Victoria’s Secret wants you back

0:00On Wednesday night in New York, Victoria's Secret held a watch party for its iconic fashion show. I thought Victoria's Secret is dying. Everyone did, though. For years, Victoria's Secret was on top of the world. And then in 2019, the public learned of a friendship between Jeffrey Epstein and the company's owner. Everybody started just asking questions. Who is Wexner and what is his relationship to Epstein? Wexner is the founder of Victoria's Secret. Like, would it be crazy to say the founder of Victoria's Secret is kind of perverted? Leslie Wexner, damn well knew. Victoria's Secret lost its place in the firmament.

0:38It just seemed kind of gross. Now it's trying to launch a comeback, but has fashion moved on? I think that they know that they need to get back to that place, but they don't know how to make it cool. That's ahead on Today Explained.

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1:35Today is playing. You're watching the show tonight? Of course I am. Never miss it. I always watch it on playback. I go back to YouTube. And I love it. Every year, I love it. I hope they're going to do it every year. I think it's like a fun thing, you know? It's a fun night out with your friends. It's kind of like the Super Bowl, but for women, I think. Amy O'Dell, fashion journalist. Shoot. The Victoria's Secret fashion show really architected the idea of fashion as entertainment. Okay, everybody, have a great show. Stand by. Adriana, the goddess from Miami, standing by. So fashion shows have historically really been trade shows.

2:19Yes, they're glamorous trade shows. You're not, you know, visiting booths in a convention hall in Las Vegas when you're going to Fashion Week. but the idea is to show collections to the industry. I don't want to know how much those wings cost, but they're very valuable, and I feel like a million bucks in them, so. And just a little more leg. Just a little more leg. A little leg never hurt anybody. Beautiful. Victoria's Secret was very early to the idea that, hey, we can jazz this up, we can add musical guests, and we can turn it into entertainment and air it on television. All right, so the 2025 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show was Wednesday night.

3:04The draw of this show was always who was there, who was on the runway, who was attending, who was doing music. What was this year all about? Like, what was cool? The models were great. They had a great lineup. Alex Consani, who's fantastic, who is funny in every interview that she does. she's great at doing those pre-show interviews sitting in her makeup chair, you know, answering silly questions from reporters. Sleek, slick back or bouncy blowout would be bouncy blowout all day. That's why we're here. The secret to the perfect blood is having an amazing hairstylist. I don't know how to do this.

3:42What's a tip? What's a tip? We saw Ashley Graham, also fantastic, in her pre-show interview talking about how things are going to be bouncing. Things are going to be moving. There's going to be a little cellulite here and there. And you know what? I'm owning it. And I'm owning it for everybody that's watching. Law Roach was asking celebrities questions on the pink carpet. It's the fantastical world that they're able to build that brings us in. Yes. And Sarah Jessica Parker was there. You know, I have probably the same history with Victoria's Secret that most civilians do, which is it's sort of like this fantasy.

4:21And whether you fit in or not in reality kind of doesn't matter. And then Victoria's Secret also brought the angels back. We saw Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, Doubts and Crows, Candace Swanpole, all these women who I remember from Victoria's Secret catalogs that I used to get at my house when I was growing up. And people did seem to have a lot of positive nostalgia. We are so fucking back. My inner child who grew up with Victoria's Secret in the fashion shows is healed. Honestly, someone who grew up watching the Victoria's Secret fashion show every single year. I thought it was great. I really, really enjoyed it.

5:00You've been covering fashion for a number of years now and you got to go to the show back when it was at its peak. What was it like? What was it like when it was like the hottest game in New York? Yeah, I started my fashion journalism career at The Cut in 2008. And the Victoria's Secret fashion show is a holiday marketing push. So as you near the holidays, the invites would start to go out. And I remember sitting at my desk and opening a pile of mail and getting an invite to the Victoria's Secret fashion show. And it was like the golden ticket. Let's hear exactly what it says. It was like one of the hottest things that you could go see if you were in the industry.

