I am admittedly a little late to the party on this one, but we need to talk about the recent resurrection of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. More specifically, we need to talk about Kylie Jenner stepping out onto the runway in Los Angeles wearing the infamous Fantasy Bra.
If you tracked the online coverage, the internet largely treated this moment as a monumental pop-culture crossover event. Under the creative direction of Adam Selman, the brand brought the diamond-encrusted piece out of an eight-year hiatus, billing the $50 million stunt as a grand celebration of modern fandom.
But if you look at this event past the immediate layer of internet hype, the whole spectacle feels remarkably out of touch. In fact, it feels fkn dystopian.
First, let’s inject some necessary nuance into the conversation: this isn’t a critique aimed directly at Kylie Jenner’s modelling credentials, nor is it an absolute dismissal of fashion’s right to be theatrical. Rather, a look at a profound cultural paradox. Why are we, as a collective consumer base, still enthusiastically fangirling over a brand that operates with one of the most notoriously toxic corporate legacies in fashion history? And how are we supposed to reconcile the media screaming over a $50 million undergarment while the real world is under immense, visible strain?
Laundering a Legacy with Celebrity Equity
To understand it, I look at the desperation behind the brand’s pivot. For decades, Victoria’s Secret was the absolute arbiter of exclusionary beauty standards. Their legacy was built on a time-worn playbook of extremely thin models, a corporate refusal to cater to diverse body types, and highly controversial public remarks from executives regarding who did and did not fit their “fantasy”. When public backlash and plummeting viewership forced the cancellation of the show in 2019, it looked like the market had successfully demanded accountability.
Yet, the revival proves that instead of doing the deep, difficult work of corporate transformation, the brand chose a much faster route: borrowing someone else’s audience.
As industry analysts from The Business of Fashion noted, putting the historic piece on Jenner, the founder of Kylie Cosmetics and a cultural powerhouse with hundreds of millions of followers, allowed the company to instantly tap into pre-existing media power. The equation of prestige has completely reversed.
Historically, getting your wings at Victoria’s Secret was a career milestone that made you an icon. Today, the brand is so hollowed out by its own history that it must rely on established influencer empires just to validate its existence on our screens; a clever public relations laundering strategy that uses the glitz of modern celebrity culture to attempt to smooth over a deeply compromised past.
The Late-Stage Capitalist Spectacle
The true dissonance of the evening, however, lies in the sheer, un-ironic excess of the product itself. Built in collaboration with luxury jeweller Jacob & Co, the 2026 Fantasy Bra boasts 4,410 natural diamonds and a massive 75.54-carat yellow diamond centrepiece. It weighs four pounds and required over a thousand hours of manual labor to construct.
When this four-pound piece of luxury was sent down the catwalk, the marketing machinery expected us to marvel at it as a beautiful dream. But in a macroeconomic climate defined by severe housing crises, inflation, and stark global inequality, watching a billionaire influencer parade a $50 million piece of underwear feels less like a dream and more like a scene from The Hunger Games.
It creates a profound sense of psychological alienation for the average viewer. We are being asked to cheer for this obnoxious display of wealth, at a time when the consumer base is completely exhausted by economic pressure. It assumes that if you make something shiny enough, the audience will forget the reality of the world they live in.
The Takeaway:
I don’t know what the solution is here. I also don’t know why so many people were genuinely cheering for this, calling it iconic. Like, can we be so for real. As a brand, some boots on the ground understanding of the reality of your audience is imperative. As a consumer, don’t let the bread and circus distract you from what this really is: a toxic company doing toxic shit.
