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Allison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Allison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, Grammy Award winning tabla player, Zakir Hussain, joins us for a listening party. Cookbook author, Julia Turshen, is here in studio to talk about her latest book, What Goes with What. Jane Pratt, the creator of Sassy and Jane joins us to talk about her latest media adventure, it's titled Another Jane Pratt Thing. That's the plan. Let's get this started with Victoria's Secret.

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Let's talk business. Brands sometimes relaunch. Sometimes it's to get back into a new market. Sometimes it's just to go back to basics. Sometimes after a spectacular fall from grace, it's the reinvention of the halcyon days when things were going great. Yesterday all three happened with the return of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show for the first time since 2018. The fashion show was once a blockbuster event. Models and musicians got together and created a spectacle. Hitmakers sang as very pretty women donned wings and very little clothing on the catwalk. In its heyday, about 10 million people watched.

After a series of controversies involving top management at the company, including an association with Jeffrey Epstein and amidst a failure to diversify the types of models featured on the runway, profits took a nosedive. Why did one of the biggest names in women's lingerie begin to decline? Who's responsible? What did decades of Victoria's Secret marketing teach young women about what is and isn't attractive? A new book seeks to answer these questions. It's titled Selling Sexy: Victoria's Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon. It's co-authored by Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez. I'm joined now by Lauren Sherman. Hi, Lauren.

Lauren Sherman: Hey, Allison. Thanks for having me.

Allison Stewart: Listeners, we want to hear from you. What has been your relationship to Victoria's Secret over the years? Have you been a customer? Are you still a customer? What do you like or not like about the Victoria's Secret catalog or the stores, or did you watch last night's show? What did you think of it? We are talking Victoria's Secret. Our number's 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. In your book, you give us a little bit of the history of lingerie. You write that in 1911, Macy's founded its first brasserie department. What did women's undergarments go from being a basic thing to a luxury or an accessory item?

Lauren Sherman: The rise of the Frederick's of Hollywood catalog, which was founded by someone whose family worked in the garment center in New York and had roots in the bra business is probably the start of the fetishizing of lingerie and popular culture. Obviously, it had been happening behind the scenes for a long time. Anything that touches your skin can be fetishized, I think. Victoria's Secret was founded in the late '70s by Roy and Gaye Raymond, these entrepreneurs based in San Francisco. They actually first founded a sex toy company that was mail order catalog only and that helped to fund Victoria's Secret.

What they aim to do is make the experience for shopping for bras and underwear more fun and pleasurable and also more comfortable for men potentially buying underwear for their wives or just women buying things for themselves. This is the height of women's lib. After all the bras were burned, what do you do? You go back to the shop, you buy some stuff, but they wanted to make it fun. Prior to 1911 or what have you, this wasn't a big part of culture. By the late '70s, buying lingerie and what lingerie represented, it meant a lot to I think the relationship women have with their bodies and also the relationship everyone has with women's bodies.

Allison Stewart: At first, Victoria's Secret was very, very upscale. What could you get at Victoria's Secret in the late '70s or early '80s?

Lauren Sherman: It was like the Barneys and this is a New York audience, you all know Barneys New York. It was like the Barneys of lingerie. You could get like a tap pant, which is like a little satin short and a silk negligee or what have you set. There was a set at that time that they sold that cost $2,000. Actually, Eleanor Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola's wife also had an intimate's line in the late '70s or early '80s that she sold there.

I bought a robe from her line on eBay recently that was basically untouched, but it was really beautiful things. The founders would do a big buying spree in Europe. They sold a lot of British brands. They sold just really high-end stuff that you couldn't find in the US really easily. Then they also launched a catalog, which made it accessible to people all over the country. You could shop at the stores in the bay area, but the catalog was really what made it a national phenomenon.

Allison Stewart: I was going to ask you about that catalog. How many catalogs were sent out. What kind of return did they get? What was the period of the catalog?

Lauren Sherman: Oh, man. Just stepping back for one minute, catalogs became very popular in the '60s and '70s as post-World War II suburban culture became a real thing. This was before malls. Malls didn't really become a big part of American culture until the late '70s or early '80s. Catalogs were ways for people in the suburbs who had been used to shopping on the high street and being able to walk to the department store from their house sometimes, or at least by train or car or what have you, catalogs were a way to access a lot of things when you were in the boonies, which the suburbs were in some cases at that time.

