The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is back on the runway. The lingerie giant’s signature event returned to Los Angeles on Sunday, staging a celebration of the changing seasons that sent angel-winged models down the catwalk in elaborate flower-petal, snowflake and gleaming metallic creations.
The show marks another chapter in the brand’s ongoing reinvention. After years in which the televised fashion show was shelved amid criticism of its narrow beauty standards and shifting consumer tastes, Victoria’s Secret has been working to reposition the event as a more inclusive spectacle — and Sunday’s Los Angeles staging leaned into theatricality to make the case that the runway show still matters.
Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show: Four Seasons Theme
Adam Selman, the show’s executive creative director, told Reuters on the pink carpet ahead of the event that he built the production around the four seasons — and then went further. “I actually did the four seasons, and then I added in a second Winter spot,” Selman said, explaining a structure that let designers play with floral spring looks, sun-drenched summer pieces, autumn textures and not one but two winter segments.
The staging reflected that ambition. Models moved through distinct chapters of the show as the set, lighting and music shifted with the seasons, and the signature wings — some crafted from layered petals, others from crystalline snowflake forms — gave each segment its own visual identity. The metallic creations, worn in the closing passages, drew some of the loudest reactions from the audience.
A Brand Still Remaking Itself
The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show has not always looked like this. At its peak in the 2000s and early 2010s, the show was a television juggernaut, drawing millions of viewers and turning its models — the “Angels” — into household names. But by the late 2010s, ratings had collapsed and the brand faced sustained criticism for failing to evolve with broader conversations about body image and representation.
The company cancelled the show in 2019, and its return in recent years has been a careful exercise in rebranding: new casting, new creative leadership and an explicit effort to present a wider range of bodies and backgrounds on the runway. Sunday’s Los Angeles show continued that project, with the four-seasons concept serving as a metaphor for change that the brand’s marketing has leaned into heavily.
Whether the reinvention is winning over skeptics remains an open question. The brand’s financial results have stabilized after a difficult stretch, and executives have credited the revamped fashion show with helping to re-engage a younger audience. But the lingerie market is far more competitive than it was in the show’s heyday, with digital-native brands and inclusive upstarts fighting for the same customers.
What the Los Angeles Show Signals
Choosing Los Angeles as the venue was itself a statement. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show has historically rotated between New York, London, Paris and Shanghai, and the return to Los Angeles — the entertainment industry’s home turf — underscored the brand’s desire to fuse fashion with celebrity spectacle. The guest list reflected that ambition, with the pink carpet drawing figures from music, film and social media.
The production values were unmistakably those of a company spending to impress. Multiple set changes, a live musical component and the sheer scale of the wing constructions suggested a budget closer to the show’s glory days than its leaner recent editions. For a brand trying to convince the culture that its signature event deserves to exist again, spectacle is the argument.
The real test, as always, will be what happens after the lights go down. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show can generate a weekend of headlines; converting that attention into sustained sales is the harder job. But on Sunday night in Los Angeles, at least, the brand looked like it was enjoying the walk.
The economics of the modern fashion show have also shifted. Where the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show once existed primarily as a television broadcast, today’s edition is engineered for clips, social posts and streaming highlights — a content factory designed to feed the very platforms where its audience lives. The four-seasons spectacle in Los Angeles was built as much for the phone screen as for the front row.