Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
SELLING SEXY: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon , by Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez Did you know that the modern brassiere is a Buckminster Fuller-level feat of soft engineering requiring some 30 to 40 separately sourced pieces, “including underwires and strap-adjusting sliders”? That’s one of many fun facts within the pages of “Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon,” Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez’s brisk, lively chronicle of the global retail empire built on sweet-nothing bits of lace and rayon. But this is a book about bras in the same way that “Citizen Kane” is a movie about a sled — which is to say, not at all. Even the most casual observer likely knows by now that the VS brand has fallen, a thonged Icarus, from the precipitous heights of its 1990s and 2000s heyday. The three-part docuseries “Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons” became a streaming hit for Hulu in 2022, in large part by breathlessly exploring the murky relationship between the company’s billionaire owner and C.E.O., Les Wexner, and the disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s monstrous legacy is duly addressed in “Selling Sexy”: He first appears leeringly on Page 4, but his crimes are ancillary to a more prosaic tale of bad actors and strategic misfires. And the banal truth is that few businesses last as long as this one did. Retail is a fickle beast; as Sherman and Fernandez, both longtime chroniclers of the industry, put it bluntly in their prologue, “Most fashion brands have a creative shelf life of 10 to 15 years before a stale smell wafts in, the hype fades and shoppers move on to the next new thing.” In case you’re wondering, there never was a Victoria. The character, and her posh British bohemia, was a fiction conjured in the late 1970s by a San Francisco couple, Gaye and Roy Raymond, who dreamed of selling unmentionables to sophisticated adults that evoked neither the sexless industrial beige of most department-store offerings nor the red-light sleaze of brown-bagged circulars. The pair’s first store, located in […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
