Les Wexner

Wexner is the most successful specialty retailer of the twentieth century and I do not think that is an exaggeration. He opened The Limited in Columbus, Ohio in 1963 with $5,000 borrowed from an aunt, on the observation that his parents' clothing store made its money on a narrow range of moderately priced sportswear and lost it on everything else — so he would sell only that. By the 1980s The Limited was a mall empire: Limited, Express, Lane Bryant, Lerner, Abercrombie & Fitch (bought in 1988 and later spun off), Bath & Body Works, and in 1982 a failing six-store lingerie chain in California that he bought for about $1M. His insight at Victoria's Secret was the same one he had at The Limited: the founder had misread the customer. Raymond built for men; Wexner rebuilt for women, and gave them a European-feeling brand at a mall price. It passed $1B in sales within a decade, and with the fashion show from 1995 and the Angels from 1997 it became one of the most valuable brands in American retail.

His record on the decline is the part I find analytically hardest. Between roughly 2014 and 2019 the customer's definition of desirability broadened and the company's did not, and Wexner — who ran the group and was famously close to its marketing chief Ed Razek — kept the show, the Angels and the imagery in place while Aerie, Savage X Fenty and Skims built businesses on the argument that Victoria's Secret was wrong. He agreed in February 2020 to sell a majority of the brand to Sycamore Partners at a $1.1B valuation, a fraction of its worth a few years earlier; the deal collapsed in the pandemic. He stepped down as chief executive of L Brands in May 2020 and left the board in 2021, ending fifty-seven years running the company he founded.

The association with Jeffrey Epstein has to be set out plainly. Wexner met Epstein in the mid-1980s, made him his personal financial manager, and in 1991 granted him power of attorney over his affairs — an extraordinary degree of control. Epstein occupied and eventually owned the Manhattan townhouse Wexner had bought; the title passed to an Epstein entity in 2011 for no recorded payment. In 1996 the artist Maria Farmer reported being assaulted by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at a property on Wexner's Ohio estate. Wexner has said he severed ties with Epstein in 2007, after Epstein's first criminal investigation in Florida, and in 2019 wrote that he had discovered Epstein had 'misappropriated vast sums' from him, some of which was recovered. He has never been charged with any wrongdoing and has denied any knowledge of Epstein's crimes. What is not in dispute is that for two decades one of the most disciplined retailers in America gave an unaccountable outsider control over his money and access to his company's world, and that the reputational cost of that decision, when it came due in 2019, arrived at the same moment as the brand's own crisis and made both worse.