Sexy can I?

Helen Holmes in conversation with Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez.

What bra are you wearing right now? Me personally, it’s a little push up number by Skims—pale flesh-colored, nicely cinched. One of many mid-priced options in the era of online shopping. 

But long before Kim Kardashian (Skims) and Rihanna (Fenty) were outfitting America’s key female demographics in cannily marketed undergarments, Victoria’s Secret had the panty market cornered; and the bra market, and the negligee market, plus the stores themselves, glossy and gleaming, dominating entire corners of the mall.

God, what I wouldn’t give to flash back and spend one afternoon (just one, mind you) as my tweenage, 2007 self, roaming the corridors of the Natick Mall in my Juicy Couture velour zip-up and True Religion jeans.

Before collapsing in on itself as a result of a broader cultural shift towards body positivity and a punishing affiliation with abuser Jeffrey Epstein (Epstein managed ex-CEO Les Wexner’s money), Victoria’s Secret was the mall brand to end all mall brands; a scratchy lace candyland where women could buy their way towards feeling sexy and young girls could buy their way toward feeling like women. 

Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon, co-written and reported by New York Magazine’s Chantal Fernandez and Puck’s Lauren Sherman, is a deeply engrossing portrait of the meticulous construction of a retail juggernaut and everything that comprises a multi-billion dollar business: endless reams of fabric, decades of cumulative experience in merchandising and marketing and a genius for anticipating the needs and whims of eager, wistful shoppers. 

Lauren and Chantal were kind enough to sit for a Zoom interview with me; Lauren called in from the back of a car during Paris fashion week. 

Helen Holmes: How did you guys arrive at exploring this business in particular as a subject, and how did you come to work together on it?

Chantal Fernandez: Lauren and I worked together for a long time at the Business of Fashion and we covered Victoria's Secret there. There are very few brands in fashion that maybe merit this kind of attention, length, investigation. It became really clear, especially as Victoria's Secret started to struggle and it was going through this really interesting and tumultuous turnaround series of years, that there was a deeper story to tell. 

Lauren Sherman: I would also add that—as to why we did it together, I think you'll see that a lot more. This is sort of getting into the inner workings of media now, but like, 20 years ago, writers would get six months or a year off and be paid in full if they wanted to write a book, and it just doesn't really work like that anymore. We both worked at a place where I'd say by modern standards, they were very generous with time off and things like that. But I don't know. If I ever wrote a book again and I did it by myself, with this depth of reporting and analysis and everything you really need to take, I would need two years, I think.

HH: One of the innovations of Victoria's Secret was the speed of the trend replication and turnover from a retail standpoint, which we now see replicated in huge retailers like Shein. Could you guys talk about the particular innovations that Les Wexner and Victoria's Secret honed in on? 

LS: It actually goes back to The Limited, Wexner's first business. He used what he learned there to inform how he built and scaled the Victoria's Secret business and the Abercrombie and Fitch business and Bath and Body Works and all these other things that came after The Limited. 

[Victoria’s Secret] really was proto fast fashion and this idea of speed to market: even today, most retailers, if they're producing their own clothes, it can be six months to a year and a half ahead of time. The scheduling is really crazy. And it means that a lot of times retailers are behind on trends, and then they can't sell stuff and then they have to discount it. [Wexner] was also one of the first American retailers to manufacture overseas. And so I would say for both of us, because we do report on the business side of the industry, that [Wexner’s] impact on the greater apparel culture and apparel business is, I don't think, very well known.

CF: What's interesting about trends is also that apparel is not the same as lingerie. Part of what was innovative about Victoria's Secret is that they created trends in a category that had previously been very utilitarian, unless you were shopping on the high end. They brought that sort of access to trends to more Americans, which is really what The Limited was doing because before that, kind of in that post-war culture, there wasn't a way for regular Americans to access the kind of trends that were coming off the runways in Europe, so there was a democratization there that was really exciting at the time. And you know, if you think about it, it's still pretty new in the grand scheme of things—but now, we're so used to it. 

HH: How did the brand’s central character—Victoria of Victoria’s Secret—change over the years? 

LS: In the beginning, when [founder Roy Raymond and his wife, Gaye Raymond] thought her up, they made up a story about being on the Orient Express, which was a thing in the 70s because of the movie Murder on the Orient Express. It was a little zeitgeisty and they said they were on the train with her and Roy leaned over to her, and she was so confident and Roy said, ‘What's your secret?’ And she said lingerie. Obviously none of this ever happened, but it was interesting because [Victoria] was English. 

