Beauty is Going Backwards: A Breakdown of False Progress

And it's been happening for a while, I think!

This is going to a be a long post on beauty industry forecasting - with charts and all. Instead of doing a white paper for some brand to benefit from, I decided to invest back into my relationship with you and this newsletter. To make this post more accessible to you and forthcoming posts, I’m running a rare newsletter sale for the next week - since other posts are scheduled I’d love you to benefit from.

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The first time I was invited to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, I was 16. I skipped school to attend if I remember correctly, but I will be honest with you - I don’t remember it, my anxiety about skipping school was so present in my brain. I went to a very competitive high school and I’d never really skipped before for an event. I guess it was worth it, in the sense I went to something most people don’t go to. But I’d never go to a high school party, either. I went instead to America’s Hottest Lingerie Show - and I can’t remember a thing. 

Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show hasn’t been memorable for a while. The past few attempts at relevance have failed, but it’s a great barometer of what corporations think people will buy into. Can’t get Chappell Roan to accept the performance paycheck? Ok, play her music twice - it’s like she was there. Get a KPOP girl on stage. Sprinkle in some TikTok girlies. Is that anything? Ignore the lawsuits!

I’m sorry, I can’t get energized even to be critical about how unfeminist the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is - it’s like being combative to an old relative at family dinner: we get it, she’s politically incorrect. Still, she’s never going to change and she’s got to die eventually. Yes, there was a Times expose on how toxic the environment was, how widespread the bullying was and the close ties to Epstein. They canceled the show in 2019. There were rebrands. But as anyone who has worked in or with institutions can tell you: a rebrand is a rephrasing, not a changing of the guard. It’s noise to put something in front of the awkwardness of refusing accountability. Bramble Trionfo, a creative director who's worked with a bunch of brands, told Rachel Tashijian at WaPo it quite plainly: “These brands are spending a ton of money to ‘rebrand,’ and they’re changing nothing. So, all it is an aesthetic facelift.” 

I feel nothing about the empty femininity of Victoria’s Secret but sadness that old questions and frameworks are resurfacing: what did you eat today? How do you get bikini body ready? It’s a lightning rod of a specific kind of beauty standard I’d hoped we’d seen progress away from the past few years, only for the pendulum to swing decisively back to hell. 

But the signs have been here for a while now - in all avenues of how the beauty industry is even conceptualized. I’ve divided it into different spheres of lost progress.

We can silo the backwards progress into four distinct pathways. I’ll break them down individually, but they are:

• Fashion’s Lack of Diversity

• Pharmaceutical Success of Ozempic

• Conservative Affirmative Action Values Regaining Control on Bodies and Funding

• The Rise (and Media Attention on) Tradwife Domesticity

First, enjoy my Venn diagram! YES, there are CHARTS.