The Limited — The Empire Survived; Its Namesake Stores Did Not

The Limited was the mall women’s-apparel chain that gave its name to one of the most powerful retail empires America ever built — and then was quietly left behind by it. Leslie “Les” Wexner opened the first store on August 10, 1963, in a Columbus, Ohio shopping center, with a $5,000 loan from his aunt matched by a bank. The store sold a deliberately limited range of moderately priced sportswear for young women, turned its inventory fast, and proved a template Wexner would replicate, acquire, and spin into a holding company that at various points owned Victoria’s Secret, Express, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Lane Bryant, Lerner, Limited Too, and Henri Bendel. The children outgrew the parent. By the 2010s the original Limited stores were a footnote inside an empire named after them.

In January 2017, the namesake chain reached the end. On January 6 its owner, the private-equity firm Sun Capital Partners, announced it would close all roughly 250 remaining stores and lay off about 4,000 people; the brick-and-mortar locations went dark that weekend, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The trademarks, website, and social accounts were sold at a bankruptcy auction to Sycamore Partners for $26.8 million, and “The Limited” survived only as a licensed online label. It was a quiet death — no liquidation circus, no “EVERYTHING MUST GO” banners, because the stores were simply switched off — which is why the fate word is Shuttered rather than liquidated.

The crucial distinction, easily lost, is that the parent company never died. Wexner’s holding company — The Limited, Inc., renamed Limited Brands in 2002 and L Brands in 2013 — went on thriving. In 2007 it sold a majority of the namesake apparel chain to Sun Capital and kept the jewels. The corporate entity is alive today, split in 2021 into the publicly traded Victoria’s Secret & Co. and Bath & Body Works, Inc. The empire’s offspring outlived the brand on the marquee. What died was the original: the moderately priced career-wear store that, after fast fashion and e-commerce had remade the mall, no longer had a reason to exist.

What was lost was modest by the standards of this encyclopedia — 250 stores, 4,000 jobs, a name that had once meant something to a generation of working women shopping for a first office wardrobe. But the arc is instructive precisely because the company that owned The Limited was a master merchant who understood retail better than almost anyone alive. He could not make the original format matter again, so he sold it. The buyer extracted what value remained and let the rest close.