Remember watching Victoria’s Secret commit suicide a few years ago after it decided to go woke with transvestite models and chubby models and aging models and fat guys in the place of the astonishing beauties that appealed to Normal People and made Victoria’s Secret a household name?
Back in 2023, the stock price had nose-dived to less than $15.00. Today, after bringing back classic beauty, the stock sits at over $70.00.
Why?
Simple.
Victoria’s Secret stopped polluting its ads and catalogues with pictures of ugly people in lingerie. Hey, I’m not being mean. No one wants to see me in a Speedo. Victoria’s Secret is supposed to be something special, about astonishments on the runway, about a fairytale of wish-fulfillment — not Gladys from Walmart or Chuck, the creepy barista in the Harley Quinn t-shirt with one red fingernail.
Funny how this works:
In 2021, the stock had cratered from $57 to barely $20 a share on a good day. Once the arbiter of all things sexy, with diamond-encrusted bras and winged angels, Victoria’s Secret’s brand was being buried under all things unsexy.
…
Rigid beauty standards defined Victoria’s Secret in the peak of its mid-aughts glory, with girls watching rows of extra-small, tanned models at the annual fashion show. But as millennials came of age and embraced a new era of body positivity, Victoria’s Secret struggled to rebrand. Their attempts — including a splashy rollout of accomplished celebrity women advisors meant to promote female empowerment — were too on-the-nose, widely dismissed as “woke-washing.” They failed to win back the shoppers who had left, and didn’t attract younger ones either.
Victoria’s Secret was so lost that it hired Megan Rapinoe as a brand ambassador. That’d be like me becoming a brand ambassador for CNN or Disney.
And so, like all things woke, the company hurtled towards bankruptcy. Then, in August of 2024, Hillary Super was hired as CEO, and she righted the ship with the brilliant idea of going back to what worked.
“VSXY” is the company’s new stock symbol as of this week. The old one was VSCO, and the change confirmed the company’s commitment to normalcy enough to give investors confidence.
“VSXY is recognizable and aligns with our strategy and the progress we’ve made. It reflects our conviction and confidence in this work,” Super bragged. “We’re owning who we are, and we’re proud of it.”
And here it is.
The fantasy is back:
Yes, some find fat people sexy. Some find tranvestites sexy. I get that. But those attractions are called a fetish. Normal People not only don’t find that sexy, they find it icky, and since the world is made up mostly of Normal People, Victoria’s Secret had a choice: Did it want to be a fetish outlet or a mainstream outlet?
This whole stupid and creepy crusade had nothing to do with platforming underrepresented beauty. Rather, the Woke Gestapo were hoping to gaslight, bully, and shame us into lying, into pretending that something icky was normal and sexy. They wanted to exhaust and demoralize us. That’s what fascists do. Thankfully, this is still a free country, so Normal People were able to speak up and protest through slumping sales and a dead-cat stock price.