VICTORIA'S SECRET EXPOSED
WHAT MYSTERY LURKED UNDER THE ROYAL ROBES?
The sadly under-nourished girls of Victoria’s Secret, apparently too poor to afford decent clothes or a square meal.
The news that America’s favourite naughty underwear manufacturer has released Victoria's Secret: The Tour '23 reminded me, improbably, of a book-finding tour made some years ago of the Pacific Northwest. My companion, Martin Stone, wasn't a collector but a finder; a “runner” – called in the US a “scout” - and probably the world’s best, but he was not an easy travel companion. A chain smoker, his recent addictions to alcohol and cocaine, the residue of his former career as a noted rock guitarist – Mighty Baby, the Savoy Brown Blues Band - dictated frequent diversions from our route for AA meetings.
Martin Stone in his musical days.
Nor had the hoped-for literary treasures eventuated. The internet had swept through the second-hand book business like a wildfire. The few surviving bookshops were staffed by drowsing dropouts who couldn’t price a paperback without spending twenty minutes on the internet researching a title, for which they then demanded a dizzyingly high price.
“Yes, but that’s for the first edition,“ we’d point out. “Yours is the third impression, has no wrapper, and someone seems to have used a slice of pastrami as a book mark.”
But this just convinced them we were cheats. Anyone who knew so much had to be a crook. “If you don’t want it,” they said with a sullen glare, “you don’t have to buy it.” Paradoxically, being treated as swindlers encouraged us to fulfill their expectations. When a short-sighted assistant mistook “$50” for “$5”, we said nothing. Never give a sucker an even break.
If our ethics were degenerating, so was our diet. People ate dinner at 5.30 and the night owls at 6. By 7, everything was shut. One motel had no coffee shop, no kitchen, no refrigerators in the rooms; no room service. Even Norman Bates offered Marion Crane a sandwich, I thought. There’d be coffee in the lobby next morning, explained the girl who checked us in – “and our wonderful cinnamon rolls. Ya gotta try them. They’re to die for!” We found this to be true. With the consistency of tissue wads soaked in glutinous goo, they were, indeed, life-threatening.
But Victoria’s Secret…
At a mall outside a town in rural Washington State, we found the halls, though decked with tinsel and ersatz Christmas cheer, almost empty. At Santa’s stand, the old boy and his elf took a load off by sharing the throne on which he usually cuddled kids.
Nobody wanted the giant boxes of chocolates, the glittering gadgetry of Radio Shack, and least of all the lingerie in Victoria’s Secret. Over-estimating the market among loggers for waspie corsets and suspender belts, the franchise owners had decided, instead of boudoir intimacy, to go for space, and rented a former carpet showroom. To fill the windows, they enlarged the standard peek-a-boo photos to billboard size. Each time I think of Victoria’s Secret, it’s those photographs I recall - models huge as whales, lounging in black net bras that could hold a pair of hippos.
In fact, the secret of the real Victoria was that her underwear came closer, at least in size, to that worn by these enlarged ladies. Periodically, some visitor to Antiques Roadshow produces a pair of drawers formerly the property of HMQ. They show that, unlike today’s wisps of gilded thistledown, her voluminous bloomers would have engulfed Prince Albert in their flannelled folds. That the couple produced nine children together was truly a miracle.
