Valentine's Day Lingerie: How February Became a Lingerie Season

Valentine's Day lingerie, the bra set or nightgown bought as a February 14 gift, is mostly a creation of American retail in the second half of the 20th century. Mail-order houses such as Frederick's of Hollywood sold to men buying for women from 1946, Victoria's Secret opened in 1977 to make that purchase comfortable, and in the late 1990s it staged its fashion show in the days before Valentine's Day.

Green silk stockings, 1669

Seventeenth-century Londoners drew lots for valentines and gave presents to the person drawn. Samuel Pepys's diary records what those presents were. On February 22, 1661, his wife sat with Sir William Batten, who "having yesterday sent my wife half-a-dozen pairs of gloves, and a pair of silk stockings and garters, for her Valentine's gift." On February 15, 1669, told that his cousin Turner had drawn him, Pepys went to the New Exchange and bought her "a pair of green silk stockings and garters and shoe-strings, and two pair of jessimy gloves, all coming to about 28s."

Garters were the intimate end of that exchange. The historian Sarah Bendall, writing for The Conversation in 2021, points to an embroidered French silk pair from 1780 that reads "United forever / I die where I cling," and to 17th-century corset busks engraved with love verses, one of them now at the Met. These were tokens, made or bought one at a time. Nobody advertised them.

The man with the order form

The modern trade starts with a catalog. Frederick Mellinger set up a mail-order undergarment business in New York in 1946, after his army discharge, and moved it west the next year as Frederick's of Hollywood. His tag line was "Fashions Change, But Sex Is Always in Style," and a company history sums up his goal as fashions "always aimed at men." A company history notes that only in the late 1990s did Frederick's try to sell "to women rather than to men buying for women."

By then the February pattern was fixed. In 2003 the manager of one Frederick's store told a Virginia newspaper that Valentine's Day was to his shop what the December holidays were to other retailers, and named a black babydoll top and a red genie costume among the sellers. Frederick Mellinger had built a business on the man who wanted to buy lingerie. The holiday gave that man a date.

A store for husbands at the Stanford Shopping Center

Victoria's Secret began with the same customer and a different mood. Roy Raymond said he felt like an unwelcome intruder buying lingerie for his wife in a department store, and with his wife Gaye he opened the first shop at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto on June 12, 1977. The aim, as it is usually quoted, was a store where men could feel comfortable buying lingerie. The decor borrowed from a Victorian parlor: floral wallpaper, gilded fixtures, classical music.

Raymond sold the company to Leslie Wexner's Limited in 1982 for $1 million. From 1983 Wexner turned it toward women buying for themselves, which is where the money was for 51 weeks of the year. The 52nd week stayed with the men.

The fashion show that opened in February

The first Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, at the Plaza Hotel in New York, was held on August 1, 1995. The next three were not. They ran on February 6, 1996, February 4, 1997 and February 3, 1998, all at the Plaza, all in the days before Valentine's Day.

The 1999 show took the idea online. During Super Bowl XXXIII the company ran a 30-second spot, bought by its parent Intimate Brands for about $1.5 million, announcing a webcast a few days later. The show streamed from Cipriani Wall Street on February 3, 1999, and drew more than two million viewers by the count Wikipedia gives; ABC News later reported that the traffic crashed the site. In 2001 the show moved to November and to network television on ABC, to sell for Christmas instead.

The company kept its February advertising. Its second Super Bowl ad, in 2008, promoted the Valentine's Day collection, with Adriana Lima flirting and tossing a football. ABC News described Valentine's Day as the chain's second-biggest sales period after Christmas. The third, in 2015, had the tagline "It's Not Valentine's Day without Victoria's Secret."

Who buys the red babydoll

Men, mostly, and late. In February 2003 the manager of a Victoria's Secret in Bend, Oregon, told The Bulletin that men were about 5 percent of her customers in a normal week and about 50 percent during the Valentine's rush, with sales up 10 to 15 percent that week. One husband left with a red silk babydoll nightgown. Most of the men, a saleswoman said, did not know their partner's measurements.

A Boston boutique on Newbury Street went further in 2002, handing male shoppers a card claiming that almost half of all fine lingerie was bought by men for women. That is the shop's claim, not a statistic. In Britain, Ann Summers reported in 2007 that online sales rose 53 percent in the three weeks to February 14, with basques among the best sellers.

Color does much of the work. Red and pink fill the February rails, and red lingerie is the default Valentine's color. The timing has barely moved: Grips Intelligence, tracking 28 US lingerie sites, found that many of them peaked near February 7 in 2024, once the Valentine's collections were out and the gift buyers arrived.

What the NRF Valentine's Day survey counts

The National Retail Federation has surveyed Valentine's Day spending every year since 2004. For 2026 it forecast a record $29.1 billion, with an average of $199.78 per shopper, from a survey of 7,791 adults taken in early January. Jewelry led at $7 billion, then an evening out at $6.3 billion, then clothing at $3.5 billion, ahead of flowers at $3.1 billion.

The NRF does not split lingerie out of clothing, so nobody can say from these figures how much of the $3.5 billion was a nightgown in a gift box. What the figures do show is that clothing now outsells flowers on a holiday once built on cards and roses. Pepys spent 28 shillings on stockings and garters for his valentine in 1669, and it was still a story worth writing down.

Last updated November 5, 2026

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