Victoria's Secret, uncovered: the troubling reality behind the sex-kitten fantasy

Victoria's Secret Angels Karlie Kloss, Adriana Lima, Candice Swanepoel, Behati Prinsloo at the 2013 show. Photo / Getty Images

Taut abs, skimpy underwear, metre-high wings: Victoria's Secret set out to make fantasy flesh. At its height in the Noughties, 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' stilettoes. "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 swathes 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 on a number of occasions, 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 ahead of the 2018 show. (Razek denied the claims; a spokesperson for L Brands, the parent company, 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 US$5,000 (NZ$8120) loan from his aunt kickstarted the beginnings of a retail empire. A decade on, in the mid-Seventies, 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 cringe-worthy 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 ($1.6m) was worth $1 billion ($1.6b). 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."

Victoria's Secret 'angel' Naomi Campbell in 2002. Photo / Getty Images

By 2001, having inserted itself into the underwear drawers of a sizeable 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 Bundchen, 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 twentysomething 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 via 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 in further, Tyrnauer was shocked at how closely its offerings resembled "softcore 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.

Heidi Klum, Adriana Lima and Karolina Kurkova at the 2007 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in Hollywood. Photo / Getty Images

Angels and Demons shows this wasn't down to one smoking gun, but several smouldering fires – one of which was set alight by Jeffrey Epstein. Wexner had met the financier in 1989, and made him his power of attorney soon after, facilitating access to wealth and women that Epstein would inevitably use for the downright disgusting. Epstein even posed as a talent scout for Victoria's Secret in 1997, luring model Alicia Arden to his hotel room for an "audition", where he groped her.

"That revelation was very shocking and disturbing to a lot of people," says Tyrnauer, Vanity Fair's editor-at-large who has explored power and abuse in his previous documentaries on Valentino and the McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn. Wexner's cash, it transpired, was helping to fund Epstein's lavish lifestyle – including the townhouse where he would sexually abuse underage girls, and the "Lolita Express", the private jet he used to traffic them.

Wexner has denied all knowledge of Epstein's sexual misconduct. Still, it doesn't look good for the brand, from which Wexner stood down as CEO last year. But Tyrnauer admits the series is more of a sum of foul goings-on than a linear retelling: "It's all quite obscure as to what was happening when," he says, blaming the "veil of secrecy" under which Victoria's Secret operates, and the vast numbers of Non Disclosure Agreements signed to stop the unpalatable getting out. Angels and Demons is "one of the few journalistic endeavours I've embarked upon where I had more questions at the end than I did when I started."

The 2014 Victoria's Secret in London. Photo / Getty Images

It's much the same for the viewer. Tyrnauer thinks his series "holds a mirror up to society" as it was then, which he describes as a cocktail of "disturbing and fascinating." In truth, it's hard to feel that the issues it exposes – misogyny, misconduct, women's bodies as a marketing tool – are as distant as he appears to believe. For the beating Victoria's Secret has taken in recent years as a symbol of all that was wrong with society's expectations of women, infinite brands before and hence continue to swell their coffers selling a hyper-sexualised vision of the female form, whether that's on a televised runway event with angel wings, or Instagram.

Victoria's Secret 2.0 is near unrecognisable from the Klum days. The models on its website are plus-sized, barely made up, worlds away from the half-starved "glamazons" that made its name. The company is also in better health than it has been for some time; its new spokeswomen include Priyanka Chopra and US women's football captain Megan Rapinoe.

Perhaps that's why the series lacks the redemption factor: nobody has really been punished, and few lessons appear to have been learnt. Wexner is still the richest man in Ohio. "The lowest common denominator still seems to work and have a hold over the American psyche," Tyrnauer says. "There's no doubt in my mind that there's still a large segment of the consuming public that would be very happy to have the whole brand still blaring… sex still does sell."