A lingerie behemoth hit a cultural hurdle – so a former churchgoing cheerleader stepped in

Amy Sedaris befriended Adam Selman when he was a costume designer on the Tennessee set of Dolly Parton’s 2007 Better Get to Livin’ video. Sedaris found him in his hotel room listening to the band Blossoms and sewing sequins onto a green pompom skirt for her character. “I thought, ‘This is my guy,’ ” she said.

Back in New York, Selman was moonlighting as a handyman, and Sedaris hired him to build shelves, wallpaper her bathroom and change the knobs on her dresser. One of his most important acts of service was introducing her to a minimiser bra. “Because I’m a big-breasted girl and I’m a small person, and I hate it,” Sedaris said. “I thank him for that every day.”

Knowing what women want to do with their boobs has turned out to be an enormous part of Selman’s professional life. Last year, he took on the role of executive vice president and chief creative officer of Victoria’s Secret & Co., the American intimate apparel institution that counts 25 million active customers and is forecasting upward of $US7.1 billion (about $10.2 billion) in sales this year. At the core of the enterprise are bras. “It’s huge,” Selman, 44, said, referring not only to the size of the company’s business, but also to the scope of his work.

In August, he led a dizzying tour through its offices in the financial district of Manhattan. Mood boards galore mapped out his purview, from the images of bottles of Bare Nectar and Tease – two scents in the company’s roughly $US2 billion (about $2.8 billion) beauty portfolio – to the Season of Strapless campaign starring Angel Reese of the WNBA.

There was a social media strategy leftover from Valentine’s Day: Hailey Bieber painting her toenails in a dresser drawer in homage to a famous image of Gisele Bündchen from 2001. PinkPantheress starred in a flared leggings shoot for Pink, the more youth-oriented label under the VS umbrella. Another section was filled with wall treatments, drawers and fixtures, part of the visual merchandising and store design for some 1400 Victoria’s Secret stores worldwide. Selman oversees it all.

Around the corner, a private studio was cordoned off by curtains. “This is just a little thing called the Victoria’s Secret fashion show,” Selman said, revealing a lingerie-filled control centre devoted to the cultural curiosity that is billed as the biggest fashion show in the world. Last year’s had a viewership of 60 million. This year’s production is set for October 18 in Los Angeles.

In the lead-up, the company hopes to goose ratings and visibility with a new docuseries, Angels Among Us, premiering on YouTube. Selman – along with Gigi Hadid, Paloma Elsesser, Alex Consani, Pat McGrath and Piergiorgio Del Moro – cast a new Victoria’s Secret “Angel” from a mall tour of American cities. She’ll be revealed next month on the runway.

Victoria’s Secret is back with a pep in its step, a big, bouncy blowout and a perky but comfortable bosom supported by its FlexFactor titanium alloy underwire technology. Since Selman arrived, its share price has risen to about $USS80 ($115) from about $US18. He has been integral to the comeback mounted by the CEO, Hillary Super, who joined Victoria’s Secret in 2024 when it was rudderless in the cultural weeds.

By then, its Barbie-bod vision of sexy had been declared a dated patriarchal manifestation. Reports of sexual harassment in the company loomed. Hanging over it all was the strange relationship between Leslie Wexner, the longtime head of its former parent company, and Jeffrey Epstein. There was also increased competition and issues with product, distribution and discounting.

In response, Victoria’s Secret dismantled the fantasy, cancelling its fashion show in 2019, retiring the Angels and introducing in 2021 the VS Collective, a group of athletes, activists and other ambassadors meant to represent a broader spectrum of women.

“There was a period of time where I think it was really cool to be a hater of Victoria’s Secret,” Super said.

The modest, self-flagellating Victoria’s Secret proved a downer on all levels. By 2023, it was generating roughly $US600 million (about $860 million) less in annual sales than it had just two years earlier, while profits had fallen by about 80 per cent. Super was hired for a turnaround. Was putting the brand’s image and customer experience in the hands of another man the answer?

Women who know Selman speak of a special quality he possesses. Selman and Super met at Savage x Fenty, Rihanna’s lingerie line, where he was chief design officer and Super was CEO. She hired him because they shared a vision of what sexy means today.

His signature look exudes low-key reliability. Short brown hair and a thick moustache frame brown eyes with the innocence of a doe and the soulfulness of a hound. He wears classic workwear and denim, like a stylish handyman. His voice is a calm, steady baritone. “I’m confident he could land a plane,” Sedaris said.

“He’s keeping the fun and the sexiness, but now with the safety,” said Paloma Elsesser, who has had a contract with Victoria’s Secret for five years. One of her early campaigns was a subdued shoot with models in everyday underwear for the VS Collective. Last year, Selman had Elsesser, Candice Swanepoel, Dakota Moore-Lizotte and Devyn Garcia skipping through the streets of New York, ripping their shirts off to bare their Body by Victoria FlexFactor bras to a disco jingle that conjured the camp nostalgia of underwear campaigns of the ’70s and ’80s.

