2025 has been, undeniably, the year of the brand comeback. But there's a difference between a brand that re-enters the conversation and one that genuinely earns its place back in it. Not every rebrand is a revival; some are just a new logo on the same old thing.
For instance, Victoria's Secret recently staged its reimagined Fashion Show, one of the most culturally significant events in fashion marketing, and did so with deliberate self-awareness. A surprise appearance from Bella Hadid (once a symbol of the brand's old identity), influencer-led digital content, and a live performance by Madison Beer transformed the event into something that belonged to now, not the early 2000s (Goat Agency, 2025). It was a spectacle with a point of view. And that's a rebrand.
Compare that to the brands that changed their wordmark and called it a reinvention. Muzellec and Lambkin (2006) make a useful distinction between cosmetic rebranding, changes to visual identity with no accompanying shift in strategy or values, and revolutionary rebranding, which involves a fundamental repositioning of what the brand stands for. The first is relatively low-risk. The second requires real organisational change and real courage.
Topshop's return to physical retail in 2025, through Liberty and thirty-two John Lewis locations, is an interesting case. The brand is leaning on nostalgia and channel novelty to rebuild salience, without yet having answered the harder question of what Topshop stands for culturally in 2025 beyond 'it's back' (Business of Fashion, 2025). Recall is not the same as relevance.
Abercrombie & Fitch, by contrast, shows what real reinvention looks like. By evolving from an exclusionary teen brand into a more mature “grown-up A&F,” cultivating a TikTok-native community around life occasions like wedding-guest dressing, and letting creators lead the storytelling, it turned cultural relevance into commercial momentum, resulting in increased sales and profit outlook.
The test of any rebrand is simple - has the brand changed what people feel about it, or just what they see? The former is hard. The latter is expensive. And only one of them compounds.
Keller, K.L. (1993) Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), pp.1–22.
Muzellec, L. and Lambkin, M. (2006) Corporate rebranding: destroying, transferring or creating brand equity? European Journal of Marketing, 40(7/8), pp.803–824.
Reuters (2025) Abercrombie & Fitch raises FY25 guidance. Reuters. Available at: https://www.reuters.com (Accessed: 5 July 2025).
