Recent documentaries on Von Dutch and Abercrombie & Fitch have been inspired by the return of Y2K styles. Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons, a three-part docuseries about fashion, sex, power, money, and wrongdoing, will premiere this week and is certain to excite.
After all, the multibillion-dollar lingerie behemoth was an unavoidable cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s and early 2000s, characterized by high-octane fashion shows, suggestive mail-order catalogs, impossibly leggy spokeswomen dubbed Angels, and lacquered stores (and signature pink-striped shoppers bags) pervasive in shopping malls and the broader American fashion industry.
Allegations of bullying and harassment of employees and models; executives dismissive of casting more diverse and inclusive models; and former billionaire CEO Les Wexner’s unsettlingly close ties to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein were hidden behind the glitz and glamour promoting female empowerment through overt sexuality.
The series traces the rise and fall of the megabrand, telling the story both from the inside (courtesy of two former CEOs, other key employees, damning never-before-seen internal videos, and a few Angels themselves) and the outside: the late-90s, post-Clinton/Lewinsky, Sex and the City–era cultural shifts that ignited the brand’s aggressive sexuality and those that foreshadowed its decline decades later in the wake of #MeTo
Approximately at this time, director Matt Tyrnauer began to notice the controversies surrounding the brand. “In a 2019 meeting I had with a fashion business, it came up that some Victoria’s Secret models were rebelling on social media,” he told.
Before it, he says, “I hadn’t given the brand much thought.” (He was unaware of the Angels until he began researching this picture.) “My initial thought was, ‘This is the worst, dumbest, most demeaning, archaic, backward-looking marketing idea I have ever encountered.’ And yet, it succeeded in a way that perhaps no other fashion marketing effort has ever succeeded.
Tyrnauer, a former longtime editor at Vanity Fair who has filmed movies on Studio 54, Roy Cohn, and the high-fashion designer Valentino, tends to move in more exclusive circles. But, “this looked to me to be an example of yet another fracture in the foundation of the old top-down fashion regime,” where models, who were before entirely controlled by the brands, were in effect biting the hand that had fed them, as he explains. “I enjoy writing about closed worlds and closed systems, and I thought, There’s something here.”
Wexner, who is now 84 years old, facilitated Epstein’s access to riches and women by providing the financier considerable control over his finances, philanthropy, and personal life. In 1997, Epstein disguised as Victoria’s Secret talent scout and lured a model to a Santa Monica hotel room where he grabbed and assaulted her.
Epstein’s long and close association with Wexner permitted the purchase of his home (where he sexually molested minor girls) and private jet used to traffic his victims, notoriously dubbed the Lolita Express by the media. (Wexner, who resigned from the company this year, rebuffed interview requests from the series but denied knowledge of Epstein’s sexual wrongdoing during his employment. The former chairman has admitted that he was once alerted that Epstein was falsely claiming an affiliation with the company and that he prohibited Epstein from doing so again. Wexner asserts that he cut relations with Epstein in 2008.)
“New York is a city where you have to fake it until you make it,” says Tyrnauer, who formerly managed Vanity Fair’s annual New Establishment list. “Epstein is the poster child for that,” he adds. “There was nothing of value there, and yet the New York media world and what passes for society – which is a money culture, which I believe is fundamentally corrupt – either embraced him or turned a blind eye.
The more we study that society, which is a culture of money, power, and notoriety, and the more we tear away its facade, the better.”
On the surface, he argues, “this series is about the most basic, lowbrow consumer product imaginable.” However, that is merely marketing. When viewed from behind, it reaches the heart of the establishment.”
Even before Wexner’s affiliation with Epstein came under examination, the company struggled to find relevance in a world that increasingly viewed its brand of airbrushed-perfect bodies and male-gaze sexuality as out of touch. As former VS executive Sharleen Ernster explains in the series, the business promoted images of “a woman born flawless and made better with push-ups and padding,” which fostered body dysmorphia in a generation of people around the world.
This idea was opposed to the company’s origins in the early 1980s, when Wexner created a brand inspired by a refined, educated British woman named Victoria, with boutiques resembling Victorian boudoirs. By the late 1990s, this refined image had morphed into one that was more brazenly provocative, catering to a new type of woman seeking to reclaim her sexuality.
This required casting spokeswomen who radiated an unreachable sexiness: supermodels, who were previously hesitant to feature in lingerie advertisements. Consistently booking great models, Victoria’s Secret elevated to the level of haute fashion a sector that is traditionally viewed as uncouth. “Lingerie is a relatively esoteric fashion niche,”
Tyrnauer explains. “It has never been a part of that universe and never will be. This brand is regarded as a fashion brand and has the most-watched fashion show in history, however, it has nothing to do with fashion. It is the use of fashion marketing tactics to generate billions of dollars.” Tyrnauer intended to “remove the veneer of that strategy, which was so successful for them, and demonstrate that they used the sex-sells and sexual-empowerment narrative of the Sex in the City era to legitimize it.”
As a journalist working in 1990s New York, he frequently interacted with Candace Bushnell and Darren Star. “I wanted to remind people that this was a widely accepted aspect of society at the time, a celebration of the type of forwarding sexuality that was associated with empowerment. It is impossible to see everything accurately via the lenses we use as a civilization today.”
Tyrnauer considers Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch to be precursors to Instagram in that they promote an unachievable body image and FOMO. “The mall was Instagram version 1.0. It was the narcotic dream machine that we all engaged in and that took over our lives, guiding us down those tile floors and forcing us to purchase unnecessary items. There is nothing wrong with shopping, but the narrative of how large corporations abused customers and labor is worth your time.
Some of the more baffling episodes in the documentary surround the brand’s teen-oriented line, Pink, with which it planned to build loyal long-term clients among impressionable young shoppers. Tyrnauer was astounded by the Pink fashion shows: “It’s preteens wearing little attire together with enormous lollipops and hula hoops. Either I’m in a Lolita Nabokovian parody, or this is the actual thing. I fear it was genuine.”
Despite the company’s efforts to reinvent itself to halt its downward spiral, the issue remains: Can the brand alter its image? It announced a significant rebranding initiative last summer, with a broad roster of ambassadors that included Megan Rapinoe and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. “It discusses female empowerment from a more contemporary standpoint,” Tyrnauer observes, a swing maybe not so dissimilar to its original rebranding in the 1990s.
Ultimately, the filmmaker hopes that the series uncovers the mechanisms underlying the business of tempting us to purchase, especially in the most successful examples. “Sometimes the facades of marketing conceal horrible reality,” adds Tyrnauer. Examining the reasons why we are so captivated by these things is a crucial endeavor.
