The Victoria's Secret annual fashion show used to be a spectacle like no other. People, especially women, waited all year to gawk at the world’s most beautiful supermodels waltzing down the runway adorned in gorgeous sparkling lingerie and enormous angel wings.

But those days, it seems, are long over. In an age when progressivism has swept the country like an insidious plague, Victoria's Secret is now like nearly every other mainstream brand: woke.

Lauren Chen is disappointed to say the least. As someone who used to enjoy watching the fashion show, as it was “an unabashed example of womanhood and femininity,” she’s disheartened to see that the company has conformed to appease the woke crowd.

While Victoria's Secret made an effort several years ago to include plus-size models in its marketing campaigns and in the fashion show, the company was met with criticism because “even those plus-size models were too attractive and not quite diabetic enough,” says Lauren.

Further, the LGBTQ+ community unsurprisingly complained about the “lack of queer and trans inclusivity.”

“Not enough penis on that runway wearing the lingerie,” Lauren quips.

In 2019, the company’s complete 180-degree transformation began when its former chief marketing officer, Ed Razek, came under fire for allegedly “creating a culture of misogyny and harassment in the workplace.” The weight of these allegations against Razek in combination with “increased scrutiny of social justice and feminist activists” was enough to temporarily suspend the fashion show.

The company promised its brief hiatus would allow it to return to the stage “better than ever,” but “that was a total lie,” says Lauren.

The new and “improved” Victoria's Secret that just emerged this past September in the form of a pseudo-documentary called “The Tour” is as woke as it gets.

“Most of the pieces that feature in this film … are not actually lingerie,” critiques Lauren. “Why they decided to not focus on the thing that the brand actually makes is beyond me, but I'm guessing it has something to do with all those allegations of misogyny.”

Further, “the models featured in ‘The Tour’ don't look nearly as sexy or as glamorous as the models that used to walk the Victoria's Secret fashion show.” In fact, they’re very average-looking (and often overweight) people, which might have worked for a company like Dove selling hygiene products, but it certainly is a “180 pivot” for a company like Victoria's Secret.

Even the stereotypical thin, beautiful models included in “The Tour” were not styled to be glamorous or feminine as they were in the past.

“They were trying to make these attractive models look worse for some reason,” says Lauren, “that reason being equity in beauty.”

But that’s only the beginning of the new Victoria's Secret era. Not only has the company replaced the live fashion show with a film, but it also nixed the iconic pop music.

All previous fashion shows featured a famous artist doing a live performance while the models walked the runway. Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd, and Ellie Goulding are just some of the artists who have performed on the Victoria's Secret stage, but this year, the company decided to take a radically different approach.

“Instead they incorporated a poetry recitation from I'm guessing a Nigerian artist,” says Lauren, who found the stunt “awkward and uncomfortable.”

“Victoria's Secret actually took to heart the criticisms of online feminist activists,” says Lauren, and the company created a film that “[checks] all the boxes.”

“It's very diverse, it features different body types, it features different artists from different countries, it's super feminist in that none of the women really look good so you're avoiding the male gaze, [and] it has uncomfortable, weird poetry and art, which, you know, progressives love.”

What could go wrong?

Apparently a lot.

“The Tour” currently “has a 2.9 out of 10 rating on IMDb and a pitiful 1.7 stars on Amazon.”

Those numbers suggest that people “would still rather be entertained than have to sit through essentially an hour of virtue-signaling about how progressive Victoria's Secret as a brand is.”

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