Episode 326: Everybody's Closet is Full with Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez
The authors of Selling Sexy: Victoria's Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon Lauren Sherman & Chantal Fernandez are both on the show to explore the golden age of retail and all their innovations, often led by mall brands Victoria Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. They also chat about how the closure of malls affects our relationships to fashion, the legacy of Victoria’s Secret for women and especially millennials, and the ways consumption patterns are changing.
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Transcript
*Transcripts are AI generated.
Doree: Hello and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.
Elise: And I'm Elise Hugh. And we are two friends who like to talk a lot about serums, and lately we're talking a lot about retail, just generally. Yes.
Doree: We're our previous guest, Amanda Mull, retail reporter, consumer consumer reporter, had a story, we're recording this on Friday, and she had a story come out, I think yesterday or today about how most of the secondhand clothes platforms are not profitable despite the heavy interest in buying secondhand clothes that both models aren't really working. The real, real, which holds the inventory, but takes a bigger cut versus Poshmark, which is just a platform.
Elise: It
Doree: Takes a smaller cut, but doesn't have to hold the inventory. So she goes through the issues with both styles. Fascinating. She doesn't really totally get into exactly why this is not working, but it was an interesting, interesting piece. So we'll link to that in the show notes. But yes, a lot of retail talk,
Elise: And it's kind of related. We haven't gotten into our theme month yet. We're going to be doing various series coming up, just series guests around a certain topic. But this is an unintentional but serendipitous theme in which we've been talking kind of retail and brands and marketing of fashion of clothes. Because last week we had Amanda Mole, and then this week we have two authors at the same time because they joined to write the big new nonfiction book on Victoria's Secret, Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez, and they're fantastic. But we had to do this week's show a little bit differently because Doree, you're recovering.
Doree: I have covid. I mean, I wouldn't say I'm recovering, but I'm also early in my covid journey. I just tested positive today. So yes. So Elise, very kindly, it was like, I will just do the interview already interviewing two people. So it's just a lot of voices, which is true. But we were going to do it together and I did really enjoy their book. I found it really fascinating. I love those sort of deep dives.
Elise: And Victoria's Secret just to point out, is not dead. It's still around us as a brand. Totally. It's just not the same cultural force that it was when mall culture ruled. And before Me Too, too, too. There was a bit of a downfall and a crisis as our listeners probably know.
Doree: Yes, yes, yes. So yeah. So I also have not, as we're recording this, I also have not heard the interview because it just happened. That's happened. But Elise said it was really great. So yeah, so we will get to that interview. So let's introduce them. Lauren Sherman has been reporting from inside the fashion industry for more than 15 years now. A special correspondent at Puck. She was the business of Fashion's chief correspondent. And before that, a staff reporter at Forbes. She has contributed to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, as well as Fast Company Women's Health and the Gentle Woman. She also has a podcast with Puck called Fashion People, which is an extension of Line Sheet, her newsletter for Puck, which I read and I find very enjoyable even though it is quite inside baseball. And I often don't know who she's talking about, but I'm like, oh, this is interesting.
So if you also those sort of insidery gossipy kind of newsletters, puck has a whole variety of 'em. And she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. And Chantel Fernandez is a features writer at The Cut in New York Magazine. She covers fashion, retail, luxury, and beauty with a focus on business and culture. And her work has also appeared in the Financial Times L and Harper's Bizarre. She used to be a scenery reporter at the business of Fashion and started her career as an assistant at Vanity Fair. And before we get to the interview, just a reminder, you can head over to Forever35 podcast.com for links to everything we mention on the show, follow us on Instagram at Forever35 podcast. Our Patreon is at patreon.com/forever five. Our favorite products are at Shop my us slash forever five. We do have a great newsletter at Forever five podcast com slash newsletter. And if you want to get advice for us, have thoughts about the show, just want to text us, whatever you can text or call us at (781) 591-0390 and email us at Forever35 podcast@gmail.com. This is coming out a week before the election, so you still have time to donate to our Giving Circle as part of the State's project. We are supporting legislative races in Arizona. Please donate. We're so close.
We're close to our
Elise: Big goal. And the money still makes a difference because there's so much spending in the final days to get out the vote on election day. So it's media spending, it's door knocking, it's staff, all sorts of stuff.
Doree: We would love your support there. Alright, so here are Chantal and Lauren.
