In 2018, where does Victoria’s Secret stand?
The push-up bra may be finally going the way of the corset.
The news this week that Jan Singer, the C.E.O. of Victoria’s Secret Lingerie was stepping down — this after a P.R. crisis over transphobic remarks made by another executive — was just the latest hit to a brand that has been in steady decline for years.
The marketing of Victoria’s Secret has been nothing if not consistent. The company’s fashion show this month, complete with skinny models, push-up bras, thongs and strappy stilettos, was a near carbon copy of the one it first mounted in 1995, albeit with more feathers, sequins and wings. And its adherence to that vision of sexy will not be compromised. Not by those who criticise the whole affair as sexist, nor by the slew of new bra start-ups that offer products meant for comfort and ease, nor even by the women abandoning Victoria’s Secret to shop elsewhere.
Victoria’s Secret is still the leading U.S. lingerie brand, but its share of the market is falling rapidly. Sales are sagging and the company’s stock is down 41 percent this year. In a September 2017 consumer study conducted by Wells Fargo, 68 percent of respondents said they liked Victoria’s Secret less than they used to and 60 percent said they think the brand feels “forced” or “fake.”
“Victoria’s Secret is losing share to other brands because it’s out of touch,” said Paul Lejuez, a retail analyst at Citi who follows L Brands. “The way it’s marketing is out of touch. Women don’t want to be viewed as stereotypical sexy supermodels buying lingerie just to impress men.”
The “Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show” on television hasn’t fared well either. It has shed nearly half of its total viewers in five years.
Consider: In 2013, when the show was still something of an event, it drew an audience of 9.7 million viewers, bigger numbers that night than NBC’s airing of “The Voice.” Last year, the show drew an audience of only five million, about three million fewer viewers than tuned into CBS’s broadcast of the holiday classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” two hours earlier.
On Tuesday, Jan Singer, the chief executive of Victoria’s Secret lingerie division, the company’s flagship brand, resigned. Denise Landman, the chief executive officer of PINK, the company’s athleisure division, will also step down at the end of 2018. (Both executives reported to Leslie Wexner, the chairman and chief executive of L Brands.)
Ed Razek, the chief marketing officer of L Brands, made headlines this month as well, when, in an interview with Vogue, he expressed disinterest in the idea of casting plus size and transgender models in Victoria’s Secret shows.
“Why don’t you do 50?” Mr. Razek said, referring to garment sizing. “Why don’t you do 60? Why don’t you do 24? It’s like, why doesn’t your show do this? Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in the show? No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy. It’s a 42-minute entertainment special. That’s what it is.”
The response on social media was swift and furious. Mr. Razek walked his statement back the following day, saying that his comment “came across as insensitive” and that “we absolutely would cast a transgender model for the show.”
But the outrage continued. “My message to Victoria’s Secret is: Challenge accepted,” wrote Teddy Quinlivan, a trans model, on Instagram. The plus-size model Tess Holliday tweeted: “Who needs VS anyway?!”
Sara Lynn Michener, 39, stopped shopping at Victoria’s Secret about 10 years ago. She said she was frustrated by the seemingly inexperienced sales people, the overwhelming “pinkness” of the brand and the inauthentic “glamazon images” in the store. She now mostly buys her bras online and at Nordstrom, environments that are mostly free of the sexed-up imagery that makes Victoria’s Secret the store it is.
Other women have decamped to new underwear start-ups that offer comfort, relatability and pareddown style. They include ThirdLove, which was started by a former product manager at Google in 2014; True and Co, which offers a quiz to help customers determine their bra size; Knix, a Canadian brand that employs patented bonded technology to keep sweat and leaks from seeping through undergarments; and Savage x Fenty, Rihanna’s popular new brand.