If Victoria’s Secret is slowly dying, then it’s a happy end to a sorry tale that has only harmed women

It hasn’t been a great year for Victoria’s Secret.

First, the underwear brand was slammed for saying transgender models weren’t welcome, shortly after which the brand’s CEO, Jan Singer, left the company. In May it was announced that its annual catwalk show would no longer be broadcast on network television, and last week VS model Shanina Shaik floated the idea that the 2019 show would be cancelled entirely.

Now, the brand’s chief marketing officer Ed Razek – the man behind the fashion show – has resigned after 36 years at the company.

Back in November, Razek had responded to an interview question about whether the show should include transgender women, by saying: “No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy.” Razek was forced to issue an apology for the comment. Singer left soon after.

Now Razek himself has left just a week after the brand said it was loosening its archaic approach to transgender models, announcing Brazilian Valentina Sampaio as the latest hire for the athletic line, VS Pink. Posting about the news on Instagram, Sampaio told her followers to “never stop dreaming”.

Well that’s nice then, but Sampaio’s hire feels like a desperate shot in the dark at a time when the fickle fashion tide is quickly turning against the brand.

Victoria’s Secret isn’t the first desperate relic of the patriarchy clumsily trying to align itself with modern values though transgender virtue signalling. Playboy featured its first transgender model in 2017. In December last year, Miss Universe’s attempt to bait headlines to their favour by becoming the first ever pageant to include a transgender contestant was as transparent as the flimsy fabric on the contestant’s mesh bikinis.

Miss Spain – Angela Ponce – took to the stage in Bangkok at the 67th competition, and dissenters were apparently supposed to throw in the towel and accept defeat.

It’s desperately shameful that people who have gone through the trauma of sex reassignment surgery should now be expected to validate themselves by whether or not they can be degraded as much as cis women are expected to be. It is as if the ultimate marker of victory and acceptance is seeing yourself defined and celebrated based on how malnutrition and protein shakes have sculpted your body.

Launched in 1977 by couple Roy and Gaye Raymond, Victoria’s Secret was created to make lingerie shopping more comfortable for men seeking to buy for their wives. It was named after Queen Victoria, whom the couple associated with the utmost refinement.

Frankly, it’s difficult to imagine Victoria wearing a pink satin push-up underneath her mourning dress, and it’s even more the case today when the brand is as far from refinement as any could be – associated more with bleak airport terminal stalls, nauseatingly sweet perfume and tacky striped bags, than any sort of sophistication. The only thing that ever lent any sort of kudos to the brand were the big name models who proudly walked the plank for womankind at the catwalk show.

That annual display of semi-nude women dripping with diamonds, feathered wings and sequins, walking in impossibly vertiginous stilettos, push-up bras and thongs was only marginally elevated above a Las Vegas strip show by the likes of Karlie Kloss, Kendall Jenner, Gigi and Bella Hadid and Winnie Harlow.

But, when even those being paid a fortune to set womankind back decades are no longer interested, the death knell has surely been sounded. Kloss told Vogue last month that she didn’t think the brand was “truly reflective” of who she was and the “kind of message I want to send to young women around the world about what it means to be beautiful”. She had spent two years with the brand.

Viewing figures for the once must-see show have waned, too. It pulled in 9.7 million in 2013, 2017 saw this figure drop to 5 million and last year, just 3.3 million tuned in.

Ultimately, women don’t want to buy underwear designed by a brand with no care for whether an underwire jabs them in the ribs and that only serves to remind them that they don’t look like the women who sold it to them.

The VS models can claim it makes them feel empowered to walk down a catwalk in front of ogling men, but it achieves the opposite for every single woman watching or who spot the pictures and clips as they go about their day in the weeks that follow: it fuels a culture that burdens us with a beauty standard that despises us, that wants to see us imprisoned by their own insecurities.

So excuse me if I don’t shed a tear if this truly is the downfall for Victoria’s Secret. Instead I look forward eagerly to the female-helmed brands that will take its sorry place.