Victoria’s Secret doesn’t just want to sell you a bra this Valentine’s Day—it wants to sell you an escape hatch from a world that feels a little too difficult. CEO Hillary Super argues that after years of cultural heaviness, the lingerie giant is finding its footing again by leaning back into glamour, glitter, and unapologetic fantasy—this time on women’s terms.
Super, the first woman to run the company in its current form, is blunt about how flat things had gotten. For years, Victoria’s Secret tried to outrun its legacy of hyper‑narrow beauty standards with cautious rebrands and empowerment slogans that critics derided as box‑checking. The brand stopped bragging about what it did well—like bra fittings—and dialed down the theatrics that once made it appointment viewing. “We were living in a beige world for a while,” she reflects in her downtown Manhattan office, where Victoria’s Secret’s maximalism is reflected in nearby leopard-print lingerie.
