Did you know that the modern brassiere is a Buckminster Fuller-level feat of soft engineering requiring some 30 to 40 separately sourced pieces, “including underwires and strap-adjusting sliders”?
That’s one of many fun facts within the pages of “Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon,” Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez’s brisk, lively chronicle of the global retail empire built on sweet-nothing bits of lace and rayon. But this is a book about bras in the same way that “Citizen Kane” is a movie about a sled — which is to say, not at all.
Even the most casual observer likely knows by now that the VS brand has fallen, a thonged Icarus, from the precipitous heights of its 1990s and 2000s heyday. The three-part docuseries “Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons” became a streaming hit for Hulu in 2022, in large part by breathlessly exploring the murky relationship between the company’s billionaire owner and C.E.O., Les Wexner, and the disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein’s monstrous legacy is duly addressed in “Selling Sexy”: He first appears leeringly on Page 4, but his crimes are ancillary to a more prosaic tale of bad actors and strategic misfires.
And the banal truth is that few businesses last as long as this one did. Retail is a fickle beast; as Sherman and Fernandez, both longtime chroniclers of the industry, put it bluntly in their prologue, “Most fashion brands have a creative shelf life of 10 to 15 years before a stale smell wafts in, the hype fades and shoppers move on to the next new thing.”
In case you’re wondering, there never was a Victoria. The character, and her posh British bohemia, was a fiction conjured in the late 1970s by a San Francisco couple, Gaye and Roy Raymond, who dreamed of selling unmentionables to sophisticated adults that evoked neither the sexless industrial beige of most department-store offerings nor the red-light sleaze of brown-bagged circulars.
The pair’s first store, located in Palo Alto, modeled a world of soft-focus boudoir elegance, spilling over with gauzy silk dressing gowns and garter belts at a luxe price point. (One $1,200 specialty item: a pair of his-and-hers kimonos designed by the film director Francis Ford Coppola’s artist wife, Eleanor.)
It was a concept that quickly caught on among moneyed Bay Area libertines, and even became a national cult hit with the advent of its tastefully erotic mail-order catalog. But Roy Raymond’s business acumen did not match his creative ambitions — his story was immortalized as a cautionary tale in the 2010 Facebook biopic “The Social Network” — and Les Wexner eventually stepped in, buying the struggling company for $1 million (in stock options) in 1982.
An almost studiously bland retail king from Dayton, Ohio, Wexner had already found success with the casual fast-fashion precursor The Limited, and he wasted little time in scaling up Victoria’s Secret’s retail footprint, while also trading in the Raymonds’ rarefied vision for something more accessible and synthetic.
Thus, the company went from a niche source for intimates to a global juggernaut whose ubiquitous pink-and-black bags, glossy showrooms and be-winged supermodels became a lodestar of sex and commerce for several generations of girls and young women.
Detailing that transformation is the main work of “Selling Sexy,” which moves methodically, if lightly, through the company’s relentless rise and swift, messy fall. Many creative and strategic leaders there were actually women, even if the top executives remained men: Wexner and his loyal longtime deputy, Ed Razek.
Wexner and Razek don’t go on the record here, but a lot of those women do, along with other former and current employees and various industry players. Readers truffle-sniffing primarily for Epstein dirt may still prefer the 2022 Hulu show, which leans faster, looser and more salacious. (It certainly doesn’t come with 12 small-font pages of footnotes.)
Instead, in chatty but precise prose, Sherman and Fernandez unfurl the kind of forensic, thoroughly sourced narrative more often found in the business pages of a newspaper, albeit one that makes clear the ongoing role that sexism, racism and sizeism played in the company’s undoing. (Among other things, Wexner held firmly to a philosophy of “hope, not help,” meaning no items — those intended for maternity, mastectomies or cup sizes larger than a DDD — that might dim the fantasy.)
Wexner may be gone, but even in its reduced state, Victoria’s Secret carries on. A runway show is scheduled for Oct. 15, with a multigenerational cast of supermodel alumni and musical guests including Cher, and the company continues to sell vast quantities of bras and underwear. Women, it seems, just aren’t buying the dream anymore.
The post Misreading the Moment, a Bra Empire Goes Bust appeared first on New York Times.