It's interesting the catalog was this way for Victoria's Secret. They obviously had this big mailing list the Raymonds from their first business, Xandria, and they were able to just access so many people. The first few catalogs, and I think for a long time, you would send a check in and you had to write down your order and fill it out yourself, you couldn't even call them and place an order. It's an interesting proto internet selling type thing. It made it a big part of the culture. It was also a comfortable way for women and men to shop these products, where there's so much shame around sex and lingerie and all of that stuff.

If you could do it from the comfort of your own home, that was the first step in. They also tried to make the stores really welcoming and comfortable. A lot of the early store employees said there were a lot of alternative lifestyle people in San Francisco shop in the store. A lot of men shop in the store for themselves, which this late '70s, it wasn't the time we live in now. They really crossed a lot of taboos and tried to open the world up, especially in the beginning.

Allison Stewart: Let's take a call. Jerry is calling in from Nutley, New Jersey. Hi, Jerry.

Jerry: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. I'm so fascinated by what happened to this company. You just unlocked a memory, shopping by catalog, but they also expanded into athleisure for a while. I've been a customer of theirs forever and I noticed in the early aughts, the quality of the clothing really declined. Things would rip, things would just come apart. If you went online and looked at the reviews, people noticed the same things.

I'm wondering if that contributed to what happened. Even before they got in trouble with social issues, and Epstein, and all that, there was just a real shift in the quality of the clothing in 2000s. I'm wondering if they changed sourcing or factory specifications, anything like that.

Lauren Sherman: For sure. I think all of this stuff always comes back to the product. If the product was good, everything that was happening around with social issues and MeToo, it wouldn't have mattered as much to be honest. I don't think consumers vote with their dollar. They buy things that make them feel good and feel like they're good value. I would say generally in the fashion industry, the quality of clothing at the lower end has decreased in many cases because of the fact that it's harder and harder, clothes are cheaper than ever. What we pay at mass retail, is a pair of jeans cost $17 in 1950, you could buy a pair of jeans for $17 now.

There's obviously a discrepancy there. Yes, the quality of the product very well might have gone downhill. They still work with a lot of the suppliers and factories that they've always worked with since the late '70s. The challenge is you have to make things more cheaply because you need to make some profit off of them and the profit margins continue to shrink because consumers want more value, there's more discounting, all that stuff. It's this terrible cycle that is a huge challenge for the fashion industry in general. Your experience of seeing the quality of the clothing diminish is absolutely true.

They might have switched factories, it may just be that the factory was taking shortcuts, but it was a real challenge. You mentioned the athleisure attempt. They really did try to get into activewear as you said in the early 2010s. There were some successes, but the challenge was the men who were really overseeing the business at the tippy top, they didn't want to be in that business. They wanted to be in the business of push-up bras and lacy underwear because they believe that that was the image that they were selling, it sold well for them for many, many years.

Another big turning point in the book, and it sounds "unsexy," but the rise of the bralette, the wireless bra in culture, Victoria's Secret sold them, but they didn't want to market them because it didn't represent their ideal of sexy. They missed the boat on that and that was the turning point I would say that then all this MeToo, and Epstein, and just internal toxic culture company stuff happened. The lack of pushing and being behind the bralette, which so many people just wears their everyday bra now, was really the beginning of their downfall.

Allison Stewart: My guest is Lauren Sherman, co-author of the new book Selling Sexy: Victoria's Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon. Listeners, we do want to hear from you what has been your relationship to Victoria's Secret over the years? Have you been a customer? Are you still a customer? What do you like or not like about Victoria's Secret, or did you watch the fashion show last night? What did you think of it? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

I want to go back to the Raymonds. In some ways, they were romantics. I learned in the book that they spent a fortune on the photo shoots and on photographers. What was the good part of their image for the company and then what proved to be a problem?

