Victoria’s Secret, an American retailer of women’s lingerie, is known for its promotion of the hyper-femininity catering for the assumed to be heterosexual women. Since 2016, there have been increasing traditional Chinese symbols employed in its product design. This paper elaborates on Victoria’s Secret’s selling of sexuality, the promotion of hyper-femininity, and its current strategy of exploring the Chinese market. First, the sexualised representation of lingerie models demonstrates the contradictory nature of postfeminist discourse. Can the representation of hyper-femininity be seen as ‘women’s success’ or as retro-sexism in the era of postfeminism? Second, the shift from an ‘Asian type’ representation of Chinese model Liu Wen to a hyper-white representation of He Sui exemplifies the dynamic constructions of female beauty from a Western gaze to the East. I will explore the ways in which postfeminism marks a racialised and hetero-sexualised modernisation of femininity. The shift also embodies a new variation of Mehita Iqani’s (2012) concept of ‘glossiness’ within the context of consumer culture. Finally, the collision and fusion of traditional Chinese culture and the sexualisation of culture raise questions about the transnational issues involved in gendered, racialised, and nationalised power relations.
This paper explores the construction of a modernised and globalised femininity through the representation of Chinese lingerie models and the Chinese cultural symbols applied by Victoria’s Secret. I address these phenomena by situating them within the context of neoliberalism and globalisation. Drawing on the existing scholarship on postfeminism (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2004), particularly the contradictory nature of postfeminist discourses combining both feminist and anti-feminist themes and the ways in which the body of literature privileges whiteness and heteronormativity, I suggest an intersectional approach in order to make sense of how postfeminist discourses reproduce inequality of race, gender and sexuality against the backdrop in which Victoria’s Secret enters the Chinese market. I conclude that all the actions are used to construct a carefully packaged form of commercialised sexiness.