The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Victoria’s Secret

0:05This is The Run Through. I'm Nicole Phelps. Today, I'm joined by Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez, two fashion writers who I've known for a long time, who have a new book, Selling Sexy, Victoria's Secret, and the Unraveling of an American Icon. We talked about Victoria's Secret's evolution, its rise in subsequent undoing, and what its upcoming return to the runway might say about our collective memory. So let's get into my conversation with Lauren and Chantal. I am here with Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez, the authors of Selling Sexy. I read it on the plane yesterday, so it's fresh in my mind.

0:44Thank you so much for reading it. Thank you for reading it. And for having us. Thanks for joining me. So when I first heard about this book of yours, Victoria's Secret was pursuing a different marketing scheme. They had pulled away from the show in 2019. I think it was canceled. And they had hired Megan Rapinoe and other important women to burnish their image. But now the fashion show is back. And it's happening a week after your book launch. And I think the timing is just incredible. How lucky. Yeah, we thought that too. How lucky are you two? We were very lucky. We thought it was like a joke.

1:26Yeah, it's great timing for us. and like another opportunity to talk about this brand that we think has been so influential in American culture, particularly through the fashion show. And it's like a great opportunity to talk about what does it represent now? And I guess we'll find out. We will. The other interesting thing when I heard about it is that Matt Turnhour had already done a documentary and that came out. And I thought, oh, well, what do Lauren and Chantal have to say in addition to what Matt did in the documentary? So what would you say is in the book that people don't know about the Victoria's Secret story?

2:03I'd say we were aware of the documentary as being produced and I think actually produced as we were putting together our book proposal. And maybe it came out to come out the summer after we got the deal signed. I think so. It's like a story or a fashion show review. There is always a different, every person, every journalist has a different point of view and a different take. And for both of us, we felt like we wanted to tell a really holistic story about the company. There are a million books in this book. There's the founding story. There's the story of how Victoria's Secret shaped shopping culture.

2:45There's the story of how its marketing kind of depicted women and the culture's view of women at the time. there's the story of the models there's a story of les wexner and and his rise and and sort of fall there's there's the story of all the executives who worked there and we felt like a lot of times you you write an article and people say this is a too big of an idea it should be a book or you read a book and you think ah this should have been a short article and we just both felt like It was sort of an epic story that would make a perfect book that will, you know, it's a tangible thing that will be there forever.

3:28You start with the story of Gigi Hadid, who we all know very well. I guess 10 or so years ago, she was a little less well-known when she was finally cast. She had been trying to get onto the Victoria's Secret runway for years. years. But I thought one of my favorite parts of the book is the line that says the story of Victoria's Secret begins not with a bra, but with a vibrator. I thought that could have been your opening line, too. So can we backtrack to the early days of Victoria's Secret? And maybe you could give us a quick synopsis of how we got from a vibrator catalog to the lingerie behemoth that it is today.

4:10Yeah, the founding couple, Roy and Gay, Raymond. Roy is perhaps the one that people have heard about more, but they were really working on their businesses together when they were married. You know, before they started Victoria's Secret, the first real successful business that they had was this sex toys company catalog that was also geared towards people with disabilities. And it's a really interesting business model that had some of the same ideas that they would later put into Victoria's Secret about discretion and trying to make the customer experience for kind of a taboo category more pleasant, more approachable.

4:45Yeah, the sex toy business was really profitable and is truly the only reason they were able to keep Victoria's Secret afloat because they spent, it's funny, it's like the story of a startup that could have happened in 2015. but Zandra was direct to consumer catalog only. So like as if it was internet only or something, and they made so much profit because they were just selling the product directly. And with Victoria's secret, they had stores that they were very capital intensive, like one of the stores or the, all of the stores where they were spending like a million dollars decorating them and furnishing them in 1980, like some big luxury retail, Some luxury stores are like$8 or$10 million to refurbish now, but a lot of them only spend a million today.