Lauren Sherman: They were really such a remarkable couple. In early example, we think of San Francisco being startup nation. They were doing that in the late '70s when it wasn't so common place to launch your own business. They had grand ambitions and big ideas. You mentioned that they spent all this money on the photo shoots, but they also spent-- One person told me that the budget to open a store was $1 million. That's a lot of money now for retail, especially in modern figures. They had big dreams and they were willing to do what they needed to do to surprise and delight the customer and make the experience feel good.

Roy Raymond, his big thing was white spaces, which a lot of entrepreneurs use that term, but he wanted to find opportunities in places that other people didn't see. After Victoria's Secret, they opened a high-end clothing store called My Child's Destiny that you could buy little mini toilets from Europe and also Apple computers. They were big dreamers. The challenge for them was that they didn't know how to make a business out of it, they didn't know how to scale it. It wasn't a time when venture capitalists were throwing money at mom and pop shops, essentially and so they had a lot of problems.

Les Wexner, who had started the limited, which is a proto fast fashion and had scaled it very quickly from the late '60s to the late '70s, he was interested in Victoria's Secret because he saw an opportunity to make it a really big thing nationally and open a ton of stores. He approached them first in 1980. Roy, who was really the driver of the business, although Gaye supported him and I don't think she gets enough credit in the early success of Victoria's Secret, but Roy rejected Les Wexner's advances and said, "We're doing this on our own."

By 1982, they were on the verge of bankruptcy. They had just overspent and they didn't really have any options. He had to succumb and give Wexner the business. By a year in, the Raymonds and everyone who they had ever hired was out, and the business was moved from San Francisco to Columbus where the limited was headquartered.

Allison Stewart: We got a text, "I never found their bras to be cut for realistically shaped women. Nobody's boobs are an inch apart and really that far away from their shoulders." We are talking about the book Selling Sexy: Victoria's Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon. We'll have more with Lauren Sherman, its co-author after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Allison Stewart. My guest is Lauren Sherman, co-author of the new book Selling Sexy: Victoria's Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon. She wrote alongside Chantal Fernandez. Listeners, we want to hear from you, what's been your relationship with Victoria's Secret over the years? Did you watch the fashion show last night? What did you think? 212-433-9692, 212-433, you can call in and join us on the air, or you can text to us at that number. We're up to Les Wexner, he takes over in 1982. What was he selling at Victoria's Secret?

Lauren Sherman: Les Wexner was all about scale and price value equation, which is a very popular marketing term used in business schools. His whole thing was consumers don't want to spend a lot of money, let's give them just enough quality and at the right price. His whole idea was to take the idea of Victoria's Secret that the Raymonds honed and make it bigger, make it more mass market. A lot of his advisors didn't think it was a smart idea to buy Victoria's secret. It was obviously, heavily in debt and the model they had created wasn't working at retail.

The thing that Wexner did that is just so smart is he was able to take that little kernel of genius and create something that helped shape the American mall. His stores, Victoria's Secret, The Limited, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, this is what populated the mall. He understood at that time that people were moving away from department stores. There's a stat in the book, the decrease of where people buy their products from department stores to single brand retailers or single item retailers, it went from the majority of products were bought at department stores in the mid 1970s to the vast minority were not bought there in the mid 1980s.

Wexner's genius really was in that ability to recognize what consumers would be interested in and scale it and make it cheap. One of the early products that they created through his relationship with this manufacturer called Mast Industries was a red teddy that was $20 or maybe $40, very cheap. I remember talking to some of the early Victoria's Secret employees about that teddy. It represented to them the company's downfall, but what it really represented was the beginning of the company's rise.

By the early '90s, it was making a few million dollars in sales when it was sold to Wexner. By the early '90s, it was making over $1 billion a year in sales. Even today, the company still generates $6 billion a year in revenue. It's really wild how many bras and pairs of underwear they sell every year.

Allison Stewart: Let's take Nicole from the Bronx. Hi, Nicole. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Nicole: I had to call in because I worked at the public relations agency that represented Victoria's Secret and all of The Limited two brands, all the Wexner brands, all the [unintelligible 00:19:42]. Just to cut to the chase, it was never about the bra, it was about the theater around it. It's why women respond differently to a diamond ring and a Tiffany box. At that time, I was working in from '90 to '94. It was theatrical, it was special.

