New branding or not, Victoria's Secret is still sexist

Lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret is best known for its longstanding commitment to creating lingerie by men, for men through ad campaigns and runway shows featuring small-waisted, large-breasted models in push-up bras and wings. In recent months, however, the company not only canceled its infamous annual fashion show, but also launched its first ad campaign featuring a plus size model. But the brand’s thinly veiled attempt to pivot to a “by her, for her” image after intense criticism and declining sales is unlikely to work.

Victoria’s Secret’s #MeToo-inspired ad effort seems particularly opportunist and disingenuous considering recent revelations that the brand’s parent company had executive ties to sex offender and serial abuser, Jeffrey Epstein. Leslie Wexner, CEO of Victoria’s Secret parent company, L Brands, employed Epstein as his financial advisor, entrusting Epstein with considerable control over his wealth and private life.  Posing as a Victoria’s Secret talent scout to recruit new victims for his sex crimes, Epstein capitalized on his not-so-secret connection to the brand, an association that recently appointed Victoria’s Secret CEO, John Mehas, cannot simply erase with new marketing.   

What’s more, why should consumers opt to buy products from a company that is still run by men when there are so many new women-led and -dominated underwear brands to choose from?  Companies like Knix, Negative Underwear, Evelyn & Bobbie, and Pepper are owned and operated by women in the context of a male-dominated industry. Two of these new brands, LIVELY and Adore Me, were actually founded by former Victoria’s Secret employees who had different visions from their mutual employer of how lingerie should function in women’s lives.  

Unlike Victoria’s Secret, these companies are also not synonymous with decades of sexist marketing campaigns and imagery.  Brand history matters, and since it was founded in 1977, Victoria’s Secret has consistently placed men’s desires and interests above those of the women they were supposed to serve. Its misogynistic aesthetic of painfully thin, conventionally attractive women was the perfect counter to new eras of women empowered by the feminist movement — many of whom consciously rejected traditional, patriarchal notions of fashion and beauty.  

In fact, the rise of Victoria’s Secret occurred alongside rising rates of anorexia nervosa and bulimia in the 1970s and 1980s. As author Naomi Wolf argued in her 1990 book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, “women’s advances had begun to give them … high self-esteem, a sense of effectiveness, activity, courage, and clarity of mind. ‘Prolonged and periodic caloric restriction’ is a means to take the teeth out of this revolution.”  

Eating disorders remain the deadliest of all mental health disorders, and females ages 15 through 24 diagnosed with anorexia are 12 times more likely to die from the disease than by any other cause of death.  

Victoria’s Secret experienced decades of financial growth and success thanks to this misogynistic marketing approach, and if its financial decline now means the detrimental and sexist standards of beauty it promoted fade into oblivion with it, that will be a good thing for American women. Because the truth is Victoria’s Secret could care less if they’ve hurt women.  Their decision to launch an ad campaign that more accurately represents their consumers comes only after those consumers stopped reaching into their pocketbooks and buying the brand’s bras. If Victoria’s Secret had any regard for the women whose purchases have padded its wallet, it wouldn’t have waited until its market share declined to respond to years of criticism.  Women deserve brands that don’t just pander to women, but that are created by women. They deserve companies that understand merely including more types of women in sex-objectifying marketing campaigns and advertisements is not progress — that the issue is not that brands too narrowly define the types of women they are willing to objectify, but that they are sexually objectifying women for profit at all. It’s time for inclusive, feminist brands and, for companies like Victoria’s Secret, that means “time’s up.”      

As author bell hooks writes in her 2000 book, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics: “Until feminists go back to the beauty industry, go back to fashion, and create an ongoing sustained revolution.  We will not be free. We will not know how to love our bodies as ourselves.”