Perhaps given a boost by the openness of the Sexual Revolution, the Victoria's Secret retail chain almost single-handedly redefined America's conception of lingerie beginning in the early 1980s. Despite the secrecy promised in the franchise's moniker, each of its stores replaced the modest, tucked-away, department-store displays of women's underwear with an openly luxurious atmosphere that recreated a nineteenth-century boudoir. At the same time, Victoria's Secret decidedly built its image with a fairly conservative, middle-class shopper in mind and avoided any connotations of sleaziness which lingerie might carry. While some critics have contested the sometimes reactionary portrait of femininity developed in the store's designs and advertising campaigns, Victoria's Secret helped women of all shapes and sizes, if not tax brackets, feel that sensuality need not be limited to models and celebrities.

Victoria's Secret was launched through the personal vision of entrepreneur Roy Raymond, an ambitious graduate of Stanford University who found himself dissatisfied working in the lower rungs of large corporations. Raymond's brainchild came to him in the mid-1970s as the result of his own experiences of buying lingerie for his wife. A shy man by nature, Raymond found himself made uncomfortable by the probing glances of lingerie salespeople in department stores and moreover thought the wares of such stores to be either excessively frilly or blandly conservative. Believing that many men and women alike shared in his desire for a middle ground between these two poles, Raymond decided to embark on the risky venture of creating his own boutiques. In 1977, he borrowed a total of eighty thousand dollars—half of it from his parents—and opened the doors of the first Victoria's Secret in a shopping center in the southern outskirts of San Francisco. Decorated to resemble a popularized Victorian bedroom, the premiere outlet was furnished with opulent Oriental rugs and period vanities whose drawers housed fittingly plush bras and panties made by upscale designers such as Vanity Fair and Warner's. Although subsequent stores were less customized than Raymond's prototype, this balance of seduction and "classy" charm continued to rule the sensibilities of Victoria's Secret.

In its first year of business, the San Francisco store had amassed sales of an impressive half a million dollars, allowing Raymond to expand Victoria's Secret into four new locations, in addition to a headquarters and warehouse. Raymond's creative vision was not equaled by financial mastery, however, and in 1982 he was forced to sell Victoria's Secret to the Columbus, Ohio-based conglomerate The Limited for the relatively slight sum of four million dollars. Although it was already a nationally known fashion enterprise, The Limited kept the personalized image of Victoria's Secret intact, albeit in a mass-produced, cost-efficient manner. Rapidly expanding into the terrain of America's malls throughout the 1980s, Victoria's Secret blossomed from a handful of stores to more than four hundred and solidified its exclusive image by appending its own label to all of its offerings as a brand name. In addition to volume growth, the company was able to vend a widened range of products with the aid of a popular mail catalog issued eight times annually. While corsets, teddies, and silk pajamas remained at the hub of the Victoria's Secret wheel, home shoppers could buy shoes, evening wear, and perfumes—such as Wild English Gardens and Heather's Embrace—all under a single banner promising both middle-class refinement and daring sexuality.

By the early 1990s, Victoria's Secret had become the largest American lingerie outfitters, easily surpassing both the even higher-priced Cacique chain and the racier Frederick's of Hollywood. However, despite the fact that the company had topped the billion dollar mark, its growth showed signs of stagnation. In 1993, Grace Nichols took over the executive helm from former president Howard Gross and immediately addressed allegations that the quality of Victoria's Secret's merchandise did not match its elevated price tags. In addition, Nichols placed added emphasis upon an older age group as the company's target concern. Nevertheless, while Nichols stressed that thirty-to forty-year-old women need not feel out of place in sexy underwear, the company's advertising campaigns continued to exclusively portray younger models with svelte, busty figures. Indeed, some critics saw the Victoria's Secret formula of femininity as a limitation to the majority of American women and argued that the company's image (highlighted in design series such as their English Lace line) implicitly promoted an overly bourgeois conception of "good taste." Whatever class and gender ramifications Victoria's Secret might have entailed, the company grew once again under Nichols's care throughout the 1990s, as millions of women—and men--continued to fill out their fantasies with the satin-lined aid of offerings such as the Angels bra series and, perhaps Victoria's Secret's single biggest contribution to the public imagination, the uplifting Miracle Bra.

Schwartz, Mimi. "A Day in the Life of Victoria's Secret." Mademoiselle. Vol. 96, April 1990, 238-39.

Woodman, Sue. "Victoria Reigns … Again." Working Woman. Vol.16, September 1991, 77.

Workman, Nancy V. "From Victorian to Victoria's Secret: The Foundations of Modern Erotic Wear." Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 30, Fall 1996, 61-73.