5:34So they were spending all this money at Victoria's Secret, and the sex toy business was funding all of that. Yeah, it was really interesting. And it was that whole idea of, you hear this in the startup world a lot, the white space idea. And Ray had gone to Stanford Business School. He had done a case study for the North Face when he was there. And he really wanted to sort of find an in for something that no one else had done. And that's also a theme of the book is like what were the circumstances that allowed a business to succeed? Like when Leslie Wexner later bought Victoria's Secret from the Raymonds, would that business mean what it does to us today if he hadn't had all that money and that success when he bought it and was able to expand it in the way that he did?

6:22So it's a lot about sort of like what were the circumstances? What led to – and that's kind of part of the business story is like what led to the next step? What did they already know about retail that allowed for the success of Victoria's Secret? It was a catalog business. It's Andrea. And then it was a Victoria's Secret. So it all sort of connects. I really appreciated those early chapters because I was a Victoria's Secret shopper in the 80s. I would use my babysitting money to go buy silk pajamas. I think they did have silk back then. Or maybe I just I was confused. It was silk. And I was also a limited shopper.

6:57So – and Limited is what you're talking about, where he made all of his money and he was able to use that to help build Victoria's Secret. Yeah, so when Leslie Wexner acquired Victoria's Secret in 1982, like the Limited was already this unprecedented huge retail success story. And Victoria's Secret sort of plugged into the system that he already had. So they were able to open stores really quickly, expand how much product they were carrying across the nation. Like all of those things are connected if, you know, it would have taken Gay and Roy a lot of capital and mistakes to repeat the same thing.

7:35So it's really interesting to think about because one of the questions we were guided by was like how did Victoria's Secret become so big that at its peak it really had no meaningful competitors? It's really hard to think about a brand in another fashion category that can say that. And part of the reason why is because of like the influence and the capital and the experience that Wexner already had when he acquired the business. I was just going to say a little aside about the limited. It was fun to talk about the Forenza sweater, which, Nicole, did you have one? I did. I did. In fact, I think I talked about that in the Matt Turnar documentary.

8:12It was one of my first fashion obsessions in junior high was a Forenza sweater. Wow. You and a lot of people. Me and millions of other young girls and women in the 1980s. Yeah. Fun detail that we found in the research was that they had like a gold-plated version of the sweater in Verna Gibson's office, who was like the merchant working for Leslie at that time. So funny. Yeah. That sweater really changed everything for them. And so at its peak, Victoria's Secret had a thousand stores across America. Is that right? Right? Yes. I think ish. I think a little bit more. And then there were at its peak, there were also stores abroad and kind of the airport stores that they had, which were really profitable for them.

8:57But it wasn't necessarily the stores that made it so much a part of our culture. It really was the show, the Victoria's Secret fashion show. I would say I think it's half and half. I think it's the popular culture and the sort of big idea culture. It was the show and that the marketing. But remember, mall culture was its own thing. And Victoria's Secret was such a big part of that and how we shop. And that is owed a lot to Leslie Wexner, but also just to Victoria's Secret in general and the like retail as theater thing. So yeah, I mean, but the show, when it came along, it really did change the game.

9:44Okay, we're going to take a quick break.

9:58Right now, in movies, in the opera, even in pop music, divinely inspired women are everywhere. This week on Critics at Large, we make our case. Saints are having a moment. Look, I can spout off any number of cliches, but they're all true. The world is moving faster and faster. Materialism is now reaching every single corner of the globe. It's very hard to say no and to say stop and to say I will do without. And I think that explains some of the modern cultural appeal. I'm Vincent Cunningham. Join me and my co-hosts on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Find us every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

10:48you are both you know a generation I think probably younger than me so do you remember watching the show as a as a young woman as a teenager did it have an impact on you both not on me I don't know about you Lauren I am like smack dab in the middle of the two of you I think I was very anti-establishment in high school. So, I mean, being anti-establishment meant wearing Gap body underwear instead of Victoria's Secret. But I was very like, oh, I'm not, I only listen to indie music. I don't care about this. But yeah, I mean, it definitely had an impact on what I thought was like traditionally attractive.

