Can Victoria’s Secret fix its image?

For Victoria’s Secret, that “more” started last year in an Ohio warehouse, where 28-year-old corset engineer Michaela Stark was let loose in the brand’s fashion show archives. The self-proclaimed “body morphing bitch” was there “to dismantle this whole idea of a Victoria’s Secret Angel” by recreating their most iconic outfits with rounder shapes and more rebellious – even downright weird – creative imagery. What’s more, the mega-brand was paying her to do it. 

Stark is one of the new “VS 20” collective of artists, activists and designers chosen to revamp the brand – and document the process for the upcoming Prime Video film. “The whole thing was pretty wild,” says Margot Bowman, the emerging director hired to capture her London peers – including Stark, plus artist Phoebe Collings-James and designer Supriya Lele – aiming to destroy old Victoria’s Secret tropes and build new ones.

Power of the brand

Like Wallis, Bowman came of age at the height of Victoria’s Secret’s take on female perfection. “I have an image of Gisele in the wings just burned in my brain,” she tells BBC Culture. She often felt excluded from the world that the brand fought so hard to create, and, she says, that’s exactly why she wanted to partner with the lingerie mainstay: “The fact that I can remember Victoria’s Secret Angels from 20 years ago, when I wasn’t even watching the show, that says a lot about the power of their brand platform,” she says. “So I was really excited to be in a position to create a new set of images – a new historical record that would be more inclusive… It was actually quite cathartic for me, finding a sense of peace in my body through the process… and I have to say, during the entire thing, the aspiration to be thin literally did not exist.”

The same sentiment was true even for Adriana Lima, an original Victoria’s Secret Angel who was once a literal poster-woman for the brand’s tanned-and-taut perfection. When the 42-year-old received a call from the brand to return to their fold, it was mere weeks after giving birth to her third child.

“I thought that wasn’t ever going to happen!” Lima says from her home in Los Angeles. “We did the shoot and it was a few months after I had my baby boy. You can see clearly in the pictures that I still had the baby weight on… I mean, let me tell you, I gained a lot of weight!… which is totally fine! But not usual [in a lingerie campaign], you know? I didn’t think at that stage it would be possible for me to model [lingerie]. But they embraced me no matter what.”