At the same time, Tyrnauer continued, Wexner—who founded The Limited in 1963 with the help of a $5,000 loan from his aunt—is a self-made billionaire who enjoyed his time as a media darling in the 1980s, “and I think one of the stories of our time is how corporate leaders have been lionized and celebrated.”
Wexner was behind much of the admittedly “brilliant marketing and branding that made Victoria’s Secret a household name,” he said, comparing the company’s tactics to an “analog version of Instagram”—i.e. it created unrealistic expectations and made the unobtainable desirable.
“It was an anesthetizing fantasy that was designed to make us buy things that we don’t need,” Tyrnauer continued, “and masked a kind of culture on the corporate level that was apparently corrupt and certainly not healthy
Ultimately, he concluded, the story of Victoria’s Secret “is a story about corporate culture run amok and about billionaires having a lot of power and in many cases, perhaps, too much power. And I think that examining what happened at this once high-flying company that crashed to Earth almost overnight is a cautionary tale.”
Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons premieres July 14 on Hulu.