Elise: Lauren and Chantal. Welcome to Forever35. Thanks for joining us.
Doree: Thanks for
Elise: Having us. Well, we start all of our interviews with the question about self-care. So for each of you, however you define self-care, it can be very broadly defined. What are you doing to take care of yourself during anxious? October?
Lauren: You go, Lauren. My biggest thing is sleep. I really prioritize sleep. I don't always get it, but I try to get seven to eight hours and I make that if I'm going to do one thing, if I have to not exercise, not do all the other things, it's sleep. And then I would say exercise. So I do try to run three days a week and do one class if I can. It was easier when I lived in New York and I didn't have children or a child and all that stuff, but I'd say that it's fundamental things like sleeping and exercising. And I used to meditate every morning for 10 minutes and that was a big part of it, but I haven't for the last two years. Every once in a while I'm like, should I go back to that? But yeah, I would say sleep is the biggest one.
Elise: Have you found that just knowing how much you sleep with the quantified self stuff, Fitbits or rings or whatever, does that make you more anxious about your sleep? Because I got that way at first,
Lauren: So I did use an Aura ring for a story for a while. And yes, because there would be, and I don't use one, I don't track my sleep. I have an alarm. I usually wake up before the alarm, so it's not a huge issue. But when I was using the Aura ring for the story, the feedback I gave them was there would be nights when I was like, oh, I had a great night's sleep, and it would say it was terrible. The data didn't compute with how I felt, so I just decided that I wasn't going to do it. I also try not to look at screens before I go to bed, but that never happens.
Elise: You're
Chantal: A reporter. Chantal, what about you? I would say sleep is the number one thing, but to give a different thing, I've been walking more like just taking walks around Prospect Park and the weather's been so nice this fall in New York, so that has really changed things for me. And sometimes I don't have the energy so tired from everything to really run. And even just walking totally changes my mindset.
Elise: Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Well congratulations to both of you on the book Selling Sexy.
Lauren: Thank you. Thank you.
Elise: Listeners, if you haven't heard it or read it yet, it is just such a panoramic look, not just at Victoria's Secret. I mean obviously Victoria's Secret is the premise, but I found it to really take me down memory lane on all of retail in the nineties. And a lot of the big brands, banana Republic and Gap comes in there and obviously Les Wexner ran The Limited and other brands, it goes into the fashion industry and modeling and retail and media and that time in our lives when malls really ruled. So let's just start with why you wanted to take on Victoria's Secret in the first place and how the two of you came together to make this a project, a co-authored project.
Chantal: Yeah, I think we realized that Victoria's Secret is so unique within the American retail and the American fashion landscape, such a polarizing and influential brand that has sort of been overlooked as this kind of sexy boobs and butt supermodel brand. And the idea that the marketing was the only reason for its success and the only reason for its downfall is just a wild oversimplification of what has been a really fascinating business. And when we started talking about writing this book in 2020, Victoria's Secret had been struggling for several years and there didn't seem like a clear exit and struggling in the context of Victoria's Secret is not on the verge of bankruptcy, it's just not as successful as it had been for decades. And I think the question for us really was how did this brand stay successful for so long? Not how did it have this downfall that we had seen with so many other mall brands,
But how did it stay ahead of all these retail cycles for so long? And the answer is, there's all these incredible stories from behind this business. There's sketchy stuff, there's things that speak to our weird relationship with feminine beauty ideals and what we aspire to and how that influences us to shop. But it also is just these really fascinating business stories that connect to exactly as you were saying, the expansion and cultural impact of the mall and how even just being there and being there with a really intriguing store design was a really interesting business model and Victoria's Secret did that better than almost any of its peers.
Elise: Yeah, it was really fascinating to me to read about the company's history and the ways that they kind of innovated a lot of strategies or ways of retail that now we take for granted. So Lauren, do you want to hit a couple of the things that Victoria's Secret did early on and then in order to stay at the top of the game that were new at the time or the rest of fashion and retailing followed?
