In a statement issued at the time, the independent directors on the L Brands board said that the company was focused on corporate governance, workplace and compliance practices and that it had made significant strides.

Mr. Wexner’s retailing empire grew out of a modest store he started after a disagreement with his father, who ran a clothing store named Leslie’s. His father carried a wide variety of merchandise, but Mr. Wexner argued that women really wanted to buy “sportswear” — a term at the time for skirts, sweaters and shirts. At the age of 26, he opened the Limited in a Columbus mall with the help of a $5,000 loan from his aunt.

Early on, he developed a reputation for working with his buyers to identify potential hits and moving quickly to offer them to customers. Lee Peterson, an executive vice president at WD Partners, a strategy, design and architecture firm, who worked for the Limited in the 1980s, said Mr. Wexner would quiz employees about what items were selling at Monday evening meetings.

“We would hold up merchandise and talk about what sold and didn’t sell, and he would only be interested in certain things,” Mr. Peterson said. “His first question was always, ‘What’d you pay for that?’ Then: ‘What’d you sell it for? How many did you sell? What would it take for you to sell 10,000 of those?’”

Mr. Peterson added: “If you didn’t know all the answers, he’d get super angry, but for Les, the thing was everything was so simple and so clear and easy for him. It was part of his DNA.”

The Limited, which was part of a wave of specialty chains like Gap and Banana Republic, opened its 100th store in 1976. But Mr. Wexner’s ambitions were bigger than a single label. By 1990, he had also purchased Henri Bendel, Abercrombie & Fitch and Lane Bryant and opened the Limited Too and Bath & Body Works.

But unlike some other retail moguls, Mr. Wexner, who has four children with his wife, Abigail, has long been a relatively private person. He did not appear in ads or write books about his business philosophy. He expressed an almost slavish devotion to L Brands. “If you want to torture me,” Mr. Wexner told The Times in 1986, “take my work away.”