11:33I didn't want to I didn't want to be a part of it but I was very aware of it obviously and in the early 2010s I started covering it so I am sort of right I'm 42 so I'm like really in the middle of when it was at its peak and I actually worked there in college for a couple of weeks just two weeks but um yeah I was very aware of it and aware of its influence but But I also was sort of turned off by it, if that makes sense. I was a shopper. I was like the pink generation hit me like perfectly. So I do remember going to the store and feeling really intimidated by the non-pink side, by the main brand side, and wanting to stick into the like more girlish pink side of it.

12:24But I, yeah, I don't remember actively watching the show, but I do feel like the stores reflected this kind of showmanship glamour that the show had already by that point many, many years established around this like aesthetic or idea of American beauty. So I do remember probably experiencing that even before I could register what that was because that store was always like a huge focal point of them all. There was such an uproar in 2018 when Vogue published my article with the architects of the Victoria's Secret show. But here we are. It's six years later and the show is back. What does it say about our collective memory and about American culture that it's on the schedule for October 15th?

13:10Were you surprised that it returned? I wasn't surprised because they sort of were gearing up for it last year with this documentary. I don't know if I was there if I would make the same choice at this point, but there is such a strong element of nostalgia driving a lot of consumer culture right now or, you know, bringing – rebooting some vintage piece or rebooting a TV show. So I think the nostalgia element is interesting. I'm curious to see – and I look a lot at like the Victoria's Secret Instagram accounts and people want these – they say, oh, bring back the girls, bring back the angels. So there is some element there that is going to be maybe satisfied by the show.

13:55But I'm really interested to see it. I do think in general, though, shoppers are so used to kind of corporate malfeasance in a way. You know, there's stories of this kind of stuff in so many different companies. Like where it doesn't maybe have the same impact that it did or we have the understanding, you know, if someone really cares about that, that those leaders have left at Victoria's Secret. You know, there's new people running the company. The ownership has changed. So they do have a clear story to tell there to say, you know, we're different. But I think part of what has been tricky for them in recent years is trying to grapple with this legacy that they have and, like, what to leave behind and what to keep with them.

14:35And perhaps they rejected too much of their past, and it's part of what has led to kind of confusion about what this brand stands for now. So it seems like they want to kind of reclaim that showmanship period and try to modernize it. It's really tricky. I'm very interested to see how people react because there's sort of a pageant element to it that I don't know how you avoid and still feels a bit dated. You did a good job of bringing together, as you said at the beginning of this interview, the multiple strands, the multiple storylines. fashion had had sort of a reckoning around diversity and inclusivity in the mid-2010s, and Victoria's Secret was slow to follow suit.

15:24At the same time, there was new competition. Victoria's Secret had new competition in the form of the Third Loves and even the Rihanna Fenty line. And so there's a lot of inputs that were making things challenging for the brand. One of the things that really surprised me in reporting this book was how many different divisions there were within Victoria's Secret dedicated to anticipating trends and cultural change. There was like a division at the corporate level. You know, the merchants were doing that. Designers were doing that, going on these trips. And this was a pretty common thing in the retail industry.

16:03Gap had teams like this. You know, the big mall brands all had people traveling around the world, like trying to figure out what's happening in Brazil and what that means about how trends are going to change in, you know, Ohio, you know, five years from now. So they had so many people whose entire job was to understand what was changing and yet they still missed, I think, a really clear cultural shift that was happening at that time to the point where, yes, as you're saying, like luxury brands understood it, changed how they approached who they chose for their spokespeople, you know. But it was such a giant company with such a defined strategy that it works so well for them.

