nothing victorian about victoria's secret.

I am not sure the grand old Empress even dreamed about  secrets like this. She certainly did not wear them under her Victorian gowns.  A technology, invented during her times, though, has certainly created the desire for these 'secrets' that bear her name. Sold it to create a multi billion dollar industry.  Without photography would there be no multi billion demand  for secrets that were not ever meant to be secret. Secrets that were meant to be shown and sold. Publicly. 


There is a lot that this says about the cultures that create these secrets.  spread them to the remotest corners of the planet. I saw them being sold  in  the ancient souk in Damascus. And even  in the famous smuggler's  bazaar of  Peshawar - along with something that really intrigued me, camouflage patterned velvet.  There was something Victorian about that velvet though.




You can tell a great deal about a nation by a peek in the collective knicker drawer. Note, for instance, that while Marks & Spencer has found its market share in clothing eroded, underwear is one realm in which British women show a remarkable fidelity. M&S retains an impressive 27.4% of the lingerie market. Underwear is an emotional purchase, and that extends to five-packs of practical knickers cut to minimise VPL rather than maximise sex appeal.



The politics of the lingerie market are complex. This is not a simple matter of berating the hypersexualisation of our culture. Agent Provocateur is a highly sexualised brand – never more so than now, when the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon has led to a boom in sales of what creative director Sarah Shotton cheerfully refers to as "the kinky stuff".


"Sexy" has become less about something that women feel or do, and more about simply how they look.



Victoria's Secret is a commercial juggernaut. Such is the power of the company's payroll that half of the names on Forbes most recent list of the world's highest paid models were "Angels", as Victoria's Secret models are known. 



The shoppers are a mix of teenage girls with Topshop bags and tourists having their photos taken next to the wings. I have always found there to be something a little unnerving about the Victoria's Secret wings. Their staged and oddly infantilised sex-appeal remind me a little of Playboy bunny ears. And what do wings have to do with underwear, or with sex? Nothing, that I can see. But they have to do with being worshipped. And with glory. And with ideals of womanhood. And that's how you sell knickers.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/oct/23/lingerie-agent-provocateur-victorias-secret?intcmp=239



Then there was the interview with Kate Moss in Vanity Fair in which Moss talked at length about how being told to pose topless as a teenager made her so miserable it nearly drove her to a nervous breakdown. So how did Vanity Fair decide to illustrate this heartfelt and rather astonishing interview? Why, how else? By getting Moss to take her top off and pose for three closeup photos, in one of which she is on all fours and, apparently, imitating a dog peeing.

I walked past the newly opened Victoria's Secret store on New Bond Street the other weekend and there were passing female tourists having their photos taken by their boyfriends and husbands in front of the angelically themed window displays. Photos! You don't get that in front of La Senza, which is all, really, Victoria's Secret is – but with an American accent.

How has this company done this, you ask? I will tell you: it has done it by openly encouraging menfolk everywhere to masturbate over its wares.

"Victoria's Secret is known for its catalogue and annual fashion show," reads the company's commendably po-faced Wikipedia entry. Indeed. In the US, the Victoria's Secret catalogue has become so infamous that it is now used as a shorthand for easy-access quasi porn in US sitcoms (Friends was especially fond of referencing it).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/nov/12/victorias-secret-playboy-lingerie