Pretty much the whole time the business was growing, it was female executives at the store level and catalog level. But in the late nineties, early two thousands, that's when Ed Razek, the marketer, really kind of took more control of the marketing. And that's when Victoria changed a lot and became depicted through the male gaze.

HH: I had no idea Michael Bay was responsible for so many Victoria’s Secret commercials, but it made sense to me when I looked at the images. He shoots women the same as cars. Women are cars, welcome to Victoria’s Secret. 

And it’s interesting that that vision for the brand sort of dovetailed with the introduction of PINK. That was my entry point into the brand, when I was a kid at the mall. Victoria’s Secret very successfully targeted tweens by selling this idea that if you're a young girl, this is where the process of growing up happens.

CF: I was part of that PINK generation too, and growing up in Houston, I didn't feel like I had another place to shop for bras, except for maybe Macy's, and that felt to me dour and kind of clinically sad, so I wouldn't have gone somewhere else. I didn't even have an option to. 

I think there was just a very genius identification of a gap in the market and a place to go. I actually was a PINK customer and I never really graduated to Victoria’s Secret by the time it would have made sense for me to do that. I just left the brand completely. PINK was more of a friendly, approachable brand identity, and it appealed to me so much more because the Victoria's Secret side of the store was really intimidating to me as a young person. And I think a lot of other people felt that way. PINK turned this Victoria's Secret mantra into something bubblegum pink and friendly and not all about boys exactly. I think that really was an effective segmentation of what the brand stood for. 

HH: How did the Victoria’s Secret fashion show become such a huge phenomenon? The first one was held in 1995, and then it only grew and exploded from there. 

CF: They wanted to establish themselves as high fashion-adjacent, and separate themselves from other mall brands and really stake a claim to say, you know, ‘lingerie is fashion and we own and elevate that space’. A big part of the strategy throughout the history of Victoria's Secret after Wexner acquired it is how to communicate that elevation.

They were filling in that narrative, and they decided to use a runway to do it. The genius of it to me was that they took [the show] to television. Especially at that time, fashion shows were not accessible to the average American to watch, but there was an interest in that world that has only continued.

Now we see fashion shows on Instagram and YouTube all the time, but back then, you wouldn't see these models walking. It was a closed world in Paris, New York, Milan, and Victoria’s Secret brought a really sort of accessible version of that to the public. There weren’t any weird clothes. The models aren't scowling. The women are more traditionally beautiful, or they're made to look so. It was taking this idea that people were aware of, but maybe didn't understand at the time, and serving it back to them in a really sort of accessible, popcorn-friendly way.

HH: What was the turning point where the brand began to go on a downward spiral? 

LS: The foreshadowing was the rise of the wireless bra, and the fact that there were people in the company that really wanted to move on that and that they were met with people higher up in the company that pushed back on it. That was the really big first bad move they made. 

And then within two years was Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo, and they continued to turn a blind eye to that and what was happening in the culture. Chantal and I, we were working together already, and we started to see sources or people in the industry or people coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘Is this fashion show okay? Is the way that they manage this; is the way that they market to people; is the product they sell, really appropriate for this time period and in our culture?’ 

It was around 2013, 2014, where you could sort of start to feel the tide shift. They continued to generate sales, but in 2016, not only did sales get tougher, but profits started to diminish. 

And then comes Ed Razek's interview in 2018, where he buried himself, and then he was fired. He was someone who they never thought Les Wexner would fire. So [Razek] was sacrificed, and then six months later, the Epstein stuff really came to a head, and that was sort of the end of that era.

HH: What would you point to as the biggest impact Victoria’s Secret had on culture? 

CF: I don't know if this is the biggest thing, but I think one thing that people can take away is this idea of a fashion brand, a business brand, [operating as] sort of a media company, which now has become so normalized.

These days, we know who the Gucci crew is. Brands create universes. They have their own blogs. They have their ambassadors do YouTube videos, like ‘What's in my bag’ or ‘Come hang out with me.’ Victoria's Secret was ahead of a lot of those trends, and it's really interesting to see how they very strategically turned themselves into a media company at multiple levels. 

The Victoria’s Secret fashion show was like a reality show. You're following the models as they're training for the show. Then you have the show, you have the commercials and they were really shrewd in the way that they rolled that out, and I think that's something we've become so accustomed to seeing from brands today with their Instagram accounts and the way they roll out a campaign. Victoria's Secret was doing that, effectively, decades ago. 🛍️

ICYMI