It was your first experience having an unboxing. If your boyfriend bought you something from Victoria's Secret, you would tell all the girls the next day at work, and they'll go, "Whoo." Being a salesperson, from what I learned was also spiritual because some women who didn't really feel great about the bras, suddenly there's this magical thing for [unintelligible 00:20:19]

Allison Stewart: Thanks so much for the call Nicole. I did want to point out about Wexner is that Les Wexner used Jeffrey Epstein as his financial manager for many years. What do we know about their relationships? Were they friends? Were they colleagues?

Lauren Sherman: A lot of it is a mystery that we'll never know because one person is dead and the other person doesn't care to speak about this and never did. The really weird thing about their relationship was Les Wexner was a very guarded, private, shy man who did not let a lot of people in. His early associates, many of them were people he went to high school with. Those people worked with him for 20, 30 years in some cases. Then he met Jeffrey Epstein in the 1980s when he was spending more time in New York, felt like a fish out of water. He's from Columbus, doesn't like to socialize, doesn't feel comfortable being in public, being on boards, things like that.

He meets this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, who he was introduced to by this guy, Bob Meister, a respectable financial person. Suddenly Jeffrey Epstein is this person that's making all these other rich people a lot of money and is also connected to society, is out and about. By 1991, Les Wexner granted Jeffrey Epstein power of attorney. All you need to know about power of attorney is that that only goes to family members, people you're really, really close with. Suddenly this guy out of nowhere, has power of attorney for this 55-year-old unmarried man.

What was the actual deal look like? We could have spent an entire book talking about their relationship and we decided not to because there are so many other stories within Victoria's Secret Nicole just mentioned, like the dream that they were selling. They were selling hope not help. It says so much about our culture, and our beauty ideals, and all that stuff. If we had just focused on the Epstein-Wexner relationship, so much of that would have gotten lost. It was really peculiar. He made Les Wexner a lot of money, and that's part of it. I'd say in the book, that's what we get into the most, the financial dealings that they had and how those changed Les Wexner's life and also Epstein's life.

Wexner essentially gifted him that giant mansion on the Upper East Side. There was some financial transaction, but the details of it are sparse. It was a very weird relationship and in the end, will be the tarnishing of Les Wexner's legacy. This is a person who did a lot of good in the Columbus area and Ohio in general, was richest man in Ohio for decades and had created a lot of cultural and institutions and donated a lot of money to education, all that stuff.

Their relationship which supposedly ended in 2007, 2008 when Epstein was arrested, a decade later, it essentially meant that no matter what Wexner does now, Epstein will always be the next sentence. It's quite odd and you could really psychoanalyze it. That's what I would say.

Allison Stewart: We got a text here that says, "As a man who worked at both Abercrombie & Fitch under CEO Mike Jeffries and VS/Pink, my experience is that the in-store experience at VS, Victoria's Secret was much more inclusive, both with hiring and emphasizing comfort for staff and clientele." Thank you for your text. I did want to ask you about the fashion show. The fashion show was a big deal five, six years ago. Why did it end?

Lauren Sherman: For one, it used to run on national television, they didn't have a tv network who wanted to run it anymore. It had been with CBS and then I think right at the end, it switched to ABC. I think ABC was like, "Look, you have this Epstein association, there's me, too. You're even associated with Harvey Weinstein, your CMO has made all these crazy comments that sound allegedly misogynistic, all of that stuff." It just didn't make sense anymore to be associated with it. If someone's not going to stream it, what's the point? In the past, the show was entirely costumes. There was nothing you could buy.

There wasn't a real return on investment, it was all intangible. That was a big reason was that they just didn't have a place to run it, but also internally, they were just going through so much that they didn't really have the capacity to put on something like that. This show that happened last night, they've been planning it for seven months. To be honest, longer probably in terms of budgeting and things like that. It was just a matter of everything came to a head in 2018, 2019 and they had to essentially start over again.

Allison Stewart: They had this big fashion show last night. If you were in the Times Square area, you couldn't ignore it. This was really interesting because they had Tyra Banks on the runway, you had Ashley Graham on the runway. It was really interesting because there was this reporter who was either, in my opinion, a feminist or just asked a simple question to some of the models. The question was, "Does your daughter know what you do?" Let's take a listen to this exchange from Gigi Hadid.

