Earlier this week, nearly 3 million people tuned in to see the 2025 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. This fashion show is a high-profile catwalk event where nearly naked models and celebrities occupy the runway.
Like every year, celebrities like Adriana Lima, Gisele Bundchen, and sisters Gigi and Bella Hadid strutted in variations of the brand’s bejeweled bikinis and underwear sets. The runway stayed true to the label’s signature mix of fantasy and sensuality, with crystal-encrusted lingerie, lace corsets, satin bodysuits, and dramatic wings and capes that echoed the show’s early 2000s heyday. Each look combined oversized jewelry, feathered accessories, and glossy makeup to match the unmistakable Victoria’s Secret aesthetic of ultra-glam and spectacle that has long made the show a global pop culture staple.
This year’s event also featured several firsts. It marked the runway debut of professional athlete and WNBA star Angel Reese, who wore a custom floral lingerie set with feathered wings. Also, the first ever K-POP performance and the first Latin performance featuring South Korean groups TWICE and Karol G were also performed. Both moves were an effort to diversify Victoria’s Secret’s image and connect with younger audiences around the world.
With conversations about body positivity, inclusivity, and female objectification dominating the fashion industry, it’s surprising that events tied to a particular kind of glorified beauty are thriving. Although the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show continues to celebrate a highly stylized, one-dimensional vision of femininity, it still attracts millions of viewers and huge investments. The production remains a multi-million dollar undertaking, supported by sponsorships, celebrity partnerships and streaming deals.
So how did the lingerie parade, originally designed to promote the brand’s underwear and sleepwear collections, achieve the status of a cultural phenomenon? And along the way, there’s plenty of glitz, glitter and glamour…
exclusivity and spectacle
The key to Victoria’s Secret’s success is its branding and good old American showmanship. When the company held its first fashion show in 1995, it was simply a marketing tool to promote its lingerie and sleepwear collection. Unlike the modest displays of Paris and Milan, Victoria’s Secret realized that it could mass sell lingerie by selling the fantasy to millions of people watching from the comfort of their own homes, and quickly treated its runways more like theater stages than mere sales floors.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Victoria’s Secret built a mythology around its models and their images. An “angel” decorated with crystal wings became the center of the story. This consistent visual branding created something other fashion weeks lacked: continuity.
Paris, Milan and London value the individuality of designers. Victoria’s Secret provided a single, reproducible identity, amplified by its televised format. By moving to network primetime in 2001, the company transformed its retail promotions into worldwide broadcasts, featuring supermodels such as: Tyra Banks Gisele Bundchen walks with live performances by stars such as Justin Timberlake and Justin Timberlake taylor swift. The idea was to fuse fashion, pop music and mainstream entertainment.
So while the runways of Paris, Milan, and London speak to insiders, the Victoria’s Secret fashion show speaks directly to consumers, aiming to democratize fashion by inviting viewers to participate in a spectacle of aspiration rather than artistry.
This year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show drew about 3 million live viewers worldwide, but European fashion shows, including those at Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks, draw only a few hundred thousand livestream viewers per runway, relying more on press and social media reach than mass broadcast audiences.
In 2014, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show reached its climax. The show attracted more than 9 million viewers in the United States and was broadcast in nearly 200 countries, effectively turning a retail campaign into a global cultural export. Shortly after, in 2019, Plummeting viewer ratings and public backlash The company was forced to cancel a fashion show over the exclusion of plus-size and transgender models.
However, the resurgence in 2024 and 2025 is strong and shows that the brand is still strong. Victoria’s Secret & Company’s market capitalization was approximately USD 2.42 billion (EUR 2 billion) as of October 2025, and its gross profit margin was 36%, according to the latest report.
So while French and Italian houses define their power through rarity and tradition, Victoria’s Secret has built its influence through ubiquity and performance. Chanel and Dior could never risk turning their haute couture runways into pop concerts without compromising their own exclusivity. Victoria’s Secret, by contrast, operates in the mass-market sector, which thrives on name recognition.