Lauren: Yeah, so last Wexner, the guy who acquired Victoria's Secret in the early eighties and made it from a tiny several million dollars a year business to a billion dollars and eventually an 8 billion business at its peak was you could call him in some ways the father of fast fashion. So he started in the sixties. He started this store called The Limited, the idea was to sell white label, so stuff that was bought through a mid through a middleman and you would buy it through middleman cheap stuff and put your own label on it. That's how they refer to white label in retail. This white label store where he was just selling really trendy stuff at a really good value. And he had learned, his parents had a very nice women's clothing store and he saw that most of the customers bought the cheap stuff. So he said to them, why don't we just stop selling these name brands and sell an in-house brand and people won't care.
And they were from a different generation and didn't realize that that was the case. And quickly they learned that he was right and they started working for him. So he kind of started fast fashion. He was also very early to produce overseas in Asia, Hong Kong in particular. He had a relationship. He developed this partnership and eventually acquired this business with this guy named Marty Trust, who was one of the very early producers of clothing in Asia. And this was pre nafta, pre a time when all of our clothes are made abroad pretty much. And he, he took the risk and went forward with it and he just realized it was much more profitable to produce things like that. So when he bought Victoria's Secret, the limit was already 15 years old. He had learned about retail and the malls and it was also the rise of the mall.
And he had learned about real estate and how to kind of navigate that world. And so he bought this store that was really, really nicely done. Stores were really expensive. It cost like a million dollars to open each of the stores, which is crazy amount of money in the early eighties. And so he applied everything he learned to the Limited to Victoria's Secret. He made it fashion, he made it scalable, he made it cheaper, a better value, and he distributed it in all these malls and other retail networks that made it accessible to a lot of people. He also invested in the catalog, even though he himself was always kind of skeptical of it, but he empowered a team of people to make the catalog into a business and it became a giant business and is sort of a proto online store or what have you. So Victoria's Secret became the crown jewel of the business because it was such a specific category and sent such a specific message that it sort of just started to pervade culture in the way the Limited was a big deal. Anyone who's old enough to remember Za Sweater? I'm barely, but I do remember that phenomenon or the stirrup pants of the early nineties. Oh yes. Yeah, it was a thing, but it never became what Victoria's Secret just had all the ingredients to really take hold of the culture.
Elise: Oh yeah. I'm an elder millennial, so I was spending all of my tween years in malls and then I don't know of a time before Victoria's Secret and a lot of these brands.
Chantal: Yeah, me neither.
Elise: Alright, it's time for a break. We'll be right back on malls. I love the way that you write about the early malls and mall design and the one that was called Pleasure Dome with Parking or a Pleasure Dome with parking.
Chantal: Yeah, I think that was one of the first ones.
Elise: Yeah. And how they were the town squares of suburbs. I grew up in suburban St. Louis and then suburban Dallas. And Dallas is like land of malls where it used
Chantal: To be. I'm from Houston, so I
Elise: Understand, okay, so you get it, you get it right. And now they're shuttering all over the place. What do we lose or do we lose anything culturally as we lose malls?
Chantal: I think so there aren't those gathering spaces that we used to have, or perhaps they've moved to other sorts of streets. I think in a shopping experience, we've lost something. It's really hard to shop online and understand your fit and the return. And I hear complaints from people all the time. The stores don't have had to reallocate how they have inventory, and often what you want is not in the store and you have to order it online anyway. Shopping itself has gotten almost the great promise of online shopping was a convenience and it's delivered in a lot of ways, but there's still a lot of friction in that process. There was something sort of quaint and special about the experience of going to the store to see what's new that we've now, it's just become a digital experience. It's quite different.
Lauren: I also grew up going to the mall, Claire's, all that stuff. What could I buy on Friday after I worked at Hallmark in the mall in high school? But I think that, so we live our lives online now and especially the teenage generation now. Their town Square is, I mean, I don't don't even know what chap, I guess TikTok, TikTok, TikTok, but there's probably something else after that. So
It's like their relationships are all online, their relationships with people, their relationships with brands, the way they connect is digitally. So I think there is that desire to have human in-person connection, but I wonder if the new generation will feel differently because they don't know it the way we do. They didn't experience that for themselves. But then again, you hear about these girls going, Sephora I think is a big, it's in a mall, but is really a gathering place for a lot of preteens and teens. And I see this, I live in Los Angeles where mall culture is still really big because it's outside. At least you're in LA too.
Elise: That's right. Yeah. So my daughters still likes to go to the mall
Lauren: Occasionally.
