Victoria’s Secret CEO says Gen Z didn’t grow up with 2000s body image baggage

Younger shoppers seem unabashed in their love of the spectacle and sparkle, the glamour of the lingerie, notes CEO Hillary Super. Formerly CEO of Anthropologie and competitor Savage X Fenty, she joined the company in the fall of 2024 after several ill-fated attempts to change the narrative surrounding the once hot brand. And though Victoria’s Secret had previously ditched its runway show, Super has re-energized it.

The Gen Z customer watching the new version of the show today didn’t grow up with the body image trauma of the 2000s like millennials did. She was raised by a Gen X mom who tried not to pass on her own body issues, who wanted her daughter to be “strong and unbothered by all that noise,” Super notes. Gen Z can appreciate the fun of the Victoria’s Secret Angels without necessarily seeing them as aspirational—or triggering.

That shift in attitude is central to Victoria’s Secret’s comeback strategy under Super, who calls the company “the biggest transformation opportunity in retail.” In October 2025, she watched a year of work culminate in the brand’s revived fashion show at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios. “Lights, Camera, Angels,” flashed on the screen before the room went dark. The show opened with model Jasmine Tookes, ethereal in gold wings and cradling her nine-months pregnant belly—a body that would never have appeared on the runway in the brand’s earlier era.

The crowd loved longtime Angels like Adriana Lima, now in her mid-forties and a mother of five; next-gen supers Bella and Gigi Hadid; curve models including Ashley Graham and Precious Lee; and athletes like WNBA star Angel Reese and Olympic gymnast Suni Lee.

For Super, the renewed wings, sequins, and towering heels aren’t a retreat from progress but a recalibration. “I don’t think, as women, we ever stopped wanting to feel beautiful or sexy or powerful in our own skin,” she says. “But we want to define that. We don’t want someone else defining that for us.”

For more on how Super is turning around this iconic brand, read the full story here.