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How Epstein’s biggest financial client shaped millennial teen culture

Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch taught a generation of young people what was desirable.

The 2000s saw what was perhaps the final generation of American mall teens, before the malls became laser arenas and windowless housing developments. The teens who inhabited them believed themselves to be sophisticated; they learned what a blowjob was in middle school from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Their jeans were low and their thongs were high, their hair was ruthlessly flat-ironed, and their perfume smelled like vanilla frosting. They bought all their favorite things from just one man.

Les Wexner was the most influential mall tycoon of the late ’90s and early 2000s. As CEO of L Brands, Wexner oversaw The Limited and The Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, Express, and — most crucially for millennial teens — Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. Wexner’s brands defined what it meant to be a cool young person in that era, and did it so successfully that Wexner became very, very rich on the backs of his devoted adolescent customer base. The defining aesthetic of a generation was the result of his vision.

All of which gets a little concerning when you consider just how many men who worked for and with Wexner have been accused of sexual misconduct involving very young people — starting with Jeffrey Epstein.

The “Epstein class,” explained

Wexner and Epstein’s “gang stuff”

Wexner started The Limited in 1963 with a $5,000 loan from his aunt, and by the 1990s, he had transformed his single store into the flagship of a multimillion-dollar conglomerate. Around the same time, he took on Epstein as his money manager. For many years after that, he would be Epstein’s only public client.

There’s little evidence to suggest that Wexner participated in Epstein’s crimes, but their intimacy has long been suggestive and confusing. The two were close enough that Wexner gave Epstein extraordinary amounts of control over his personal fortune, including power of attorney.

Wexner has never been charged in connection to Epstein. A 2019 FBI memo lists Wexner as a potential Epstein co-conspirator and notes that a subpoena had been served, but........

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