Chantal: Yeah, the mall's not dead. And Wexner himself owns a fantastic mall near the Victoria's Secret office outside Columbus where I was there the summer and it was full of teens roving around in Pack. So that element of that culture still exists. I just think it's fewer malls than there were. But there are still successful, like a plus malls as they call them, or a malls,
Elise: Victoria's Secret as a brand still exists today, but in a more contracted at a more
Chantal: Contracted size. It's huge
Elise: Business, right? Oh, it's still a huge business, but culturally less relevant or less of a
Chantal: Achieves culturally way less relevant. And I think that compared to its own track record of a success, it's underwhelming. But yes, it's still a 6 billion business in a market leader. But compared to the cultural influence that it once had, they're trying to regain that, but they're really struggling. It used to be have this interesting combination of being the brand that so many people shopped at and having some sort of cultural cachet, cultural cool, which is rarely happening at the same time in the same business.
Elise: What do you all think then, is Victoria's legacy for women? So many of women our age who grew up with Victoria's Secret, just omnipresent and I feel learned a lot about sexuality and undergarments and the performance of womanhood from Victoria's Secret. So as you look back, and this is towards the end of the book, but as you look back, what do you feel like its lasting legacy is because it does have a complicated history?
Chantal: Yeah, I think for me as sort of a squarely down the middle millennial who grew up in that pink generation,
To me it represents that exactly as you say, that performance of sexuality that really defined two thousands culture. This idea that to be sexy was to appear sexy to men. And I think a lot of women of my generation and others have been dismantling that idea over the last decade and thinking about where that came from and interrogating cultural touchstones of their youth. But I think Victoria's Secret, despite the efforts of so many really fascinating female executives who work there in different eras, who wanted women to be in touch with their sexuality, to feel good about themselves, that was sort of the message that I got that sex was about a visual layer and nothing more. Because when you really think about Victoria's Secret, it's sort of sexless in that it is sort of just an exterior facade of sexiness or that's my impression. I think different people have different interpretations. I'm curious your answer to that, Lauren.
Lauren: It's interesting. We did an interview with a journalist who is probably, she said she was in high school in 86, so she's probably like 82, so I think she's 15 or 20 years older than me. So it was interesting, she was talking about the late nineties. She had gone to a couple of their shows and the kind of guys who were at the shows, and I actually remembered there was a feeling of disappointment around that kind of display of sexuality and imagery that I was like, I remember, it wasn't that I aspired to it in any way, but I remember feeling like, oh, I'm never going to look like that. So I'm never going to have those kinds of, it's, I'm never going to be right in enough in culture as a woman because I'm not like that. And I would say that wasn't my general way of thinking. We've been asked many times, do we shop at Victoria's Secret? And I always am. I was a gap body person. I wasn't trying to look like I shopped at Victoria's Secret, but I remember feeling a little sad that, oh, I'm just never going to live up to that standard. And I think it turned into, it morphed into something bigger
During Chantal's era where it was, it was so gigantic that you couldn't even connect to it. Whereas I think when we were growing up, there was something about it that it was more directive and the two thousands brought the democratization of a lot because of the internet. And you just saw, okay, there are other ways to be attractive or sexy or whatever. A lot of them still were through the male gaze, but there were different ideas of it, like the rise of American apparel and things like that. So yeah, it's an interesting thing of, I actually hadn't, this interview this morning was the first time where I felt that sadness this whole time we've been talking about Victoria's Secret, because I'm just so disconnected from it as a consumer. And I had forgot about that feeling in the late nineties of, okay, if you don't look a certain way, you're just not going to get what you want in life. And I don't think that exists anymore. I think that's what's really changed, and it's hard to pinpoint, but I feel it in the culture for sure.
Elise: You're not alone. You're not alone. I was just about to say that as you were answering that, it reminded me growing up that Victoria's Secret was so ubiquitous and it was basically the one undergarment store. It was like the one place you can go and get the five panties for $25 or whatever, and the lacy brass and the sexy stuff. There was this effect of, its everywhereness, its ubiquity that had a normalizing effect where it was like, this is normal and it's skinny white chicks with giant boobs. And if you weren't that, then you felt sort of less than. And yeah, that's something that I think so many of us have to reckon with.
Chantal: I think one of the questions we were wrestling with in this book was, did Victoria's Secret create that idea or did it reflect that idea that was already so prevalent in the culture? And obviously it's a little bit of both, but I think in reflecting it so effectively, they sort of furthered that idea.
