The Bra Was the Culture: A Victoria’s Secret Coming-of-Age Story

Michelle Chung

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I was fifteen the first time someone invited me to a sleepover that didn’t turn out to be about sleeping.

I had freshly moved to the US from Asia, and everything that year was a translation. The language, obviously. But also smaller things — how to stand in a group of girls without looking like you were waiting for permission to be there. What to wear so you didn’t stick out like a sore thumb. How to laugh at the right moment in a conversation happening too fast to fully catch.

Somewhere in 2006, mid-conversation, it became normal to switch outfits, talk about boys, debate what was trending. Five girls lounging around a bedroom, half-dressed, completely unbothered, everyone in Victoria’s Secret without anyone announcing it. It was just what you wore.

I remember sitting very still. I understood, in that moment, that I was witnessing something — a kind of ease with the body, with each other, with being seen, that I did not yet have the language for. The bras were the proof that you belonged, that you were one of them, that you had crossed some invisible line into a version of American girlhood I had only watched from outside.

The brand stitched into all of those bra tags was Victoria’s Secret. And in that bedroom, in that year, it might as well have been the whole culture.

Victoria’s Secret, Then: When Wings Meant Everything

It is hard to overstate how total Victoria’s Secret‘s grip on American girlhood was in the 2000s. The Angels were not just models — they were the aspirational shorthand for an entire decade’s idea of femininity. Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, Adriana Lima, Gisele Bündchen — names that teenage girls knew the way earlier generations knew movie stars. The annual Fashion Show was appointment television, watched by tens of millions, an actual cultural event built around wings, rhinestones, and a runway full of women who embodied a very specific and very aspirational idea of beauty.

The PINK sub-brand existed specifically to catch you earlier — sweatpants with words across the back, dog logo, the first “grown-up” underwear most American teenagers owned. Owning it was not really about the product. It was about the membership card it represented (yes, my friends and I owned multiple pairs. This too, was my path into American girlhood).

This was, by most honest accounts, a complicated era for the brand and for the girls who grew up inside its marketing. The beauty standard was narrow. The culture around it, in retrospect, asked a lot of very young women. But it was also, undeniably, the thing — the shared reference point, the brand that made femininity feel like something to celebrate rather than hide. Whether you participated in it or watched from the outside, the way I did at that sleepover, it was impossible to be a teenage girl in America in the 2000s and not feel its pull.

Victoria’s Secret, Now: Sexy, Redefined

The story does not end in 2014, when the brand was named the most popular apparel label in the world. What came after was a period of real reflection — the brand listening, evolving, making some bold choices along the way. The original Angels stepped back. The wings were retired for a time. Victoria’s Secret was genuinely reckoning with what it wanted to be next.

But brands, like people, get to evolve past their worst and best years simultaneously. By 2025, under new CEO Hillary Super, Victoria’s Secret made a different choice — not a return to the old formula, but a more honest synthesis of it. The Fashion Show came back in October 2025, broadcast on Prime Video, with original Angels Gigi Hadid and Adriana Lima walking again alongside a new generation, performances from KAROL G and Missy Elliott, a lineup that felt less like nostalgia and more like an actual reckoning with what the brand could still mean.

This June, the company changed its ticker symbol to VSXY — a quiet but deliberate signal of where it’s going. Their own language now: “sexy in all its forms — not one look or one definition, but a feeling every woman owns for herself.” It embodies a different premise than the one that defined my sleepover in 2000-whatever. Sexy as something you are handed, versus sexy as something you decide for yourself.

The brand that helped a generation of girls find their footing is now redefining what that footing looks like. The language has shifted, the runway has expanded, and the women walking it look different than they did in the 2000s. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, exactly what growing up looks like — for a brand and for the women who grew up with it.

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What Victoria’s Secret Carries Today

For anyone who has not browsed the brand since the PINK sweatpants era, the range has expanded considerably:

+ Bras — from everyday wireless styles to push-up and balconette, sized broadly across the spectrum

+ Panties — the original full range, still at accessible price points and irreplaceable favs

+ Lingerie — the original category, still the throughline

+ PINK — the brand’s younger, more playful line, now leaning into loungewear and soft, wireless silhouettes

+ Sleepwear & Loungewear — pajama sets, robes, the kind of thing you actually wear at home

+ Swim — bikinis and one-pieces, seasonal and frequently refreshed

+ Beauty — a genuinely large fragrance program, body mists, lotions, the category that built much of the brand’s everyday accessibility

+ Apparel — tops, joggers, leggings, dresses, and casual clothing that bridges the gap between loungewear and everyday dressing

+ Accessories — totes, beauty pouches, luggage tags, flipflops, and small accessories that round out the brand beyond clothing

The product range today is broader, more inclusive, and more wearable than the version most of us grew up with. The marketing has changed. The Angels have changed. But the bra and the underwear — the two things that started it all — are somehow still the things everyone reaches for first.

The Thing About Belonging

There are brands you consume and brands that become part of how you understand yourself. For a lot of women who came of age in the 2000s — and for a fifteen-year-old girl from Asia trying to find her footing in a new country — Victoria’s Secret was the second kind.

It gave me a reference point when I had very few. A shared language at a time when most conversations were still happening too fast to fully follow. The bra was not the point, as I said. But belonging was. And Victoria’s Secret, in that bedroom in 2006, was the closest thing to a key I had found.

That kind of loyalty does not disappear — it evolves. And watching Victoria’s Secret evolve alongside the women who grew up with it is exactly the kind of cultural story worth paying attention to.

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