The thing about Wexner is he himself is not creative. He wasn't a creative, a visionary.

He understood how to co-opt creativity and scale it and every idea he had was based in the practical.

I'm Ricky Mulvey and that's Lauren Sherman, a fashion correspondent

It Puck and the co-author of Selling Sexy, Victoria's Secret and the unravelling

of an American icon. Sherman and her co-author Shontal Fernandez caught up with my colleague Mary

Long for a conversation about why retail companies have a tough time staying at the top, the turning

point for Victoria's secret, and why Abercrombie and Fitch is thriving in 2024.

Before we get to the book, you both are coming off like a whirlwind couple of months, in part because of the book for sure but

also because there's been one fashion week after another. Any business takeaways

from those trips like what are what are the high-powered people of fashion talking about?

They're real worried about their striking money.

Nobody's buying anything.

I mean people are buying billions of dollars a year of clothing but it feels like they're

not and so everybody's real worried.

Yeah there's like a luxury slowdown right now that's giving everyone a lot of stress and they're like

firing all their creative directors as a result trying to mix things up. I just

wrote about like VICs the top spenders in luxury

and how these brands are now desperate

to get them to spend more and more

because more kind of aspirational,

quote unquote, regular luxury shoppers

are cutting back. So it's a really kind of stressful interesting time in fashion.

...