Elise: And then you learn it was run by these marketing creeps, right? Like Ed Razek their marketing, he was the CMO famously for a long time. And then so many of the models were cast based on his decisions, or the catalogs looked a certain way because men were deciding what they wanted women to look like.
Chantal: But then women, the audience, loved it, loved it, and a lot of women still love it. It's complicated. I think yes, men ultimately controlled this brand at every era, and we saw that in the way that the image of sexuality refined itself into something blunter and simpler as time went on. But again, we talked to so many women who worked at this company and had saw their role as different. And one of the fun anecdotes is that they had this wheel of sexy, which was as sort of a chart that they used to think about, are we hitting all these different interpretations of sexy? And that was their effort to try to combat some of that focus on the male gaze stuff. But as time went on, it became harder to do that, or the most prominent aspects of their marketing fit into this narrower sort of Michael Bay idea of femininity. But again, women loved this brand. I think that's something that Lauren and I wanted to make clear because it's really easy to say men force this brand upon America. It's like, no, this company was insanely successful and women loved it, and a lot of women still love it. So what does that say about us? It's just more complicated than we were tricked into this ideal.
Elise: Okay, let's take a break and we will be right back. Lauren, you have just written about Mike Jeffries, the longtime CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch, who's now charged federally with sex trafficking. I believe you might need to correct
Lauren: Me. I mean, we can do the quotes of what it is. I don't know if that's too, that's rated X stuff. Yeah. Okay.
Elise: But the question I want to get at so disturbing is that these brands that I and so many people of our age grew up with, Victoria's Secret, like Abercrombie, were boosting and amplifying certain ways to be or live or mainly look out to young people everywhere. And so how do we process that now? And what is a more affirmative vision for retail and fashion and marketing that won't leave the residue that we're all just having to talk about now on the Forever35 podcast?
Lauren: I think one thing that's hard about Mike Jeffries in particular, and Les is a different character. He didn't let his personal life, there's a lot of speculation about his personal life, but he didn't let it get involved in the business as much as Jeffries was like his personal life and his work life were the same thing, and who he was and the way he acted and all of it. What I wrote yesterday was that no one was surprised by any of this, A because a lot of 'em knew what was going on, but B, because of the way he behaved at work. But on the other hand, Abercrombie was amazing. Victoria's Secret was amazing. Abercrombie in particular, he created something out of this little fishing. Teddy Roosevelt used to wear Abercrombie and Fitch to go fishing.
It became this phenomenon. And in the same way the Victoria's Secret made me a little sad. I think Abercrombie did too, but I also thought the imagery was beautiful and thought that the catalog, the quarterly magazine, was really cool and smart and all clever and all that stuff. So he was a genius in some ways. And so I think for a long time, these geniuses who were 99.99, nine 9% men were allowed to do whatever they wanted. And now there are more guardrails. But the issue with that is what ends up happening is then they don't take risks when it comes to the business and which they need to do. So everybody's careful about everything and not just about the way they behave with other people, but also about being exacting about their businesses. And that's the part of it that's hard, because being the way he was crazy about the business, it worked in some ways.
Is there a better way to go about it? Sure. But what ends up happening is that excitement is lost when everybody's tiptoeing. And so that's the part of it that I think in our culture right now, why you see this anti woke backlash is because people are reckoning with the fact that all that stuff is really batting shouldn't happen. But there was also a lot of the reason it was permitted was there was so much good stuff going on. And so how do we get the good stuff back without making people feel terrible all the time?
Chantal: And to add to that, I would say the other reason it was permitted is because it was so financially successful. We're talking about a golden age of retail that Victoria's Secret really that story aligns with in Abercrombie as well. Retail is a much harder business these days. You can't scale as quickly as Abercrombie or Victoria's Secret did Now, and every time there's excessive financial success and the power that comes with that, then you're going to create a situation where someone feels immune to normal norms or laws and acts out. So I think that's also connected to that.
Elise: We seeing that now with the leadership of Brandy Melville, because they've been really called out, haven't they? For all sorts of awful behavior?
