctive. Customers were not simply buying lingerie. They were buying into a world of glamour, fantasy and spectacle that the brand had spent years building.

Its recovery suggests that world still has an audience. The question is whether Victoria’s Secret understands what made it appealing, or whether it is about to dilute it again.

When everyone is an Angel

The 2026 show combines established models with a “Angels Among Us” series, which has attracted more than 100,000 applicants, and a creator programme of more than 16,000 members. The brand has also moved its broadcast from Amazon to YouTube, which Super describes as a more “democratic” way to reach younger consumers.

As marketing, the logic is clear. Open castings generate publicity, creators spread content and YouTube offers access to new audiences. The casting search alone has reportedly generated 1.7 billion impressions.

But reach is not the same as desire. Victoria’s Secret can encourage thousands of people to participate in its world without making every participant the face of it. There is a difference between inviting customers into a brand community and changing the identity that attracted them in the first place.

The Angels were never just models. They were recognisable figures at the centre of a carefully constructed fantasy, made distinctive by the show, the styling and the status attached to being selected. Their appeal lay partly in being exceptional. If the distinction between the Angel and the brand advocate disappears, Victoria’s Secret risks making its most recognisable symbol less meaningful.

The Jaguar lesson

Jaguar offers a useful parallel. In late 2024, the carmaker launched its “Copy Nothing” rebrand with a new logo and an advertisement that showed no cars. The campaign generated attention, but also questions about whether the company had lost sight of the people who bought its products and the identity they valued.

Customers do not necessarily want brands to remain frozen in time. But reinvention becomes a problem when it loses the connection between what a company wants to say about itself and what its customers value about it.

Victoria’s Secret has already learned this lesson once. Its retreat from the image that made it famous failed to deliver the cultural relevance it sought, leaving the brand years of work to rebuild its appeal. The return to glamour suggests it has recognised what was missing. The current casting debate raises the possibility that it is once again prioritising reach and participation over the qualities that made the brand desirable.

Know your audience

Victoria’s Secret does not need to abandon its creator programme or open castings. It needs to understand their purpose. They can build engagement and introduce new audiences to the brand, but that does not mean every marketing initiative should redefine its central identity.

The reaction to Strijd’s rejection is a crucial reminder that customers have expectations shaped by years of brand storytelling, and that those expectations cannot be rewritten simply because a new approach generates impressive engagement figures.

Victoria’s Secret has made a promising commercial recovery. Its next challenge is to avoid confusing popularity with brand loyalty, or accessibility with desirability. Like Jaguar, it risks becoming so focused on what it wants its brand to represent that it forgets to ask what customers wanted it to represent in the first place.