A new catalog from Victoria’s Secret landed in mailboxes last month, igniting a flurry of texts and emails among former executives.

The words “Bond Street London” had been added below the familiar font of the company’s name at the top of the cover, and the black-and-white photos of models appeared less salacious than usual. It seemed to many like a return to the lingerie giant’s early heyday, when it was guided by the tastes of a fictional British woman named Victoria and its catalogs featured a London address, although the company was based in Columbus, Ohio.

The mailing “really shows a finer level of refinement and sophistication than the brand may have been pursuing in the recent past,” said Cynthia Fedus-Fields, a former executive who oversaw Victoria’s Secret’s enormous direct business, including its catalog, from the mid-1980s until 2000. “What goes around comes around.”

But it will take more than a catalog reboot for Victoria’s Secret to return to its previous heights. Shares of L Brands, its parent company, have cratered since 2015; sales at stores have dropped; and the brand has been forced to reckon with shifting consumer tastes, executive turnover and new competition. The image of lingerie-clad supermodels walking runways in stilettos and angel wings — a marketing idea that Victoria’s Secret turned into a prime-time television hit — now seems positively retrograde.