Chantal: Yes, definitely. But the audience does not care. There's still lines down the block for those brands. So it's interesting to see when it hits the customers and when it doesn't. I think Brandy Melville, that those owners being, I think based in Italy also sort of protects them in a sense. But the product is still really touching the teens and the people in their early twenties. They still love it, and it's the right price point. Again, it's just wild. Such a tricky business.
Lauren: We were in Chicago and every single mom that came up to us of a teenage daughter brought Brandy Melville up because it was like we were there just as the Jeffries News broke, and they all said, our kids love it. They don't care about the documentary. I watched that documentary, it's so crazy. They don't care at all. And that's another big thing. I don't think consumers vote with their dollars, so that complicates things even further.
Chantal: But you were asking about better models for operating. I think, not to give Abercrombie too much credit, but the way that they've recast themselves in recent years I think is super interesting. They found a gap in the market for career-minded, younger millennials, young parents who want better clothing than what they get on Sheen or Zara and has targeted them aggressively, and it's been really successful and they've abandoned completely this marketing from their past, and it's been really interesting to see how that's resonated with people.
Elise: Let me ask the two of you a question that we asked a man Mul who we had on last week, which was, have we hit peak consumption? Because we know that fashion and retail are inherently wasteful and not sustainable for the planet, and yet Americans are buying more than ever before from places like Xian and Temu. So where are we in this cycle?
Lauren: I think we live in a culture and economy driven by consumption. So the government and everyone else is going to do everything they can to get us to keep buying more and more stuff. But I think consumption patterns are changing, and you see this in, there have been a lot of headlines that have spread to the mass about the luxury market over the last two weeks. LVMH, one of the biggest luxury group with owns Dior and Louis Vuitton and all these big brands has had a dip in sales. Not a crazy dip like 5%, but this is a company that they missed this Wall Street's estimates for the first time in ever. What I think is changing is the consumer, because the consumer has so much information, the first thing is access to information. So they have access to so much information and they're inundated with so much information.
They think that they're really smart and they think that they know a lot about product and what quality is and what value is, and maybe they don't, but they believe that they do. So it's harder than ever to convince them that it's worth buying something. Everybody's closet is full. There's too many clothes. You can go to Primark and have a full closet for $20. So the thing is, when there's not enough physical room for anything, that does become an issue. Everybody was talking about experiential luxury or moving to spending on food and travel and now on Ozempic and other weight loss drugs and things like that. They're moving towards that and moving away from buying a handbag a week or what have you, because there's just not enough room. So I think the big answer is no, we're going to keep consuming, but the more challenging answer is that consumption patterns are changing. And so what people buy and what people spend their money on and how our culture directs them to spend money is going to shift.
Chantal: One of the legacies of fast fashion is that it's taught us not to spend much money on clothing because it's not going to last that long, and that has only become a bigger problem in recent years. Your closet might be full with Primark stuff, but in a couple of washes, you're going to be like, oh, this stuff has stretched out, or it's shrunk, or it's ripped, or something like that. And I think that problem, people really notice that, and it's gotten worse and puts brands in a really difficult position to try to convince people to value their product at a price that allows them to make something that's quality enough and that lasts a little bit longer. But we're so trained. I did a story about why is every dress summer dress $500 now? And we talked a lot about what is that number going to be in the headline, because still in the comments, there's people who were like, I would never spend more than a hundred dollars on a dress.
It's like, okay, if that's true, then, and I get it, people have different socioeconomic realities. Look at the success of sheen, but then your dress is not going to last very long. It's not going to be very well made. It's going to be made probably under some gnarly labor conditions, and that cycle just fuels itself because if it's not going to last long, then you're definitely not going to spend more than a hundred dollars on it. So I think that is something that, especially in clothing, if you're not shopping luxury, if you're shopping like mass market clothing, that's a really tricky element of this market.
Elise: Before I let you go, is there an undergarment brand that either of you really ride hard for
Lauren: Chantal, you have the most evidence for yours, but I have a new entrant that I just found out about this weekend.