5:43I think that's because you were going to get to see someone like Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber perform. And there was just so much excitement and heat. So typically they would have reporters come and interview the models backstage when they were getting their hair and makeup done during the day. Well, I mean, we have beautiful hair and makeup, and there's a body room where they, like, you know, give us tan and shine. A body room? Yes, yes. So you would go and talk to the models, and around this time, the late aughts, early 2010s, a lot of it would be, you know, how are you getting ready for the show?

6:19And they would talk a lot about their diet and exercise routines. I remember that. I work out every day. Sometimes I take a day off in the week. It depends. You have to work out every day. I'm sorry. which later drew increasing amounts of scrutiny. Lima says she gets on a regimen of protein shakes, vitamins, and a gallon of water a day. For nine days leading up to the show, she doesn't need any solid food. And then you would go back and you would watch the show at night, and there would be a lot of people there sort of stadium-style seating in the armory in New York City. and there would be a big pink carpet where celebrities who were attending would walk the carpet and answer questions.

7:05Past celebrities who attended included Leonardo DiCaprio, Vin Diesel. Donald Trump went twice in the 90s. And I seem to remember that they would sometimes like get up and clap for the models as they were coming down the runway. And I have to say watching it, it really did feel like, you know, objectifying women. And that was very glaring to me at the time, even as a young reporter. And also a lot of the people in the crowd were people who looked like they came from Wall Street, which is very atypical for a fashion show. Like it wasn't the ladies walked over from the financial district and were like, show us the great underwear.

7:45It was the dudes. Exactly. It was men in suits who looked like they came up from Wall Street. And And I was told at the time, I would try to ask them, like, what are you doing here? Why are you here? It's just so atypical to see that type of person at a fashion show, at any fashion show. 2025, we are now living in a second Trump administration. And the culture, broadly, is more comfortable criticizing things like diversity. It is more comfortable criticizing plus-size people. There's kind of a push in some corners to, like, return to form. Go back to when everybody looked like Sidney Sweeney or Adriana Lima.

8:22Did you feel any of that tension watching this show? I did feel that tension. To me, the aesthetic felt like the Victoria's Secret of the aughts, where Vin Diesel would stand up and cheer as a hot girl was walking past him on the runway. And a lot of bronzer, kind of very done hair. the look of cool in fashion um you know like it or not has for so has for a long time maybe a decade now been sort of this phoebe filo version of cool which is oversized clothes kind of awkward flat shoes sneakers i think the sneaker trend is actually finally breaking but we were wearing sneakers with everything for like 10 years you know not stilettos and so victoria's secret kind of shows you the opposite of that.

9:15It's glitzy. It's push-up bras. It's shiny fabrics. It's bright colors. It's tacky. It's very loud, very done and made up. You've been following Victoria's Secret for a long time now. What do you think in 2025 it is trying to say about what it's doing, about who it's for, about whether it leads culture or is downstream of culture? I think it's downstream of culture. I don't think it has a grasp on culture or its place in culture. I think it wanted to come back. I think it wants to have the buzz and clout and interest and intrigue that it did in the 2000s when it was at its peak. But I don't think it understands the culture that it's coming back to.

10:03For all of the conversations I saw on social media where people were like, I'm kind of into this. This is really fun. Like, I love the nostalgia. I saw a lot of people saying, you know, why are we still doing this? Why are we back to this?

10:19Amy O'Dell is a journalist. She writes the Back Row newsletter, covers fashion and culture. She hosts the all-new Back Row podcast. Check out our show notes for more. Coming up, the Epstein Files.

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14:45Beauty. Style. Today Explained. Lauren Sherman is a fashion correspondent at Puck. She's co-author of the book Selling Sexy, Victoria's Secret, and the Unraveling of an American Icon. Lauren, tell me about this couple, the Raymonds, who founded Victoria's Secret. So Roy and Gay were sort of proto-startup people. Roy had his MBA from Stanford, and he was in the 1970s in Silicon Valley when all that stuff was sort of starting, and he saw white space in lingerie. He actually, they started a sex toy company prior, a mail-order sex toy company. Essentially, he was trying to find things that made people uncomfortable and make them more comfortable.

