Between collaborations with buzzy brands like Sandy Liang and Summer Fridays and a viral denim campaign with rising girl group Katseye, Gap can close out its 2025 on a high note. In November, the brand posted 5% comparable sales growth, marking its seventh consecutive quarter of positive growth.
“[2025’s growth] is built on a foundation that we’ve taken several years to get to. Improve the quality, reduce the number of SKUs, and build our own sort of campaigns and big ideas,” said Mark Breitbard, president and CEO of the Gap brand. “Every campaign we’ve had, you see us taking the ideas and the brand codes of Gap and doing it in new, relevant ways. … When it’s familiar, but new and fresh, is where we win.”
The viral Katsye campaign from August, which has racked up more than 55 million views on YouTube as of December, brings to mind the dance-centric ads that dominated Gap’s ‘90s heyday, when it was a staple of mall shopping culture. With nostalgia on the mind of consumers, Gap is far from the only mall stalwart to stage a turnaround in 2025.
Victoria’s Secret, after years of a muddied identity and a tarnished reputation as former CEO Lex Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein came to light, restaged its once iconic fashion show in 2024 and 2025 and hired designer Adam Selman to evolve the brand. In December, the lingerie brand posted 9% sales growth in its third-quarter 2025 earnings report.
Bath & Body Works closed out 2025 with a C-suite hiring spree, bringing on Maly Bernstein as chief commercial officer and Samantha Charleston as chief human resources officer in November. Niche perfume founder Veronique Gabai joined the company shortly after as creative product and brand advisor. Fellow mall body-care brand The Body Shop reentered the U.S. market via Amazon in October after shutting all American stores due to bankruptcy in 2024.
Gap’s buzzy campaigns and improving sales have shown that a turnaround is possible for those battered mall veterans. But some are cautious to call it a comeback just yet.
“When you go through that many consecutive quarters of even double-digit down, high single-digit down, there was just such negative momentum [for Gap] that breaking the momentum is reason to celebrate,” said Pauline Brown, founder of executive development platform Aesthetic Intelligence Labs and former LVMH and Estée Lauder exec. “But it’s not really in a big growth mode, either.”
While Gap, Inc. CEO Richard Dickinson, who joined the company from Mattel in 2023, has helped bring stability to the company, Gap still has many decades of decline to overcome. Between 2000 and 2021, Gap closed around 2,000 stores and saw sales fall $3.5 billion. Bath & Body Works has good reason, meanwhile, to shore up its executive floor: The company’s shares plunged 25% following the release of its Q3 earnings report.
And Victoria’s Secret, while it managed to bring on a mix of classic Angels and new faces like WNBA star Angel Reese to its 2025 fashion show, still has to contend with lost market share to Kim Kardashian’s Skims juggernaut, Brown noted. Skims was valued at $5 billion in November after securing new funding.
Those brands also have to adjust their strategy, as actual mall experiences aren’t what they were in the ‘90s. 2025 saw the continued closure of department stores like JCPenney and Macy’s, which have traditionally acted as anchors to indoor and outdoor malls. In its Q1 2025 earnings presentation, Bath & Body Works shared that all of its 13 new store openings in the U.S. were in non-mall locations, while all eight store closures came from malls.
“The reason Skims can continue to outperform is that, as they go more and more into retail, they’ll pick streetfront locations. They’ll pick neighborhoods,” said Brown. “[Gap and Victoria’s Secret] are still anchored in that mall dynamic. Unless going to the mall starts to become a thing again, they’ll always have a heavy weight that they’ve got to overcome.”
But consumers are showing a predilection for ‘90s nostalgia outside the mass mall retailers. “Ralph Lauren Christmas” has taken off as a viral holiday trend with young shoppers looking for cozy, plush green and red decor that looks out of a ‘90s catalog for the season. The RealReal’s head of fashion and strategic partnerships, Noelle Sciacca, said the secondhand designer platform has expanded its Ralph Lauren offerings as demand surges for the brand.
“We’re at this very special intersection where a lot of millennials are feeling nostalgic for simpler times. And the positive emotion connected to these items is really driving people to be excited to revisit and put their purchasing power towards that,” said Sciacca. “At the same time, Gen Z is coming to an age where they have some sort of spending power and are experiencing these things for the first time. But it feels retro and novel to them.”
Retailers like Gap are far from done with their comeback plan, however. The apparel brand is making its way back to beauty and brought on former Estée Lauder exec John Demsey as executive director of beauty in September. It faces competition from both established beauty names and newcomers, however. That includes Skims, which hired Ami Colé founder Diarrha N’Diaye in November to lead its beauty expansion.
And the next wave of nostalgia may leave consumers looking for another era beyond the ‘90s. Gen Zers have begun to romanticize the “millennial optimism” of the early 2010s, when the likes of Williamsburg led the way in hipster fashion.
“You can dig in the data so much and start to predict [trends]. But sometimes those moments are sort of unpredictable,” said Sciacca.