Selling Sexy

August 1, 2024
An investigation of the ups and downs of an iconic American brand. Sherman and Fernandez bring extensive journalistic experience inside the fashion industry to their examination of Victoria's Secret, a business and brand that had a significant effect on the concept of female sexuality for several decades. The company began as a struggling retail chain that was taken over by charismatic executive Les Wexner, who was quick to realize that in the 1980s, women were ready to splurge on intimate apparel sold in pretty, energetic, colorful stores in malls. He led the company to remarkable heights and turned it into a cultural icon. The annual Angels show, featuring supermodels in glittery undergarments, became a key event of the fashion calendar. The company was marketing sexiness--or, rather, a hyped-up version of sexiness--with a large dose of commercialized fantasy mixed in. However, as the authors show, success contained the seeds of failure. Wexner failed to understand the rise of social media, and the company was a latecomer to online shopping. Younger women blamed the company for reinforcing stereotypes, and a series of revelations about the misogynistic culture behind the scenes created more problems. The company took another major hit when Wexner was associated with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his former financial manager. The authors are unsure about the extent of the damage from the Epstein scandal, but it certainly did not help a company that was already reeling. Wexner tried to recast the company's image for a new era, but nothing worked. "In the years since Les walked away...the brand's sales have gotten better, then worse, then mostly settled into a state of slow and steady decline," write the authors--though it still owns "18 percent of the intimates market share" in the U.S. A dynamic, fair-minded chronicle of the rise and fall of Victoria's Secret.

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August 19, 2024
Journalists Sherman and Fernandez debut with an enthralling deep dive into the history of Victoria’s Secret. They recount how husband-and-wife duo Roy and Gaye Raymond opened the first Victoria’s Secret store in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1977, seeking to tap an underserved market for upscale lingerie. Roy’s thriftlessness imperiled what was otherwise a thriving business, leading him to sell his four stores in 1983 to retail maven Les Wexner, who updated the Victorian decor; stocked cheaper, tawdrier products to bring in more customers; and pushed for rapid expansion across the U.S. Sherman and Fernandez chart the company’s transformation into a multibillion-dollar brand, but the most revealing sections cover the business’s beleaguered recent past. For instance, the authors discuss how executives’ unwillingness to update their business model for the digital age contributed to the company’s mounting financial woes throughout the 2010s, when changing mores around body inclusivity heightened scrutiny of the business’s glamorization of thinness. Victoria’s Secret also took hits to its reputation after Wexner’s close ties with Jeffrey Epstein received renewed attention following the financier’s 2019 arrest for sex trafficking, and a 2020 New York Times report revealed that chief marketing officer Ed Razek routinely fat-shamed colleagues and made inappropriate advances toward models. A sharp assessment of the company’s financial and moral failings, this pulls no punches.