16:40It's also easy to say in hindsight, like, oh, you know, I think they were grappling with trying to understand what is our core identity that we can't let go of. And I think they weren't flexible enough at that time. I think that you can really see the trajectory start with like the foreshadowing in 2013, 2014 with the rise of American Eagle, Aerie and the broad let and Victoria's Secret's rejection of that trend. And this was like pre-Harvey Weinstein, pre-Me Too movement. And Victoria's Secret was doing really, really well financially. I don't think it peaked in terms of sales and profitability until 2016.

17:24And so you could see why the executives were kind of arrogant. There were a lot of people internally there who were pushing back and saying, we're missing out. The culture is changing. We need to get with the program. and unfortunately the people at the tippy top were just kind of like, why would we do that? We're making tons of money and we know best. They had a lot of ups and downs over the 30, 40 years that they owned the business, but generally it had been incredibly successful and they had been the market dominators. So I understand to a point why they turned a blind eye to what was happening in the culture.

18:02I think the sort of Me Too reckoning made it so the consumer couldn't ignore that Victoria's Secret wasn't moving on as well. And then with your interview with Ed Razek, who was the head of marketing there, that was the big sort of bump over the head that, okay, this company is like extremely out of touch. And by then they were already losing market share and the consumer had twisted. So if you want to pinpoint one moment, it's definitely the rise of the bralette. But that was years before they actually started to feel it in terms of sales. And the bralette thing sounds so trivial in a sense because you're like, well, then why not just sell bralettes?

18:47Why not Victoria's Secret sell bralettes? But you have to think about part of what was so interesting about the Victoria's Secret story is that they kind of set the standard that unless you were wearing a molded cup underwire bra, like you were not dressed for the outside world. And that idea has shifted so much. You know, you see women now going without a bra or they're wearing like a soft cup, non-molded. You want a more natural look. But Victoria's Secret had really established that as like the core element of your wardrobe for an American woman. And, you know, even since 2013, when this started as like a trend, oh, we're going to wear a bralette to Coachella or whatever, and it expanded from there.

19:27But if you think about during the pandemic, so many women have abandoned their underwire bras or gone into like more natural looking bras. And that was a wasn't just a short lived trend. It's like a it's like a generational change of a silhouette. Like it's like the low rise going to high rise. Like this is something that is going to impact the business for many, many years. And I think they weren't ready to accept the fact that that was a shift they couldn't control because they had set trends for so long. And I think they thought this was just going to blow over. I always call those kind of bras the chicken cutlet bras because it's like you have chicken cutlets in your cups.

20:06And you make a good point of that in the book. You bring up the fact that Les Wexner and Ed Razek didn't think bralettes were sexy. They just weren't sexy, and that's why they weren't going to do them because Victoria's Secrets' raison d 'etre was sexy, right? I mean, that was the marketing line for so many years. What is sexy? Absolutely, and I think some of the challenger brands that we've seen come up since Victoria's Secrets started struggling, you know, they're not selling an idea of sexy. They're selling comfort, and that is also a huge priority for women today. I mean, you could argue that underwear is inherently sexy no matter what it is.

20:46But, yeah, it's kind of this idea of, like, what is the bigger idea that you're selling? So it's interesting to see them, with the return of the show, kind of want to own a bit of that sexy zone again. And I guess it makes sense because it's their legacy. But I feel so many women, you know, just anecdotally talking to people, they just are like, what's the comfortable bra? And then sexy comes after that. So I don't know how that's going to impact them. More on selling sexy after the break.

21:19Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford, senior awards correspondent at Vanity Fair and co-host of Little Gold Men. Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood. There's a hundred wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar nominated. Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.

22:00Some people probably disagree with me, and many of them were the designers of the Spring 2025 collections. Like the other coincidence, I think, you know, in addition to your book coming out a week before the show coming back on the air is that the spring 2025 collections were a very sexy season. And Lauren, you and I were there and we just lived through it. Why would, you know, I don't know if you had time to decompress having just gotten off the plane like 12 hours ago, but why do you think designers have turned back to sexiness? Yeah, the most shocking one was Demna, which I wrote about. Demna Balenciaga, yes.

