Victoria’s Secret is doing away with Angels and bringing soccer star Megan Rapinoe, actress Priyanka Chopra and others on board instead.
“When the world was changing, we were too slow to respond,” Martin Waters, the chief executive of the brand, told The New York Times in an article published Wednesday. “We needed to stop being about what men want and to be about what women want.”
Victoria’s Secret is getting rid of its Angels and wings. The company has hired new representatives — including soccer star Megan Rapinoe and actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas — as it tries to conduct one of the most extreme brand turnarounds in recent memory. https://t.co/tdP4s3cCNM
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 16, 2021
The brand is hiring a list of spokeswomen not to model the brand’s lingerie, but to promote the brand through podcast and other marketing materials, according to Page Six. That list includes Rapinoe, Chopra, model Adut Akech, skier Eileen Gu, transgender model Valentina Sampaio, plus-size model Paloma Elesser and journalist Amanda de Cadenet, the outlet reported. (RELATED: Here’s How Many People Watched The 2018 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show)
The group will be featured in a 10-episode podcast where they will each share their own story.
“I’ve known that we needed to change this brand for a long time, we just haven’t had the control of the company to be able to do it,” Waters told The New York Times. “In the old days, the Victoria brand had a single lens, which was called ‘sexy.'”
Rapinoe doesn’t believe “sexy” has a single lens either.
“As a gay woman, I think a lot about what we think is sexy, and we are afforded the ability to do that, because I don’t have to wear the traditional sexy thing to be sexy and I don’t think the traditional thing is sexy when it comes to my partner or people I’ve dated,” Rapinoe told the outlet. “I think functionality is probably the sexiest thing we could possibly achieve in life. Sometimes just cool is sexy too.”
Victoria’s Secret hasn’t had a fashion show since 2018, effectively cancelling the 2019 show and not having another for the past two years.
