Victoria's Secret: retiring the Angels, then bringing them back on new terms

For two decades the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was the brand’s main stage: a televised runway of models known as Angels, in wings and lingerie, with pop stars performing between the walks. The last show of that era was staged in November 2018. The show was then paused, amid criticism of its lack of diversity, falling viewing figures and a long decline in the brand’s sales and market share. On 16 June 2021 the company announced that it was retiring the Angels and replacing them with the VS Collective, a group of seven women that included the footballer Megan Rapinoe, the actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas and the skier Eileen Gu. Its chief executive at the time said the brand needed to stop being about what men want and be about what women want. Later that year Victoria’s Secret was spun off from L Brands as an independent company.

On 15 October 2024 the show came back in New York, its first in almost six years. Tyra Banks, Adriana Lima, Candice Swanepoel and Alessandra Ambrosio returned, alongside Gigi and Bella Hadid, Kate Moss and Carla Bruni, the first models over fifty to walk the show, and an all-female line-up of performers that included Cher. Hillary Super, previously chief executive of Savage X Fenty, had taken over as CEO in September 2024, and a second show followed in October 2025. In the second quarter of 2025 sales rose 3%, while the share price had fallen sharply over the year and analysts warned that one good quarter did not make a recovery.

A value and its carrier

The Value to Market method distinguishes between a value and the source that carries it. Victoria’s Secret had long sold one value above the others: glamour, the feeling of being desirable and a little extraordinary. For years the Angels and the show carried that value. Then the environment flipped the sign on the carrier. By the late 2010s a televised parade of models in wings, staged for an implicitly male gaze, read as dated to many of the women who actually bought the products.

When a carrier becomes a liability, a brand has two broad options. It can drop the value along with the carrier and adopt a new one, or it can keep the value pinned and move it onto a carrier the new environment accepts. The second move is what the books call Value Swapping: keep the meaning, renew the starting point.

2021 changed the value

The VS Collective was a sincere repositioning, and it brought in admired women. It also replaced glamour with a different value, achievement and empowerment, a territory other brands already occupied. The 2021 move changed the value along with its carrier, and many customers came to the brand for the value. It is hard to isolate the effect of a campaign from the pandemic years, the spin-off and competition from younger lingerie brands, and we would not claim to. The visible result is that the company did not keep the Collective as the face of the brand, and three years later it returned to the runway.

2024 swapped the carrier

The returning show reads much closer to a textbook swap. The value on stage was again glamour, with the wings, the music and the spectacle. The carrier had been rebuilt around it: women in their fifties next to women in their twenties, a cast of performers who were all women, and a stated intention to reflect who the brand is today. The meaning stayed constant and the source of it changed, which is the move the 2021 relaunch skipped.

A swap carries its own risk, and the books name it: confusion. When the new carrier looks too much like the old one, the people who needed the difference can miss it, and part of the audience may read the 2024 show as a simple return to the past. Whether the swap holds will show in the sales of the next few years more than in the reviews of one evening.

The broader point concerns diagnosis. When a symbol stops working, the first question is whether the value it carried is still wanted. If it is, the job is to find a new carrier for it. Telling the two cases apart is the kind of reading we train your team to make before a rebrand is briefed.