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.
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 allowed that “there is limited evidence regarding his involvement.” In February, Wexner testified before Congress that he knew nothing of Epstein’s abuse of girls and young women.
Regardless, Wexner appears to have known that Epstein traded on his connection to Victoria’s Secret to target and assault aspiring models in 1997. While we don’t know what Wexner did in response to this news, their relationship appears to have withstood it.
They eventually had a falling out related to Epstein’s 2007 solicitation charges, which led Wexner to discover that Epstein had misappropriated family funds. According to reporting from the New York Times, “instead of reporting the theft to the authorities or bringing legal action against Mr. Epstein, they opted for a private settlement. In early 2008, Mr. Epstein returned $100 million to the Wexners.” The Epstein files contain an unsent and undated letter from Epstein to Wexner in which Epstein writes, “You and I had ‘gang stuff’ for over 15 years,” and adds that he has “no intention of divulging any confidence of ours.”
It appears that Epstein wasn’t the only bad actor surrounding Wexner. Ed Razek, former chief marketing officer at L Brands and a close friend of Wexner’s, has been accused of nonconsensually groping Victoria’s Secret models and blackballing those who refused his advances. Mike Jeffries, the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, is awaiting trial on sex trafficking and prostitution charges, having allegedly targeted young men who modeled for Abercrombie, worked as the stores’ infamous shirtless greeters, or aspired to do any of the above. Bruce Weber, a photographer who shot many of Abercrombie’s famously edgy ads, has been accused of sexually exploiting male models.
Wexner’s persistent presence in the Epstein story is often overlooked, as he’s not a household name in the way that President Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Bill Gates are. Still, Wexner’s influence is undeniable because his companies were so central to the prevailing aesthetic and ethos of the 2000s. When I was a teenager in those years, every girl I knew got her first bra at Victoria’s Secret, and most of my classmates either wore or aspired to wear Abercrombie’s jokey graphic T-shirts. The companies that made up L Brands were as fundamental to the experience of being a millennial adolescent as speculating over the state of Britney Spears’s virginity was.
The compulsory raunch of the 2000s mall
Wexner’s brands were not neutral purveyors of clothing. They defined culture and were architects of what was cool, which is to say they provided teens, tweens, and young adults with an ideology of what is acceptable and desirable, and what is not.
At L Brands mall stores, being cool meant being thin (neither Victoria’s Secret nor Abercrombie was what we would today call “size inclusive”). It also meant being white. Abercrombie infamously refused to hire people of color to work the sales floor and sold numerous racist T-shirts, while Victoria’s Secret dressed white models as “sexy little geishas” and Black models in jungle-themed lingerie.
Perhaps most importantly, though, at L Brands stores, what was cool was what was raunchy. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a sexualized and then pornified era, and perhaps nowhere was this grim, compulsory sleaze as evident as it was at the mall.
In her 2025 book Girl on Girl, the journalist Sophie Gilbert describes Abercrombie’s trendy, envelope-pushing raunch circa 1999. As Gilbert writes:
The Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly’s Christmas issue that year, titled ‘Naughty or Nice,’ featured nude photo spreads, mentions of oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with the porn actress Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts. The publication provoked outrage in the media, but the company’s strategically sexual marketing to its teenage consumer base was sound: A 2000 Time story reported that sales had increased sixfold in just six years.
Meanwhile, Victoria’s Secret televised its annual Fashion Show for the first time in 2001. In 2002, the brand launched Pink, its first collection aimed at teenagers. Pink joined the Fashion Show in 2006, featuring young models in barely there lingerie, clutching cheerleader accessories and stuffed animals.
“Les was pretty excited about Pink, and so it got a lot of attention,” a former CEO of Victoria’s Secret said of Wexner in a 2022 documentary. “He saw an opportunity, and he likes to exploit an opportunity.”
All of this is to say that the people who taught young millennials how to be cool were people with a history of inappropriate conduct around the very young. In that case, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the cool to which they taught teenagers to aspire was a pornographic kind of cool.
We’ve spent much of the past 10 years unpacking the baggage of the 2000s: all that sleaze, all that casual misogyny, all that fat-shaming, all that cynical, performative raunch — and at the same time, that intense fixation on innocence, on purity, on virginity. The contradictions have troubled me so much that I built a whole essay series around it. Over time, what I’ve found strangest about the raunch-purity paradox of those years is that it felt so compulsory, as if there were no other options outside of the binary with which we were presented, no other way to be a person that had worth.
You had to diet yourself as thin as possible, because the Abercrombie low-rise jeans required it, and you had to navigate people (often adult men) reacting to your partially exposed Victoria’s Secret underwear, because the thongs required it. Complaining about any of the above felt like a waste of time: It meant you would come off as humorless and uncool and behind the times, and anyway, what other options did you have?
As millennials move through their 30s and 40s, we’re still making sense of the misogyny and racism that was normalized by adults in our teen years. At this point, it’s worth asking the question: Did the people who did this to us do it on purpose? Were we simply watching capitalism in action? Or was it something closer to being groomed?
