JENI O’DOWD: Why Victoria’s Secret’s token efforts at ‘inclusivity’ are no victory

My daughter and I sat on the same couch, watching the same Victoria’s Secret show, and saw two completely different things.

I saw a parade of impossibly thin women walking down a runway in a male fantasy dreamed up in a boardroom. She saw beautiful women selling underwear she would actually wear. One of us spent the evening muttering at the television. It wasn’t her.

By her account, I was insufferable. Every time a model walked past in those huge wings, I had something to say. Too skinny. Who is this for? Does anyone actually sleep in that? Meanwhile, my daughter was making a mental shopping list.

It’s worth thinking about why we saw it so differently, because I don’t think either of us was wrong.

My generation grew up with the Victoria’s Secret show at its peak. And the women on that runway were stars. Proper ones. Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, Gisele Bündchen and our own Miranda Kerr.

You didn’t need to care about fashion to know their names. But for all that star power, the show set a beauty standard that very few women could meet without a personal trainer, a chef and possibly a minor miracle.

The Angels were stunning, but almost all of them were the same shape. For many women, it wasn’t aspirational so much as quietly punishing.

The people running the parade didn’t even pretend otherwise. In 2018, the brand’s chief marketing officer, Ed Razek, told Vogue the show was a “fantasy” when asked why it didn’t cast plus-size or transgender models. The backlash was enormous. He apologised for the transgender comment. The plus-size one, not so much.

So when the brand pulled the plug in 2019 after slumping ratings and years of criticism, plenty of us cheered. The fantasy had curdled.

When it came back in 2024, the parade was different. It featured curvier models, the first transgender models, and, in what was clearly meant as a gift to women like me, models over 50.

Kate Moss walked at 50. Tyra Banks returned at 50. Carla Bruni, the former first lady of France, walked at 56, the oldest woman ever to appear in the show.

I guess I was supposed to feel seen. I didn’t. These women don’t represent us. They are genetic lottery winners who have spent decades working out like it’s their job, because it is.

They’ve all had children, and somehow you’d never know it. This year the brand leaned on its original Angels again. Adriana Lima, a mother of three, and Alessandra Ambrosio, who has two children, are both 45 and look almost exactly as they did 20 years ago.

That isn’t inclusion. Putting a 50-year-old supermodel in lingerie doesn’t widen the standard. It just extends the deadline. Now we’re meant to look like that after kids, after menopause and after 50.

But here’s where my daughter has a point I can’t argue with.

Nobody bats an eyelid when a dozen firefighters strip down to their boots and a strategically placed hose for a calendar. We buy it, we laugh, we hang it in the office kitchen.

No one talks about the objectification of men or worries what it says about masculinity. People see it as cheeky fun, and good on them.

So why should a woman be shamed for doing much the same thing to sell underwear?

The honest answer is that she shouldn’t be. Women ought to be able to sell lingerie, sell calendars, sell whatever they like with their own bodies, without disapproval from people like me on the couch.

However, the firefighter comparison only goes so far. The problem with Victoria’s Secret was never that women were selling underwear. I think sexiness isn’t the sin, but narrowness is.

It was who was allowed to be in the picture. For years, the brand offered one body type and presented it as the only one worth celebrating.

To be fair, the firefighters aren’t exactly a cross-section of Australian men either. They’re hot in every sense of the word. But at least they’re raising money for charity, and an office calendar hasn’t spent 20 years telling teenage girls what a woman should look like.

The revived show has started to look more like the women who actually buy its products, and that is what my daughter responded to. But a start isn’t the finish line.

So here’s where I’ve landed. If the firefighters can have their calendar, the women can have their runway. But please, make it wider. Women of all shapes, sizes and ages are beautiful, and “fantasy” isn’t necessarily aspirational.

I will try to keep my insufferable commentary to the ad breaks next year.