15:37So with underwear, you know, the places you would get that in prior to Victoria's Secret was you would go to a department store where they would just have a bunch of beige stuff or you would go somewhere more tawdry or like a Fredericks of Hollywood type thing. And there was nowhere that men or women could shop for lingerie in a comfortable, sort of very elegant way of doing it. I think of it as like a Barneys of lingerie when it first launched. It was very high-end, lots of high-end brands from Europe. And it was cool. It was an interesting, very novel concept at the time. And because they launched with a catalog as well, it really took off fast.

16:21Okay, so this is what in capitalism we call an inevitability. It was going to be a success. Once it took off, what happened? Well, you know, Roy and the original partners, they weren't great at managing the business, but there was this guy named Les Wexner sitting in Ohio. He had launched this company called Limited Brands out of his parents' store, and he thought that Victoria's Secret was primed to be scaled across the country. And so he bought it for a very measly sum out of the Raymond's hands. And, you know, by 10 years later, it was a billion dollar business. In the Victoria's Secret lingerie shop on Madison Avenue, a transformation's going on.

17:05A woman, a self-described practical type, given to wearing blouses with high collars and her boyfriend's old jeans, is buying slinky silk teddies and panties edged with lace. When did, when and how did Victoria's Secret go from being, you know, a store that I would go into and buy some nice draws to like this company doing a wild fashion show in New York that everybody wants to be part of? It happened in the late 90s after Wexner read this book by the director Sidney Lumet called Making Movies. And he really applied the cinematic experience to brand building in retail. And he turned Victoria's Secret into a media brand.

17:49And he and his marketer, Ed Razek, launched this fashion show. The first one was at the Plaza Hotel. Think about this. They live streamed the Victoria's Secret fashion show and it became a cultural phenomenon. It was something that like whole families would gather around together and watch. It's an honor to be here tonight to help get the entire country focused on two very important things, supermodels and lingerie. It really transformed from the place that you get five for 25 undies to a part of as big as the Super Bowl in some ways. When you're talking about major fashion events, there's our show, and then there's what?

18:30And so once you're as big as the Super Bowl, in some ways, you are bound to hit trouble. What happens to Victoria's Secret that kind of derails it? Well, you know, cultural mores changed, and the company did not change with it. And when you're that powerful and that rich people don't like to say no to you. And so by the 2010s, when the sort of hokey, vaudeville-esque way that these women were being displayed, it didn't feel modern anymore. It felt, you know, it was objectifying and everybody knew it. On behalf of every tongue-twisted guy who's ever tried to strike up a conversation with a delicious crumpet, I will introduce to you the caring, multi-talented personalities beneath the bras.

19:17The parent company was run by men and they just decided, no, this is what we think is sexy and we're going to keep it that way. And Razek did an interview, Ed Razek did an interview with Vogue in 2018 where he kind of just said a lot of really off-color things. During an interview for Vogue, Razek used the word transsexual, which is deemed outdated and offensive, and said that trans and plus-size women do not exemplify the fantasy the Victoria's Secret is trying to sell. The exec also revealed that he and the VS team have previously thought of casting trans and plus-size models, but ultimately decided against doing so.

19:51That upset many people, and the company was already starting to decline by the time that happened. But the bigger picture is that this comes in the face of declining sales at the lingerie chain and also plummeting TV ratings for this fashion show and criticism that what it really does is it objectifies women. And then because it can always get worse, it does. Close listeners may have heard you say the name Les Wexner. One thing that's very clear, when people say, you know, please share names, there are names that are very well known, like that of Les Wexner. This is a name that around 2019, 2020 was all over the place.

20:29Tell us about the men who were involved with Victoria's Secret and who else they were involved with. So Wexner had a very longstanding relationship with the one and only Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein had power of attorney over Wexner for many, many years, starting from the early 90s up until I think the early 2000s. He was his business associate and he also, you know, they were very close. Wexner actually essentially gifted him a mansion, that famous mansion on the Upper East Side. It was originally Wexner's. So there was a transfer of the townhouse. It's very blurry if you look at how that happened.

