Victoria’s Secret was founded in 1977 by a California businessman who wanted to sell lingerie to women that made her feel good. The store is known for its sexy, body-hugging bras and panties that have become popular among women of all shapes and sizes. The company also offers sleepwear, beauty products, shoes and swimwear. The brand has expanded from its roots in lingerie to become one-stop shop for women’s apparel.
In the heyday of the 1990s and early 2000s, Victoria’s Secret rode a wave of sexuality-as-empowerment feminism endorsed by everything from the 1992 movie “Sex and the City” to Calvin Klein’s seminal 1992 campaign featuring a scantily clad Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg. With models like Heidi Klum, Stephanie Seymour and Gisele Bundchen strutting in sexy, body-hugging lingerie on the annual Victoria’s Secret fashion show and in high-concept ad campaigns from directors like Michael Bay, Victoria’s Secret became a symbol of female confidence and power.
But in the last half decade, calls for more representational inclusivity — in terms of body size, race and gender — in marketing and advertising have begun to catch up with Victoria’s Secret and other retailers. In 2016, sales began to decline and the company has struggled to turn around its fortunes.
During the course of the three-part series, directed by Matt Tyrnauer, which premieres on Wednesday on Prime Video, we see how the brand’s culture makers, such as Wexner and Chief Executive Officer Ed Razek, consciously and unconsciously created a vision of femininity that was based on racy sex appeal. We learn how this ideal was used to market the products and to construct a fantasy world of the brand’s sexy, beautiful and confident model “Angels.”
The film explores how the brand’s sexiness and erotic messaging helped fuel sex tourism and sex industry industries that profited off of young girls and women who were exposed and vulnerable. It also looks at the relationship between Wexner and his ex-business partner, Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested in 2019 for allegedly using his connection to Victoria’s Secret to traffic underage girls and young women for modeling jobs, runway shows and commercial shoots.
In the years since, Victoria’s Secret has begun to reverse its course. It has reworked its advertising to include curvier and more diverse models, expanded its maternity line and launched bras specifically designed for mastectomy patients. It has also revamped its stores, refreshing their pink-lit spaces and expanding product offerings to encompass more than just bras, underwear and pyjamas, including loungewear, sweaters and slip dresses. It’s an effort to make the palace of pink dreams a place where women can feel invincible, despite its history of presenting a sexy skewered image. It’s not yet clear whether the shift will pay off, but it seems like a start.