Chantal: Well, from a personal brand perspective, I really like this bra brand called Marie Jo. The bras are expensive, they're like $120 each, but I've basically bought and worn four of them over the last 15 years, and those are my main underwire brass. We did a lot of bra shopping
Lauren: During this journey and some for research. And then in the end you're like, oh, should I, and I never ended up buying Victoria's Secret bra during this period, which is funny, but I have had a really hard time. I was one of the people who became a Bette person in the last 10 years, probably about 20 12, 20 13, I stopped wearing underwires. And then last year or so I've been, I don't know, it just feels like unprofessional not to have an underwire one, if that makes sense. I dunno. I was like, I feel like something changed with my body that I needed one. I would say the last year I've been wearing a lot of only hearts, which is just, it fits really well and they're actually not, I believe they're small, medium, large. I don't believe they're band sized, which I have a lot of trouble with band size. I have a really wide back and smaller breasts, so people never believe me. They're like, no, you're probably, I'm like, no, it's just not. My size is kind of weird. The other bra that has kind of come up in the last week that I had thought about buying but is also expensive. I think it's like 135 bucks,
And it's kind of random because it's from a fashion brand, but is Doen makes a bra? Oh, do they?
Yes. So Hillary Kerr, who has a great newsletter, hi everyone. She's also runs a bunch of magazines within and publications within the Future Publishing Empire had recommended this Brito Me years ago, and she came to our book, she was moderated one of our book readings in Los Angeles and Margaret Cleveland, who's the CEO of Doen came and Hillary brought the bra again and said, it is really, really good. You should get it, because she's like, it just seems to fit everyone. And Margaret was like, it's true. It really does fit everybody. Look, I think it really does fit everybody who's a C Cup or smaller. I can't speak to a D, I'm a B, so I can't speak to Deer or higher. I think it's basically a black laced Balt, but not extreme Balt. They have it in pink and white lace too. It's a flat lace and it's unlined and it fits me perfect with Raj. You don't really want to buy them from a fashion brand because you think they're going to phase them out.
Elise: But
Lauren: I would say with this, they're not going to phase this out. This is going to be a thing that they carry every season. And also this is a brand that's going to be around for a long time, so I would guarantee you at least have 10 or 15 years of being able to buy this bra, but also buy a few and have them forever. It's like my husband bought all these American apparel V-Neck when they went out of business. Little did he know that Dov Charney would just recreate American Apparel with Los Angeles apparel, but it's the kind of thing you want to buy in bulk. But yes, if you are on the smaller side size boob wise and you don't want any lining, this is a fantastic bribe. I'm so glad that, and Hillary is the kind of person, she's probably done a newsletter where she tried on 75 bras and this was one of them, but it really does deliver and is worth the $135 investment or however much it is.
Elise: Great. Recommendations. We will link everything y'all mentioned, including the newsletter in our show notes. And then Lauren and Chantal, their book is called Selling Sexy Victoria's Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon, Chantal. Lauren, thank you so much for joining me.
Chantal: Elisa was pleasure. This was so
Doree: Fun. So last week, my intention was to schedule my days and that all got kind of thrown out the window because Matt tested positive for Covid, which meant my schedule got all scrambled and now I have Covid. So sometimes you just have to roll with the world what the universe gives you. That's
Elise: Right. That's right. Maybe that's the intention.
Doree: Yes, exactly. So my intention this week is to just have covid and try not to push it too much because I feel like that can often happen with Covid where you're like, I'm feeling a little better. I'm just going to go work out or something. And then you're like, oh my God, I feel like I'm going to die. So I hope to not do that. That's my goal for this week. Just take it easy. Be easy. Just take it easy. Just take it easy. What about you, Elise?
Elise: So last week my intention was to write longhand more so just to do morning pages in a notebook instead of typing things out. I was somewhat successful because when I was at Ted, you're not allowed to really have your devices on in the theater. So I actually had to use a fancy notebook and a good pen and write down all my notes and my thoughts. And so my to-do lists and my shopping lists as my mind wandered also wound up longhand. The problem is when you write on random post-its and things, you can't find them later.
So I don't know where my shopping list is, but I did write it longhand, so it's like you win some, you lose some this week. I think that I should channel you and also try and just take it easy. I think we need to be really easy on ourselves. There is only one week left until an election that is probably not going to be decided on election night. And then after that, the period is going to be really rough for our country no matter how it goes. And so I just really want to take it easy. I wish everybody ease and that extends to myself.
Doree: I love that. Alright everybody, just a reminder that Forever35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Shafrir and Elise Hugh, and produced and edited by Sam Junio. Sami Reed is our project manager and our network partner is Acast. Thanks everybody.
Elise: Thank y'all. Bye.
Doree: Bye.