When Grace Nichols became chief executive of Victoria’s Secret in 1991, its owner Les Wexner expected her to double sales to $2 billion and open at least two hundred new stores. Wexner had already conquered the American mall with fast-fashion chain The Limited, but he had high hopes that the romantic San Francisco lingerie company would take his Columbus, Ohio, empire to even greater heights.

Wexner, however, was operating with an outdated playbook. What had worked for The Limited — “buy one, get one free” promotions; grabby store signage; knock-off merchandise — would have to be revamped for Victoria’s Secret. In order to grow as aggressively as Wexner wanted, the brand would have to develop a more sophisticated, showy marketing strategy. Losing out on the push-up bra craze would force the company to finally advertise in a major way — and with top models.

In 1994, breasts were ready for a lift. Maybe it was thanks to Pamela Anderson, whose cleavage first filled the famous red Baywatch swimsuit in 1992; or Karl Lagerfeld, who sent Chanel models down the runway with extra padding underneath tweed bra tops the following year; or Madonna, who styled an entire tour around Jean Paul Gaultier’s canonical brassiere in the early 1990s. Or perhaps it was the temporary ban of silicone breast implants over safety concerns. Whatever the reason, by the mid-1990s, push-up bras were surging in popularity.

New cleavage-enhancing “fashion technology” promised to offer what nature had not. And in the battle for padding supremacy, two sides emerged as the dominant players: Playtex’s Wonderbra and Gossard’s Super-Uplift.

Victoria’s Secret sold neither.

The war broke out in the United Kingdom, where the two companies released expensive advertising campaigns in 1994. Wonderbra’s starred the lingerie-clad model Eva Herzigová, photographed by Ellen von Unwerth, gazing down at her buoyant cleavage next to a simple slogan: “HELLO BOYS.” The ad became a global sensation. City officials in Birmingham pulled the image from billboards, fearing it would cause traffic accidents. When the Wonderbra arrived in American department stores in the spring of 1994, the Herzigová campaign was already so famous that Playtex sold it as a poster. The Wonderbra ad wasn’t just clever, it was unusually ubiquitous.

By targeting men, Wonderbra ensured its message reached far beyond the pages of women’s magazines and overshadowed every other push-up bra on the market — including Victoria’s Secret’s “Miracle Bra,” a new style released in 1994 as the push-up trend was gaining popularity. Since the brand had advertised the Miracle Bra’s arrival only in the catalogue and in its stores, the Herzigová hoopla dominated the public conversation. While the Miracle Bra sold fine, it never rivalled the Wonderbra, not even when Victoria’s Secret released a television commercial and magazine campaign starring the model Heather Stewart.

“We got creamed in terms of awareness,” said Nichols a few years later. And no wonder. When marketing executive Jill Beraud arrived at Victoria’s Secret in 1995, she was surprised to find that the marketing department was little more than a “sign shop.” Each Tuesday, the marketing team would meet with the merchants and “take orders” for the coming days and weeks’ in-store banners. “All we spent money on was paper,” said Beraud. While the catalogue had its mailing list, the stores division lacked any data on its customers, including their ages and their purchase history. Beraud had come to Victoria’s Secret from Procter & Gamble and from agencies that specialised in strategies to target different types of customers, like creating sub-brands within a hit product line and using national television commercials.

Wexner was long resistant to paid advertising, preferring to use his store windows to announce new arrivals. But the Wonderbra experience confirmed that his old tactics could get Victoria’s Secret only so far. To eclipse department stores and dominate the intimates market, he needed more than the hundreds of stores in malls across the country. Victoria’s Secret needed stars.

As the Victoria’s Secret catalogue grew in scope and scale in the 1990s — 200 million catalogues went out to 10 million people annually — many of the models featured in its pages became minor celebrities. There was Elaine Irwin, then the wife of rock star John Mellencamp, and Jill Goodacre, girlfriend (and future wife) of singer Harry Connick Jr. “People come up to me: ‘Are you the Victoria’s Secret model?’ ” Goodacre recalled. “In my head I say, ‘I’m not just their model.’ If you see my book, it’s a million other jobs.” When Stephanie Seymour joined the catalogue’s cadre of models in 1992, several of her late-1980s supermodel peers, including Linda Evangelista and Karen Mulder, soon followed her.