21:14For zero, and then there was payment. It's unclear the money trail. And then also, don't forget, he also transferred the jet over, a Boeing 727. They had a very complex relationship. And Epstein's rise and fall sort of coincides with the Wexner and the Victoria's Secret rise and fall. When Epstein was finally arrested in 2008, Wexner kind of came out and said he had no idea any of this was going on, that Epstein was stealing money from him, etc., etc. In a statement today, Wexner says, I severed all ties with Mr. Epstein nearly 12 years ago. I would not have continued to work with any individual capable of such egregious, sickening behavior as has been reported about him.

22:04As you can imagine, this past week, I have searched my soul, reflected and regretted that my path ever crossed his. And that was sort of the time when Victoria's Secret failed to see the writing on the wall of where the market was moving. And so at the time of Epstein's arrest and then in the late 2010s and then his death, it was all sort of the parallels between what was happening at Victoria's Secret and what was happening with Epstein were really remarkable. He never had anything to do with the day-to-day running of that business, even though many people assume he did. He was really a personal advisor to Wexner.

22:42But he also was around. He went to the fashion show. He definitely engaged with the models. And so it is a very, very complex intertwining and has definitely mired Wexner's legacy on a lot of levels. The board of directors of Victoria's Secret, even though Limited Brands was a public company at the time, the parent company, was always a lot of friends of friends. It wasn't, you know, above board board. And so eventually there were activist investors who pushed them. A rough stretch for Victoria's Secret. Earlier this week, the chief marketing officer for L Brands, the proprietor of Victoria's Secret, resigned in the wake of a host of controversies.

23:24And that was all before the company's CEO received this damning letter from more than 100 models demanding action. They changed the board makeup and Wexner eventually stepped down and stepped away from the business and divested from the business. And I imagine they're under new management and they're really trying to come back. They're really trying to be relevant to Gen Z in particular. What are the opportunities that Victoria's Secret has to, you know, change their brand and make themselves appeal to the wider culture again? We're at this anti-woke period of culture where it's like a pushback on the pushback.

24:06And I thought Victoria's Secret did a good job last night and their executive creative director, Adam Selman, of conjuring what made Victoria's Secret fun, what made a lot of people participate without making it feel like the last 10 years didn't happen. So it was incredibly inclusive, incredibly diverse in terms of body size, ethnicity, gender even. But it also didn't feel forced or that they were doing it because they had to. It just felt like this reflects what the culture looks like right now. And also the musical performances. They had this big K-pop band on and Missy Elliott. Like that reflects like the old school Missy Elliott fans.

24:54and then you know everyone who's under 25 is obsessed with k-pop and so i think the the big question for them is like does anyone care is this worth it will this drive sales it felt like a nice outing really positive all around whether or not that's going to move the needle for them is another question. I've talked to people who have worked in every generation of this business. The core of Victoria's Secret was to make women feel good. And that used to mean pleasing your husband. And then it meant pleasing society. And now it means pleasing yourself. And I think what Victoria's Secret did was they acknowledged, look, like there were models on that runway who used to be 50 pounds heavier than they are.

25:45And I think what Victoria's Secret did was show every kind of beauty. And it's not perfect. Like, it's still, why are we showing women walking around in lingerie on a runway? It's so crazy and silly. But I think they did the best job of reflecting, like, actual reality, which most marketers cannot do.

26:12Lauren Sherman is a fashion correspondent at Puck. She's co-author of the book Selling Sexy, Victoria's Secret, and the Unraveling of an American Icon. Ariana Espuru produced today's show, Miranda Kennedy edited. Patrick Boyd is our engineer, and Laura Bullard is our senior researcher. The rest of the team, Avishai Artsy, Miles Bryan, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Hadi Muagdi, Kelly Wessinger, Danielle Hewitt, Denise Guerra, Amina El-Sadi, and Jolie Myers. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Sean Ramos-Furram, my co-host, you've been having a good time? I have. I have purchased marijuana at a legal cannabis shop.