Empowered or entrapped: What do Victoria’s Secret shows really mean for women?

Heels, hair and HOT! The secret formula that the Victoria Secret producers just recently rediscovered for their runway.

October 2025 saw the second return of Victoria’s Secret, following 2024’s disappointing attempt: largely due to the lack of bombshell blowouts, glittery stages and intricate wings. Though some just used this as an excuse to propagate hateful body image ideals… but safe to say pretty much everyone was disappointed in one way or another. 

Background on the shows:

The first show took place in August 1995, intimately hosted at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Its aim was to promote the brand and make lingerie more mainstream — breaking down the stigma around the sales. There was however, a conscious effort to illustrate the line as high-end, slightly unorthodox for what is ultimately, a ‘mall brand’. 

To gain a brand however, Victoria’s Secret had to introduce their ‘it factor’: taking form in their infamous angel wings. The first pair were worn by Tyra Banks in 1998, due to her prominence in the industry at the time and her title as one of the brands first official ‘Angels’ — playing a vital role in redefining the label from shopping centre to stardom. 

Nowadays, Victoria’s Secret shows are nothing short of a spectacle. Featuring celeb musical guests — creating pop culture moments such as Gisele Bündchen and Justin Timberlake, Bella Hadid and The Weeknd, cementing the show’s cultural relevance. Their elaborate wings can range from weighing between 40-60 pounds (such as Bella Hadid’s 50 pounds pair this month) or, for performance-based wings, about 5 pounds (as seen in Madison Beer’s final wings in this year’s show). 

Cut the cameras 

The main concern with these shows ultimately comes out once the show is over: the people the bodies walking the catwalk. 

There was an unexpected difference between male and female and female response to opinions on the impact of Victoria’s Secret shows on body image when asked on instagram. With female responses typically liking the show, expressing satisfaction with the “BETTER WINGS!!!” as one user commented, and others saying “it’s empowering because if you have the body for it, why not flaunt it?”. Which in the context of self-confidence is agreeable, if you love how you look, why not show it? But it begs the question if this is the way to do it, that if we hadn’t been exposed to this display of ‘self-love’, would this be our innate understanding of self-confidence — something we have to physically prove? You could also consider the idea of ‘the body’ as previously mentioned, and what that entails. It still fits the size of the expectation many women have outgrown as we strive to become more outspoken in the realities of women’s lives. That by still upholding an image of ‘the body’, we shrink back into the mould set by society.   

A male viewpoint offered that it “feeds into objectifying women and creates an unspoken understanding that all women look like that and wear underwear like that”. The emphasis on the subconscious ‘understanding of the female body’ is rarely touched on, considering its profound impact. As mentioned earlier, Victoria’s Secret being a mall-street brand whilst suggesting that all women wear intricate lace and leather on the regular, doesn’t really align itself consistently with this supposed aim of empowerment and reality. One response directly touched on this, saying “I think the aim of the show is more interesting, part of it has to be tradition and marketing focused. However recently it could be good to assess whether this has been morphed into an aim of empowerment. If the central focus of the show isn’t to empower women, then the aim must be more selfish.” 

Objection to the show is often stunted by discussions of ‘choice feminism’, the belief that any choice made by women is innately feminist, so long as it was done freely. This concept is however limited, as it disregards the influence the patriarchy bears on these decisions and offers a ‘one size fits all’ approach, ignoring the disparities in options for choice amongst women. So by adoring a show who’s leading figures make comments about how audiences have “no interest” in seeing plus-size models and resign over the hiring of transsexual models, are we empowering all women, or just our favourites? 

It’s a topic with nuance: what female empowerment truly is. And marketers are well aware of this uncertainty amongst audiences, and so present their product with reassurance of guaranteed ‘female power’. As pointed out by another instagram follower who argued that it’s “presented in the language of empowerment… and even if you had a body like that, would you want to use it to knowingly reinforce that hierarchy?” 

I’m not sure if there’s a clear answer to my initial question of whether women are empowered or entrapped, as the audience has shifted over time to now become predominantly female suggesting its successful reclamation. But can we excuse a spectacle founded on the basis of female insecurity and the perpetuation of harmful body image to the point of the brand’s cancellation in the late 2010s, for the purpose of ‘true fashion’ which conveniently overlaps with the recent return of ‘heroin chic’?