22:42Yeah, where I said it looked sexual because that is not a word I've ever used to describe anything that man has ever designed. But I think that that's been happening for a while, and I see it in consumer behavior. There's just, if you look in the last few years post-pandemic, and this is a general, you know, the pendulum always swings, but for a decade or even two decades, it was very much about covering up. And that sort of peaked with all the Valentino capes and that sort of monastic look in the late 2010s. And then pandemic, there was a shift towards more body conscious, overtly sexual clothing.

23:32And then the pandemic happened and we were all in sweatpants. And so out of the pandemic, it's like rum spring or something. And everybody's like, let's just go nuts and wear. But I find myself wearing body conscious clothing, which I haven't never done in my entire life, because it's just there's a lot. Designers are really paying attention to the body. And I think also our culture became so sterilized in so many ways that this is a sort of pushback on that. And so whether or not the clothes are actually sexy is questionable, but there's definitely an interest in sexuality and like expressing that you have a body.

24:16So how closely will you both be watching the show in mid-October when it happens? I mean, this is the book is coming out, but you're still reporting on the brand, I'm sure. I'm definitely going to be watching and I'm really interested to see how people react. You know, part of what I'm curious about is they're bringing back a lot of the models that were always associated with Brandtire Branks and more recently Gigi Hadid and Bahadi. There's a lot of like iconic faces and I think people do care about those women. I'm curious. So much of their strategy seems to be targeted towards younger audiences.

24:52So I'm curious how people who maybe don't have great memories of the show in 2012, if they're going to respond the same way to seeing these women that we know their faces so well. I'm curious how like a new generation is going to respond to that or a younger generation who hasn't been paying attention. Yeah, I'm interested. Emanuel Alt is styling the show and I'm a big fan of hers and think she's a great fashion show stylist. she's a great stylist generally but I think she does a really good job with shows so I'm interested from the fashion perspective of how they present it the thing I would say that maybe they're not thinking about or maybe they are and and just don't mind is the impact of these shows is not as great as it used to be because a lot of brands do a lot of big shows and Victoria's Secret was definitely a trailblazer in the fashion show is live event.

25:49They live streamed their show in 1999 on the internet, which is just so crazy when everyone had dial up. It's really wild. And if you think of brands like Chanel, or even that Balenciaga show we went to, or, or Miu Miu or Vuitton or any of the big shows that are really large spectacles, Dior, that sort of thing. those are really important for the marketing of those brands, but those are, you know, it's a, it's a different market. And also the, the impact is just a couple of days, whereas the Victoria's Secret show used to be essentially like a year long benefit to them. And I'm not sure it could be that anymore just because of how people consume and process information.

26:32So I'm curious to see like how much traction it actually gets, because now someone does a show and two days later, it's everybody's done with it. So I think that I have a feeling it's actually going to be pretty nice and that people will enjoy it. But whether or not that's going to translate into something that's meaningful to them from a marketing and exposure and sentiment perspective is a question. Yeah. And one barrier that I see with them is that they have made changes in recent years. Lauren and I were just in the store during New York Fashion Week, and, like, they have extended their size range, not always in store, but certainly online.

27:13And I think a lot of people don't know that. And they're just like, oh, I realized in 2004 that this brand wasn't for me, and I have not needed to reconsider that position. And I'm curious to see if this show communicates any of that to say, like, if you didn't feel accepted at this brand before, you literally didn't find your size here, like, we have changed. I'm curious if they can fit that into this program. It's a lot to achieve. Right. Right. Because the definition of sexy was quite narrow, like literally, right? And a lot of categories they just ignored. And since that 2018-2019 moment, I think they have added things back.