How China Turned Around Victoria's Secret
Days after the Los Angeles show fielded four Chinese models, the brand's Chinese joint venture reported revenue up 42 percent and profit up more than fivefold — the numbers behind a comeback few saw coming.
The 2026 Victoria's Secret show in Los Angeles on October 18 was, by one measure, a Chinese runway. Four models from mainland China walked it — Liu Wen, Xi Mengyao, He Cong and Gu Yue — and He Cong became the first Asian model to open a single segment in the brand's history. Liu Wen made her tenth appearance at the show; Xi Mengyao returned after eight years away. Within hours, high-resolution runway shots were circulating widely on Weibo, where fan account Houson猴姆's gallery was reposted hundreds of times.
The bigger story was in the accounts. As Shandong's Da Zhong News noted in its show roundup, Victoria's Secret's first fiscal quarter of 2026, ended May 2, brought net sales of 1.56 billion US dollars, up 15 percent year on year, and a net profit of 48 million dollars — against a four-million-dollar loss in the same quarter a year earlier. The company is back in the black, and China is doing much of the lifting.
The Chinese business runs through a joint venture with Regina Miracle, the intimate-apparel manufacturer, formed in 2022 with Regina Miracle holding 49 percent. Its latest fiscal year, ended March 31, brought revenue of 2.799 billion Hong Kong dollars — roughly 2.4 billion yuan — up 42.4 percent, and net profit of 525 million Hong Kong dollars, more than five times the prior year. In fiscal 2020 the same business lost 669 million Hong Kong dollars. The joint venture's returns have grown so fast that they now contribute more to Regina Miracle's bottom line than its core manufacturing work does.
Chinese readers were less interested in the party than in the mechanism. "Victoria's Secret makes money mainly from localization and a younger product mix," one commenter concluded — dropping the old single-playbook sexiness for comfortable, affordable and more diverse underwear and beauty lines. Another put it more bluntly: underwear, sleepwear and fragrance are the actual revenue; the show is "expensive global marketing" designed to make people buy more of it.
The debate was not all rosy. On Baidu's search board, the most-discussed items about the show were a plus-size model — about ninety kilograms — celebrated for returning in pink petal wings, and a wave of mockery aimed at the show's PINK segment, which critics said looked like a performance at a rural county gala rather than a high-fashion stage. Glamour, in other words, is still unevenly distributed even as the business recovers.
This was also the second straight year the show became a conversation about Chinese models rather than just Chinese consumption; last week three of them shared the stage with Kobe Bryant's daughter Natalia, as we covered after the earlier appearances.
One number cut against the triumph. The show took place on October 18, a Sunday, when US markets were closed, so the market's verdict is still pending. The last trading day before it, the stock fell 3.52 percent, leaving the company worth about 6.97 billion dollars — a long way from the tens of billions it once commanded. The wings are back; whether the valuation follows is the open question.