Bloomberg 专栏唱多维密品牌复苏，但无新增财务事实，属评论性软文

Not so long ago, it was pretty easy to write off Victoria’s Secret as another past-its-prime mall brand destined for the dustbin of history. After a triumphant run through the skinny, low-rise, body-glittered aughts, the lingerie retailer stumbled as cultural and commercial tides turned in the 2010s. Its narrow vision of sexiness clashed with the rise of body-positive marketing, and its padded pushups were usurped by millennials’ preferred wire-free bralettes. Top executive Les Wexner’s close ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein became a stain on the brand. Victoria’s Secret canceled its once-popular televised runway show in 2019, after its creator and longtime Chief Marketing Officer Ed Razek retired under public pressure over comments about excluding plus-size and trans models from the runway. By 2020 the pandemic-era demand for comfort seemed like it might lock Victoria’s Secret into a death spiral. Curve-embracing upstarts such as Kim Kardashian’s Skims and Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty looked poised to take over the lingerie mass market.

Over the past year, though, such prognostications have started to feel foolish, and never more so than they do right now, in the afterglow of the brand’s once-again-annual runway show on Sunday, which initially returned to television in 2024. The event was a mix of aughts nostalgia and current pop culture, with many of the brand’s most famous Angels — Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, Elsa Hosk — returning to winged duty, alongside zoomer favorites such as Gigi and Bella Hadid, Tate McRae and the pop group Katseye. Kylie Jenner walked the runway in a reboot of one of the company’s favorite old gimmicks: a diamond-encrusted bra worth a purported $50 million. The show also included a tad more body diversity than it had during its original run, as it has every year since its relaunch — contra to Razek’s theory, the inclusion of a handful of plus-size and trans models doesn’t really affect the product at all.

In 2024 the company hired former Anthropologie and Savage X Fenty Chief Executive Officer Hillary Super to be its new leader. Super has overseen a stark reversal of the brand’s fortunes: Foot traffic has returned, discounting has decreased, and year-over-year revenue is up for five consecutive quarters. Most recently the company announced it would put its weight behind a revival of Pink, its once-mighty offshoot offering cheeky undies and loungewear to a target demographic of 18- to 24-year-olds. It was a $3 billion-a-year business on its own at its 2018 height. Pink has already seen its fortunes improve through a popular series of collaborations, which have put the logos of colleges and NFL teams on its tanks and sweats, among others.

Super’s moves have been operationally savvy, but the company’s revival has also benefited from a number of outside factors. One is that teens and twentysomethings these days very much enjoy going to the mall — perhaps even more so than their elders — where they’re likely to encounter one of the brand’s more than 700 black-and-pink-clad American stores. Another is that bras are Victoria’s Secret’s biggest and most important product category, and they’re notoriously difficult for consumers to size and select. That drives people into stores to try them on, including many of the same shoppers who long ago decided that online options work just fine for jeans or sneakers. Competitors like Skims have begun to experiment with brick-and-mortar, but they’ll likely never reach the broad accessibility of the Victoria’s Secret fleet on a pure numbers basis. Bras’ inherent trickiness as products has also given the company a durable edge over upstart competitors in design and manufacturing. Its competitors have had to deal with fresh issues in fabrication and sourcing that industry incumbents long ago ironed out in their development and supply chains.

Maybe, though, what’s aided Super’s efforts the most has been time — time for the controversy to die down and the company to recalibrate, and time for people to test out its competitors and find them wanting. In some sense the Victoria’s Secret backlash was both correct and inevitable: The brand had lost touch with its customers. How Victoria’s Secret responded to that backlash was also, in its own way, demonstrative of how tenuous its grasp on a changing culture had become. Even then, it should have been clear to the company that women didn’t want or need activists to sell them panties — yes, something Victoria’s Secret actually tried — but they did need a few more band sizes and a vision of sexiness that felt more modern.

Ultimately that’s what Victoria’s Secret has settled into over the past two years. Its products now serve a greater range of mall-going Americans, who, as it turns out, just wanted to feel sexy in their moderately priced underthings this whole time.