VICTORIA’S REAL SECRET
DOCUMENTARY LOOKS AT THE DARKER SIDE OF ICONIC FASHION BRAND
Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons Amazon Prime Video
Taut abs, skimpy underwear, metrehigh wings: Victoria’s Secret set out to make fantasy flesh. At its height in the early 2000s, it was the biggest lingerie brand in America: tens of millions tuned in to watch its annual orgiastic catwalk-cum-concert, where Kanye West or Taylor Swift or Destiny’s Child would perform over the click of supermodels’ stilettos.
Angels from Tyra Banks to Heidi Klum would glide down the runway, women imagining the kind of femme fatale they too could be if they wore its iconic “fantasy bra” — men imagining, well, best not to think about it.
As is the way of these things — not least where swaths of near-naked women are involved — darker goings-on at the multibillion-dollar behemoth were afoot. A new three-part series, Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons, unpicks how sex, money and gross misconduct turned a household name into a dirty word.
Ex-angels, former employees and others cast adrift by the megabrand’s mishandlings describe it as a “cult,” where powerful people “allowed a lot of bad things to happen.”
Not that it seemed to matter back then, as owner Leslie Wexner continued banking his billions. He was accused of making “demeaning” comments about women, and failing to take Ed Razek, CEO of Victoria’s Secret’s parent company, to task over allegations that he had tried to kiss models, and touched one’s crotch before the 2018 show. (Razek denied the claims; a spokesperson for L Brands, the parent firm said they were “fully committed to continuous improvement and complete accountability.”)
As veteran style writer Michael Gross tells the cameras, “Fashion is essentially amoral; it doesn’t care about good or bad. It has no ethics,
it has one rule: sell the frock. No matter the collateral damage.”
Wexner, now 84, started out as an assistant in his parents’ clothing shop, before a $5,000 loan from his aunt kick-started the beginnings of a retail empire. A decade on, in the mid-70s, he had opened 100 stores of his brand The Limited, and began buying up other companies — including Victoria’s Secret, then a little-known lingerie company, in 1982.
At the outset, its modus operandi was eons away from its latter day sex kitten style. The eponymous Victoria — full name Victoria Stuart White — was modelled as a British debutante, and the documentary shows a cringeworthy internal marketing video relaying her backstory.
“Mother was passionate; a fiery Frenchwoman with a quick temper and a healthy disrespect for the English and their stodgy ways,” we hear in clipped Home Counties tones. More detail than you might expect for a mascot peddling pants, but this was simply the beginning of the branding machine.
By the end of the next decade, said pants were significantly more risqué, along with the women in them — Wexner successfully “surfing the zeitgeist at a very different time where forward, female sexuality was equated in the culture with empowerment,” the documentary’s director, Matt Tyrnauer, says.
It was working: the company he bought for $1 million was worth $1 billion. Victoria’s Secret had cornered a third of the total market share, making him the richest man in Ohio in the process. This was “the Sex and the City era,” Tyrnauer says by way of explanation. “These tropes were picked up on by a lot of brands and I think none more exploited (that) than Victoria’s Secret.”
By 2001, having inserted itself into the underwear drawers of a sizable tranche of America and beyond, Wexner — who also owns Abercrombie & Fitch and Bed, Bath and Beyond — was ready to go bigger. So began the annual shows broadcast on major networks; there were performances from Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry: Banks, Klum and Kendall Jenner, Gisele Bündchen, Naomi Campbell, Gigi Hadid and every other supermodel on the planet were there, in bras and angel wings. Quite the turnout, given this was a retail brand, and not a couturier.
But it was well worth it, footage in the documentary shows, with a 20-something Banks telling the camera: “I told my modelling agent to call Victoria’s Secret, because they put girls on the map.” Klum admits, “it made me kind of a household name.” Another clip shows Jenner smiling in her pre-show smalls for a selfie, before thrusting the phone back to its owner, sullen-faced.
Until three years ago, Tyrnauer had somehow never heard of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show — “this is just not my demographic,” he says. His first brush with it came by social media, where suddenly, the models previously clamouring at the brand’s barely-clad teat began lambasting it. Allegations of misogyny and sexual misconduct swirled. As he dug, Tyrnauer was shocked at how closely its offerings resembled “soft-core porn,” unable to understand how “something so retrograde and backward worked at all ... clearly there was a market for this kind of unreconstructed, retrograde exploitation of sexuality to sell things.”
Yet in the cold light of the #Metoo era — and CEO Ed Razek telling Vogue the brand wouldn’t hire trans models, “because the show is a fantasy” — Victoria’s Secret was looking dangerously out of date. In 2018, the Angels walked for the last time.