Quote: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.

Quote: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.

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:

Quote: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?

(Mar 26 2026, 7:48 PM)Clover I saw the thread title and I was like "damn... yeah..." I was also thinking about it in the context of the internet. (Though in that case, younger generations have also been groomed sadly...) But yeah, it's so morbid to look back and think about how prominent young girls sexualizing themselves was seen as "normal" or "in" or whatever. The Playboy bunny was all over the place. I remember going through my teenhood possessions when I emptied out my childhood room a few years ago, and came across a bunch of panties. Like... thongs... when I was in high school. I was thinking like. 1. How the hell did I wear this? and 2. Why the hell did I wear this? I mean, I know why, now, looking back, thinking about how the pop culture at the time was all about sexualization. It was also a weird kind of "sexy cute" which... I guess makes sense if it was all a bunch of nasty old pedo men in charge of promoting this culture to girls. My sister is Gen Z and I am like, well, I mean she fell into and had to deal with the trans hysteria for her generation, but I am glad she hadn't had to deal with the sexualization culture I had fallen into in high school.

(Yesterday, 8:05 AM)Mixmax I'm a Millennial as well and it was just generally a very weird time. You mention fat shaming, rightfully so, but it also transported my mind to the era of ''sex positive third wave feminism''. I came of age in the time that it was really riding its high and I was shocked to see what it was about. I learned about feminism in history class and I didn't have AS much access to social media and internet in general before I moved out, so once I did, I was so confused as to what ''feminism'' had become as it seemed so antithetical to how I knew it. (learned about the first 2 waves etc)

I also remember the Playboy bunny, yeah, in high school already... I thought that was really weird and inappropriate, at the time. Degrading.

Honestly, for us as Millennial women it was a shitshow. I sometimes think back to how third wave feminism ''behaved'' at the time and how honestly, outright dangerous and harmful it was. I feel like we were groomed from at least 2 sides: the one mentioned here, but also ''feminism''. I can really see, looking back but also at the time, how this culture laid the groundwork for aggressive inclusion of TIM; I feel like it helped eradicate any sense of ''class consciousness'' in women. Back then, I noticed how unhealthy it all was and thought to myself ''I must be 'sex-negative' then''. Women and even girls were encouraged to undergo degrading things and claim it back as being a ''kinky slt'' or whatever, as the ultimate self-humiliation. They took this sick culture, recognized the shaming, rejected that shame and sold the culture back to us as empowerment. It's good that they saw the shaming! However, that shouldn't mean that we should embace the very culture that was grooming litte kids. And yeah, the thing with fatshaming... They went the route of ''fat girls/women can be just as fuckable! [and that's what really matters for a woman]''.

There was hardly a way, culturally, to just be dignified and A Person. You had to embrace this grooming slt culture or you were a prude, repressed, religious, boring, un-liberated. It was a clusterfuck. I felt estranged and dissociated from feminism at the time.