Victoria’s Secret couldn’t match the clout that Seymour and Mulder gained when posing for luxury fashion brands like Chanel and Alaïa. But the catalogue came along at just the right time. Modelling was a fickle, fast-moving business. Seymour was 24 but had been modelling since she was 15; she was no longer a new face in the industry. Fashion’s most prestigious jobs had shifted to a younger generation. “The big European fashion companies are phasing out the faces of the Eighties,” Women’s Wear Daily wrote in 1993. Kate Moss, Shalom Harlow, and Aya Thorgren were now landing big luxury campaigns over Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell. “Linda is history,” sneered one unnamed photographer in the same Women’s Wear Daily piece, which described the Victoria’s Secret catalogue as “high in pay, but comparatively low in prestige.” Luckily for Victoria’s Secret, models like Seymour and Mulder looked fantastic in lingerie because they had breasts, visible hips and strong shoulders. They had posed for Playboy while modelling for Versace. Their bodies were a natural fit for the shoulder pads and hip-hugging pencil skirts of the late 1980s. When fashion trends turned severe and minimalist in the early 1990s, the faces on the runways changed, too. Designers preferred to showcase their clothes on leaner bodies. “Glamazons just didn’t look good in Jil Sander suits,” Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello later wrote. Designers such as Helmut Lang and Calvin Klein — with their clean-lined and narrow suiting — cast ultra-skinny models with chests so flat they didn’t even need bras.

Androgyny was in, except not at Victoria’s Secret. Wexner challenged Laura Berkman — the catalogue’s creative director who oversaw the booking of the catalogue models — to ramp up the star power. He wanted Americans to open the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and see the supermodels they recognised from Vogue and MTV. Above all, Wexner wanted the German sensation Claudia Schiffer. He promised Berkman every resource at his disposal, from money to private jets, to woo the model. “It was like getting the hottest music band to play at your prom,” Berkman said. In the 1990s, Schiffer’s career was ascendant. Frequently described at the time as a real-life Barbie, she was one of the highest-paid faces in fashion, earning upward of $8 million a year posing for Guess, Revlon, and Chanel, where she served as a muse to creative director Karl Lagerfeld. And at the time, she was dating the star magician David Copperfield.

When Victoria’s Secret came calling, Schiffer wasn’t desperate for money, but she was entering an entrepreneurial phase. Soon, she would appear in a commercial for Fanta soda and sign on as a partner with the Fashion Cafe, an ill-fated attempt to copy the Hard Rock Cafe business model. Schiffer was also a resident of the tax-haven Monaco and needed to work there a certain number of days per year to claim resident status. That provided an opening for Berkman, who proposed a catalogue shoot at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. [A representative for Schiffer said that her residency status had no bearing on the model’s decision to work with Victoria’s Secret.] Schiffer was not yet comfortable posing in her underwear, which was no problem for Berkman. In the spring 1994 catalogue, Schiffer appeared on the cover of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue for the first time, wearing the brand’s popular jeans and a fitted, scoop-neck top.

Two years later, Berkman returned to Monte Carlo to work with Schiffer again, this time with another gimmick in mind. On the overnight flight to the shoot, she and Monica Mitro, a newly hired public relations manager, used a hot-glue gun to encrust a Miracle Bra with rhinestones. It was a craft project made on the floor of a private jet. But when it was worn by Schiffer, who would believe the bra wasn’t covered in diamonds? Schiffer, finally comfortable enough to pose in lingerie, appeared in the “diamond rhinestone-bedazzled bra” on the cover of the 1996 Christmas catalogue, which offered the sparkly bra she wore for $1 million, complete with a red velvet presentation box and a certificate of authenticity. It was Victoria’s Secret’s first “Fantasy Bra.” “Please allow twelve weeks for delivery,” the catalogue advised.

The stunt made headlines, as did Schiffer’s appearance that December at one of the brand’s stores on Fifth Avenue in New York City, where a five-story-tall poster of her cover shot was hung outside the building. No one bought the million-dollar bra.

Adapted from Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon, by Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez.

The Wall Street Journal