"Everything in life has to do with fashion," she said.
More later on the sheer silk-georgette robe designed by Rhoads and roundly rejected by Leslie Wexner, chief executive of Limited Brands, parent to Victoria's Secret. These days, Rhoads' focus is on seducing shoppers with place settings and vases, lamps, paintings, and other items of elegance she wants them to buy for themselves or as gifts.
When customers step across Simply Elegant Home's threshold on East State Street, she wants them "to think and imagine, 'Oooooh. I can live like that!' "
This entrepreneurial endeavor is not what Rhoads, 59, of Rose Valley, planned decades ago as a student at Ursinus College. She majored in psychology, but she had no interest in graduate school to turn that into a career.
So she applied at John Wanamaker, where she was accepted into a training program in 1974 to become an assistant buyer for the children's department.
"I always loved fashion," particularly that it is ever-changing, she explained. "I get bored a little bit easily."
Then a man caught her eye. Rhoads married and moved to North Jersey, where she would work in a variety of jobs for Bamberger's and the department-store giant that swallowed it, Macy's, until 1989. Most of her time at Macy's flagship store in Manhattan was as a lingerie buyer.
One of the vendors she dealt with tipped her off to an opening at what was then an expanding Victoria's Secret catalog division, at a time when old reliables Vanity Fair, Bali, and Olga dominated the lingerie trade.
"The senior management at Macy's said it was a fly-by-night operation," Rhoads said. "They said women would never buy unbranded bras."
Turns out Victoria's Secret did branding "better than anyone I've ever seen."
