Selling Sexy: Victoria's Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon

The story of how Victoria’s Secret skyrocketed from a tiny chain of boutiques to a retail phenomenon with more than $8 billion in annual sales at its peak—all while defining an impossible beauty standard for generations of American women—before the brand’s tight grip on the industry finally slipped

Victoria’s Secret is one of the most influential and polarizing brands to ever infiltrate the psyche of the American consumer. Almost right at its start in the late 1970s, the company developed a ...