The first thing Selman wanted to do on the job was laugh. “If you said, ‘Close your eyes and think about Victoria’s Secret,’ does it bring a smile to your face?” he asked. “If we’re having a great time and being earnest and sincere about the things that we’re putting out there, the customer will feel it, too.”

Ideally she is feeling the effects of Selman’s 80-20 female-to-male ratio for photographers, stylists, hair, make-up and set people, and models. If they use a male photographer for one shoot, it’s a female photographer the next time. New names include Carlijn Jacobs and Miyako Bellizzi. A majority of Victoria’s Secret’s full-time staff members are women. The idea is to make women want to be a part of it. “It needs to capture your attention, or else I’d be out of a job,” Selman said.

On the road with Angels Among Us, Selman got a closer look at where Victoria’s Secret’s grip on the cultural psyche originates. Contestants were asked why they wanted to be an Angel. “Every other story was, ‘My mom and I used to go to the store together,’ or ‘My mom and I would watch the show together every year,’ ” he said.

One aspiring Angel spoke of her first bra. Her mother had died, so her father took her to Victoria’s Secret, where the store associates helped her get measured and fit. “That’s pretty powerful to be able to be at such a pivotal, unique point in a woman’s life,” Selman said.

Even his first memories of Victoria’s Secret go back to his mother. “Growing up in Texas, we would walk by the Victoria’s Secret store, and then … well, my mom would cover my eyes,” Selman said.

Selman’s father was a high-school football coach and teacher. The family of five moved from Illinois to North Carolina to Virginia before settling in Texas, where they attended church five days a week. He was active in theatre, sewing costumes for school plays with his mother. “It was a lot of Butterick pattern,” he said. “We were always handy, crafty, making curtains for the house.”

When he joined the high-school cheerleading team as the only male, his church youth group didn’t take it well. “It was pretty obvious that people were calling me gay,” he said. “But it definitely made me do my own thing.”

He reduced his church attendance to Sunday service and joined Cheer Station, a competitive cheerleading team in Austin, Texas, committing to high-level tumbling, stunting – the pageantry of the whole thing. They were junior Olympic gold medallists. Selman gave up a cheerleading scholarship to attend Pratt Institute in New York to study fashion.

From there, the strait-laced, churchgoing Texas cheerleader immersed and experimented in the New York fashion and art kid scene. “It was the early 2000s, and I had a big, long mullet that I would straighten with a hair straightener and an asymmetrical bang that eventually grew into a huge pompadour,” Selman said. “I was wearing denim and cowboy boots.”

Selman found his way to the Hotel Chelsea studio of Zaldy Goco, who designed costumes for big celebrity music tours. “I was like, ‘Wait, there’s this whole world that I never knew could be a career path,’ ” Selman said.

He started as an intern and ended up staying with Zaldy for 10 years, working on tours for Mick Jagger, Rufus Wainwright, Britney Spears and Michael Jackson’s final “This Is It” tour. Selman worked on the first five seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which is done through Zaldy’s studio, and spent three years with the Scissor Sisters tour.

“On the surface, Adam looks just like a regular guy, but inside he has got some really interesting points of view,” Zaldy said. “He also has very refined taste in the most silly kind of way.”

In addition to the art of costuming, Selman absorbed big personalities. Perhaps no one has shone more brightly in Selman’s hands than Rihanna. Specifically, when she wore the “naked dress” he designed out of sheer mesh and 230,000 Swarovski crystals to the 2014 Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. Its impact rivals – and owes a debt to – the famous naked numbers Bob Mackie designed for Cher and Mitzi Gaynor. “It was amazing,” Selman said. “It’s also the thing I can never get away from.”

He began working with Rihanna through his boyfriend at the time, stylist Mel Ottenberg, on her 2011 “Loud” tour and stayed in her world for years, consulting on her Puma partnerships, her LVMH-backed Fenty line and her lingerie and intimates brand Savage x Fenty. “I was a conduit to her vision,” he said.

Selman’s personal vision was manifest in his own labels, his ready-to-wear Adam Selman collection, which he led from 2013 to 2018, and Adam Selman Sport (A.S.S.), a cheeky sport line he introduced in 2019 and closed in 2022. Both were laced with references emanating from soft-focus, body-conscious glamour and nostalgia: the late fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo, Eyes of Laura Mars, Lipstick.

Throughout his collections, there was always a fascination with the body with swimwear-inspired looks and sports bras for A.S.S. “I learnt the bra part of the business,” he said. “Like, here’s how you truly lower the bounce rate side-to-side and up-to-down while trying to keep it in the fashion space.”

In other words, Selman has been training for Victoria’s Secret his whole life. “My history lets me tell the science and the joy of intimates,” he said. Wall Street and 25 million customers are watching.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The New York Times.

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