Why there's a fine line between retro and outdated (SWWC vol 4 issue 9)

Hello!

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So, quick note, you might get this issue before the prior one. This is because TinyLetter flagged the prior issue, possibly because there's a lot of links and that reads as spammy. I do not apologize for packing any newsletter with helpful links. Anyway! Perhaps one day you'll read about how some cities in America are like that fun short-haired Bachelor contestant.

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I can't remember the last time I shopped at a Victoria's Secret, but I can remember the first. I was a high school senior, endowed with a driver's license, a part-time job and my own ATM card. It was a dizzying combination. And when I went to the mall with my best friend, who was two years older, she matter-of-factly steered us to Victoria's Secret to buy underwear. I paid $20 and walked out with four pairs of floral sateen string bikinis and a sense of mild confusion. I liked the job-and-money-and-independence aspect of adulthood, but I was not quite sold on the apparent underwear requirements.

This was right before Calvin Klein's pared-down notion of sexy hit but even before that perspective-shifting moment, the jewel-bright balconettes and photos of Frederique Van der Wal casually lounging around in a merry widow and garter belt felt regressive in a way I couldn't quite articulate. I was 18. I didn't have the vocabulary for why Victoria's Secret felt not-quite-for-me.

This was why, per the New York Times:

Victoria’s Secret ... was designed with the straight male consumer in mind.

The company was started by the entrepreneurial couple Roy and Gaye Raymond in 1977 as an antidote to the confusion and shame Mr. Raymond felt in department store lingerie sections. He told Newsweek in 1981 that while shopping for his wife he “was faced with racks of terry-cloth robes and ugly floral-print nylon nightgowns, and I always had the feeling the department store saleswomen thought I was an unwelcome intruder.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was entirely possible to build a blockbuster brand on the sales pitch that a man's approval of a woman's product was really why any woman wanted it.

There are some brands that manage to withstand the passage of time because their values are sufficiently responsive to the times. I remember going to a Tupperware party hosted by a drag performer in the mid-1990s and being delighted that the brand had expanded beyond a housewifey image. Once Phranc began selling the stuff, it almost seemed counterculture. As she explained, "I wanted a way to work part-time and still be able to do my music and my artwork."

(The Gen X dream of not-exactly-selling out! Was there anything more fin de siècle than finding work that let one think they were not selling anything, buying anything, or processing anything as a career?)

And there are some brands that manage to withstand the passage of time because their brand positioning encourages the consumer to turn inward. Is there any perfume more aptly named than Estee Lauder's Pleasures? Pretty instead of striking, airy, gently floral ... it's a scent for someone who likes smelling nice for herself. Even the bottle reminds one of the pleasingly self-contained oval perfection of an egg.

Victoria's Secret stuck to the conceit that underwear wasn't for the woman wearing it, but for the man looking at the woman wearing it. But it didn't do so in a way that suggested at any point that the woman had any agency in whether or not she wanted to be looked at, merely that she had an obligation to fulfill the male gaze and upholding it would give her the satisfaction of having done the duty assigned her gender. It was an approach that lacked wit. It also lacked respect for its customer. And it showed.

The thing that kills me is that it didn't have to be that way. Victoria's Secret could have stuck to the aesthetic of lush, excessive lingerie and big hair and made a lot of money. We have room for it in the culture -- we've got a decade of mainstreaming drag as an aesthetic, so there's obviously room for a more-is-more aesthetic. Imagine how fun the brand could have been if it leaned into the notion of satiny ostentation as a pleasure for the person wearing it. We're in the middle of an ongoing beauty products moment. Why wasn't Victoria's Secret leaning hard into the kind of glam turbans-and-terrycloth-pedi-slippers products that would have launched a million self-care selfies?

Because Victoria's Secret was committed to the brand perspective of that straight man who just wants to feel comfortable ogling ladies in underwear. They literally did not comprehend their customer as anything other than the prop in some man's story. Meanwhile, the nation moved toward acknowledging that a whole lot of people were not cool with being thought of as props in someone else's story.

Into this perception gap stepped other underwear brands, many of which understood a fundamental aspect of early 21st-century marketing: the product is the experience, the experience is the product. Some of these brands were even in the same age cohort as Victoria's Secret -- Title Nine sportswear was launched in 1989 as a mail-order business and spent much of the 1990s devoting a great deal of catalog space and customer service calls to walking women through finding the right sports bra. They've continued to refine the process. They knew early on that the experience of buying a bra should, perhaps, belong to the woman wearing the bra.

Right now, Victoria's Secret is griping that sex isn't selling. But maybe the real reason is that women are no longer buying the idea that they're products for someone else's consumption.

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Your pop culture recommendation of the day: ... is Noelle Stevenson's She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix, of course. I tweeted about why here, but the short answer is: Because it's exactly the kind of show I wished had been around when I was a little girl.

Of course, then I would have been denied an excellent mother-child moment in 1979: I was watching Star Blazers on the basement television and my mom walked in the room and said disgustedly, "Why is there only one woman on the show and why is she only supporting a man? Where are the space stories for women?"

That was the moment I realized I didn't have to accept "There's only one girl in the story and her job is to support the boys" in my stories. But you know, I'm so glad we have She-Ra now because my daughter will grow up thinking stories like She-Ra are normal and not as extraordinary as I do. That's progress.

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