Speaker 3: Now, your daughter recently turned four. Does Khai understand what mama does for a living?

Gigi Hadid: Not really. She will love this when I show her, but more for the costumes and the fantasy, which is so much of the reason that I love it the same way that I love Broadway and theater, I love this show.

Speaker 3: It's an icon.

Gigi Hadid: It's such a production, and the wings and the costumes are really so beautiful. I think she'll love it for those reasons, but no, she doesn't really know what I do. She knows I walk a runway and she knows I make sweaters. She comes to my knitwear company to our office. She knows that I do fashion, but she doesn't know what that means.

Speaker 3: Still putting it all together, but if she were to show interest to do what mama does, what grandmama has done, what her auntie does, what would you say to her getting into the biz?

Gigi Hadid: I want her to do whatever she wants, but she's interested in so many things. She can have a dress up moment and strike a pose, I can tell you that.

Speaker 3: Because she gets it from her mama, y'all.

Gigi Hadid: She's also so musical, artistic, smart, she loves space. I don't know if it'll be modeling, but if it is then I'll be happy.

Allison Stewart: That's a pretty good answer from Gigi Hadid, but why do you think they asked that question? Because it went to a couple of different models and some of them had different reactions.

Lauren Sherman: Interesting. I don't know. One thing I will say is Gigi Hadid's knitwear line is great and great example for her daughter. It's been very successful. I think that was probably an inadvertent way to say, do you want your daughter to know that you're dressed up in underwear and walking on a runway right now? What kind of message does that send? Maybe the interviewer could have been a little more direct, I guess. I think that also puts a lot on the models to-- I'm not sure if this is their job.

There's also that part of it that they're just doing the work. I don't know if we can place all the responsibility on them for upholding images or what have you. It's complicated. Everybody is implicated and nobody is implicated in some ways.

Allison Stewart: Let me get one more response from you. There were really interesting reactions to the fashion show. On a post from Vogue, one of the top comments say, "Didn't we collectively decide a few years ago that we didn't give an F about this nonsense? Another red Ozempic hit, and everybody's back on this Victoria's Secret train." On the other side of the corn, Ashley Graham, a plus-size model, some of her top comments, "I'm sorry, No. This is a beautiful woman, but not an angel. Bring back the old versus Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. This wasn't it." First of all, did you watch and do you think it worked?

Lauren Sherman: I watched. I think that nothing will work like it once did. I think that the sentiment generally, I would say once we get all the social media stats back that I think the sentiment favored the positive that people were like, "It was fine, they looked pretty." It didn't feel as male gaze, it felt more connected to women. The show was put together by women, styled by women, all of that. There was diversity of age with the models and to an extent, size, there were two plus-sized models, there were two transgender models. There was an effort that I thought felt pretty genuine to mix things up.

All that said, we don't live in a monoculture anymore, our culture is fragmented. The impact of these types of events is very minimal. The amount of money that they spent on this, tens of millions of dollars, is it really going to affect sales for more than a week or two? I highly doubt it. The thing about now is everything's measurable, so we'll be able to tell. The other thing is, it's interesting that someone said that about Ashley Graham, who I thought they all looked great. To me, the women on that stage were still upholding these unrealistic standards of beauty, regardless of size, or gender, or race, or what have you.

It was still about looking a certain way. Most of the models were extremely thin, even the ones in their 50s. I don't really think it's going to have an effect either way. I think the sentiment is a little bit helpful for the business, but the reality is the product that they're selling is not up to par. There's Fenty, Savage by Fenty is very popular. There's Skims, which is the go to for a lot of women now when they think about buying a new bra.

Victoria's Secret is a giant business, but it's going to continue to shrink unless they do something about the product itself. These kinds of fashion show, extravaganzas, it's fun. We're talking about it now. We will be for the next week, but then will people be talking about it six months from now? I really don't think so.

Allison Stewart: The name of the book is Selling Sexy: Victoria's Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon. It is co-authored by Lauren Sherman. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us.

Lauren Sherman: Thanks so much for having me, Alison. Big fan of yours and a big fan of Jane Pratt. I can't believe I'm going to get to go before her.

Allison Stewart: That's up next, it's Jane Pratt.