I love this but I’d like to let y’all know a few things that I know because I’m old. They make this story even WORSE.
The old man in Ohio didn’t invent Victoria’s Secret. He bought it from someone else--he bought a lot of his brands from other people.
Victoria’s Secret first opened in 1977. In Palo Alto, California. At that time I lived in West Virginia and I was 13, but I knew about it because they ran tiny, tasteful ads in Ms. -- the magazine for 70s feminists. The ads were black and white, with no pictures of uncovered women in them.
Roy Raymond and his wife Gaye opened the store with their own savings. The short version of the story is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Raymond
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria%27s_Secret
and I’m including it because that’s where I learned a lot of this. Because I was a child when Victoria’s Secret was actually good, but when all this stuff about Lex Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein the pedophile’s BFF, came out, I knew I couldn’t be crazy for remembering that Victoria’s Secret used to be different.
The Raymonds opened the store because Roy Raymond wanted to buy his wife some nice lingerie but it was a totally embarrassing experience. You either went to the ladies’ section of the department store, which at that time was not at all welcoming to dudes, or you went to a sex shop, and a lot of the stuff at the sex shop was cheap and ugly. There was also Frederick’s of Hollywood and they had a catalog you could order by mail or phone from but the emphasis there was also on being racy and provocatively sexy.
So they named the store Victoria’s Secret to emphasise that you wear lingerie under your other clothing, or in private with people you love, and it’s an intimate thing. And the decor of the stores was very tasteful.
Now I turned 18 in 1982, and that was the year that Wexner bought Victoria’s Secret, but the Raymonds continued to run it for a while. Raymond said once that he when he met Wexner it felt like he was talking to the devil, and I believe it. This guy was hanging out with Epstein playing his reindeer games FFS.
But sometime in the 80s I started to shop at Victoria’s Secret a lot and it was before they really started changing it. At that time it was really very nice. It was done up like a Victorian drawing room, things were displayed on mannequins, things were kept in drawers and there was dark wood paneling and classical music playing and they would go and fetch you stuff.
You could NOT be seen inside the store from outside. They generally managed it so the customers didn’t have to see much of each other unless they came in together.
They had started sending out catalogues showing the lingerie on models at about that time, but nothing like the ones they have now. It was all tasteful, there was an actual effort to make you think about the Victorian era.
They made these nightgowns/robes called the Canterbury and I actually wore them as dresses. I had different colours and I’d layer them Pink House Style over each other--the nightgown was sleeveless with a placket, the gown had sleeves and buttoned all the way up and down so you could leave it open to show off the underlayer, and I would buy them in coordinating prints and colours, and they were not, uh, what men generally think of as sexy at all. It was a very proto-Lolita look. I could’ve fit a petti under them but I didn’t.
They had lace and pintucks and ribbons and were gorgeous. I don’t know when VS stopped selling them but I had them all thru the 80s and I bought panties there too. I’ve always been a weird bra size so no bras there, but.
Back then I fuckin loved Victoria’s Secret. A lot of their stuff looked Pink Housey back then tbh.
I stopped shopping there in the 1990s because of a lot of reasons. That was when Wexner really started rebranding (ruining) the shops and the brand. It was a tough time for me, I’d just gone no contact with my mom and I was broke a lot, I had a terrible marriage, et cetera, ad nauseam.
But I’d go back in every now and again and the soft pastels and the cottons were becoming a smaller and smaller part of the offerings and they modernised their image and they stopped making the stuff that I wanted to buy. The windows were bigger, the stores went from dark wood panelling to whiter and airier, they started selling gym clothes and miracle bras and the emphasis on being hot and sexy and attractive to men came along and got dialed up to 11.
I was completely grossed out in 2002 when they started doing the PINK line, which according to one of the documentaries on Epstein, was his influence--it was designed to recruit teens and tweens into the market for their stuff. I just knew that I did not go to Victoria’s Secret to buy fuckin’ sweatpants, and I stopped shopping there; the miracle bra did sound kinda cool, but they sure’s fuck didn’t make it in a 38G.
The original Victoria was actually kinda Victorian, and feminist magazines took their ads for their mail order catalogues!
But Les Wexner (while saying he wanted to emphasise the female customer more, LMAO) changed it from a place where you could go to get really luscious cotton and lace (and silky polyester too, but with a nice feel to it) nightgowns and underwear and gowns that were pretty and opaque and covered enough to be worn as dresses in the day time, in a beautiful environment, to another freaking mall shop, and another place that made girls and women of all ages, sizes and assigned genders at birth feel like there was something wrong with them that miracle bras and pushup panties could fix.
The couple that opened the place got divorced. The guy who sold the business to Wexner committed suicide in 1993 by jumping off the golden gate bridge because none of his other businesses succeeded.
And now everyone who remembers when Victoria’s Secret was actually nice is old. :(
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