GET WOKE, GO…: Victoria’s Secret Bet On Megan Rapinoe, Woke Marketing Push Miserably Backfires.
Highlighted in a Fox Business report, Victoria’s Secret got slammed in its revenue projections for 2023, based on a streak of progressive, inclusive marketing.
From hosting bizarre VS runway shows (never thought you’d hear that) to highlighting biological men as female models, Victoria’s Secret quickly lost touch with the clothing empire it built.
Without much of a strategy, Victoria’s Secret went woke and is in danger of going broke.
What was once a mindless store fit to offer gifts for a wife or girlfriend became an ideas dartboard for woke Victoria’s Secret execs to fire at. And it failed.
The Fox Business report stated that Victoria’s Secret intends to ditch its new woke shell and go back to “sexiness.” Which is good news for all.
Indeed.
Victoria’s Secret bet on Megan Rapinoe, trans models and fat chicks to sell lingerie. Turns out it was a total woke disaster, sales collapsed, and now they are going back to hot chicks. https://t.co/GY8d2Blca3
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 18, 2023
Flashback: Leave Supermodels Alone!
The other night, after I’d had a little too much of this world, I decided to bathe in cleansing waters and scour my soul by watching the new E! True Hollywood Story episode on Victoria’s Secret. (Yes, I know. Life is sad.)
Best I can tell, this investigative blockbuster was largely derived from a New York Times story from last year, subtly headlined, “Angels in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret.” The gory particulars of both the article and the E! documentary were enough to curl your hair, not unlike the bouncy locks of former VS model Jill Goodacre (a Victoria’s Secret OG). There were harrowing tales of handsy, lecherous executives, and of models getting ready for Objectification Fest (the once-hallowed Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show) by eating an apple a day with no sides. Ed Razek, the former chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret’s then parent company, L Brands, was so creepy, that he kept company with Jeffrey Epstein, the latter of whom posed as a Victoria’s Secret recruiter. It was all genuinely awful.
But perhaps most unsettling of all, according to the ominous narration, VS didn’t show a commitment to diversity of body types (women, you may have heard, come in all shapes and sizes!), and they continued to “market a standard of beauty that customers found male, stale, and hopelessly out of touch.” (Just imagine a woman so deluded, that she’d try to make herself attractive to a man while performing the sacred fourth-wave feminist rite of buying lingerie.) After hearing this last bit, I sat there in stone silence for what felt like hours, but was probably just a few minutes or so, until E! aired another rerun of The Bradshaw Bunch, in which former NFL great Terry Bradshaw “still stinging from their embarrassing loss last year…..coaches the family for a repeat appearance on Celebrity Family Feud.”
I hurt for my supermodel sisters. I asked a lot of unanswerable questions like, “Why, God, why?” Then I asked one last question, which you’re not supposed to utter in public: “Whatever happened to skinny, beautiful models, and will they be coming back any time soon?”
As Iowahawk likes to say:
