Our first Get a Clue! posting goes to Victoria’s Secret, who made news this week when a stock analyst asked CEO Sharon Jester Turney whether the company will be hurt by Abercrombie & Fitch’s new, more wholesole lingerie store since VS has gained more of a “tawdry image and a somewhat bordello feeling in store.” Turney essentially replied that their parent company (Limited Brands) has taken notice and wants to return VS to “a higher taste level.” She also said that she feels restoring some of the feminity and “sophistication” would help them become “more relevant to their customers” and bolster falling sales.

You think? What took them so long? I’ll admit I’ve never been a big VS fan because a few purchases I made back in college didn’t seem to be well made and certainly weren’t comfortable to wear. But I knew plenty of people who shopped there. And now, I know no one who does (or would admit to it anyway). Because somewhere along the line VS went from girl-next-door-sexy to Amsterdam-red-light-district. It’s not “too sexy” as some headlines this week said, for most folks in middle America, it’s just plain trashy.

But this didn’t happen yesterday, or even last year. Several years ago VS created quite a stir with its new store in Tyson’s Corner Mall which featured, as one reporter so elegantly put it, “bare-bottomed mannequins in provocative poses and suggestions of bondage, tarted out with rhinestone garters, fishnet stockings, and feathery thongs.” [slides of the displays]

Which wouldn’t have been so bad if it were down a side street in Georgetown. But this was one of the first stores in the mall’s new wing, across from the elevator for stroller-bound parents, and sandwiched between teen retailers Guess, Free People and Abercrombie & Fitch. As you can guess, there was quite an uproar. (And no, all publicity is not good publicity.) So they toned down the displays a little but VS management at the time gave a non-chalant response about having to sell their products. To whom, I guess they weren’t so concerned with since many people don’t want to be seen walking into such a store.

But now that they have a few more competitors and continue to rack up lagging sales, they suddenly are.