Resurrections are rare, in fashion and ready-to-wear even more than elsewhere. The one underway at Abercrombie is the fruit of a long-term effort, which began nine years ago in the midst of a storm when Fran Horowitz took over as CEO.

The painful legacy of the past is on the way to being definitively wiped out. Last October, the justice system announced that it had closed its case against Mike Jeffries, Fran Horowitz's predecessor.

Accused of turning the company he was in charge of into a machine for sexually abusing young models, Jeffries was close to Epstein - Abercrombie, like Victoria's Secret, belonged to billionaire Les Wexner, for whom Epstein worked.

That's where the company comes from! In operational terms, at least, its restructuring has been a resounding success. Witness the spectacular expansion of margins and growth in cash flow, well served, it's true, by the pandemic - a pretext skilfully exploited by Abercrombie to close its fast-growing non-profit outlets.

That's all it took for Reddit to seize on the "preppy" icon and elevate its title to "meme stock" status. Except that here, unlike Gamestop, AMC or a Ponzi scheme like MicroStrategy, the progress is real and the explosion in valuation legitimate.

After fifteen years of lethargy, and nine years of Horowitz's takeover, Abercrombie is back to the profitability levels of its glory days. The icing on the cake: as the number of shares has been halved over the period, earnings per share this year are expected to be double those achieved during the 2006-2008 peaks.

Horowitz's other masterstroke - and an audacious one at that - was during the pandemic. when Abercrombie raised prime-rate debt specifically to buy back its shares - then at rock-bottom prices - on the market.

Supremely well-advised, this operation signalled the high degree of confidence Abercrombie placed in its prospects of a return to grace. A return to grace confirmed by the nine-month results published yesterday, with sales up by a further 14%, margins improving and the number of shares in circulation declining.

Despite the explosion in the share price over the past fifteen months, valuation multiples remain surprisingly reasonable. Despite the similarities, it's only a short step from drawing parallels with Nvidia: Nvidia enjoys a virtual monopoly on a product that is suddenly in very high demand, while Abercrombie, despite the hype surrounding its latest collections, operates in an ultra-competitive market.