Natalie Massenet has a knack for predicting the future. In 2000, when people still carried beepers and seven years before the release of the first iPhone, she launched Net-a-Porter on the Bezos-like hunch that, one day, online shopping for designer fashion would become not only a booming business but, among a certain crowd, a blood sport.
But it’s safe to say she didn’t see this one coming. In a lawsuit filed on Thursday in a California civil court, Massenet accused Erik Torstensson, her partner of 14 years in life and work, of leading a “rampant” double life replete with prostitutes, alcoholism, drug use, and exorbitant spending.
The news has dominated the group chats of the fashion firmament from Los Angeles, where Massenet was born and where Torstensson’s fashion line, Frame, is partly based, all the way to England, where they entertained at their lavish homes in South Kensington and Wiltshire.
They met in 2009, the year before Massenet sold her stake in Net-a-Porter to the Swiss luxury-goods conglomerate Richemont for a reported $70 million. Back then, Torstensson was a plucky young marketing executive and creative director who pitched Massenet on the men’s-wear digital vertical that would become Mr. Porter.
By 2011, she was divorced from the French financier Arnaud Massenet, with whom she had two daughters, and ever since, she and Torstensson have been among the fashion industry’s most visible power couples.
Massenet began her career in the 90s working as an editor at WWD and Tatler. A warm and friendly fixture in the viper pit of fashion, she is known for her mentorship. Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon and the designers Anya Hindmarch, Erdem Moralioğlu, and Victoria Beckham are among her intimates.
But according to Massenet’s lawsuit, all this success made her a target; it claims she was “seduced” so that Torstensson could acquire “social clout” and create a “path toward power, influence, and a better life.”
Torstensson, who grew up on a farm in rural Sweden, was a skateboarder and semi-professional dancer before he moved to London, worked at Wallpaper magazine, and, with his Swedish partner Jens Grede, co-founded the fashion-marketing agency Saturday Group. In 2009 they created Industrie magazine, with Torstensson telling The New York Times, “I will happily admit we started Industrie so we could be editors, so we could be more important, so people would listen to us and have meetings with us.” In 2012, he and Grede launched Frame with Massenet’s support.
Frame immediately went after the superstars, getting its skinny jeans on Rihanna and Beyoncé and cultivating relationships with top models like Gisele Bündchen, Gigi Hadid and Karlie Kloss, who hosted the brand’s third-anniversary dinner at Indochine in New York. According to an October 2024 article in The Wall Street Journal, its annual sales were approaching $200 million. Earlier this week, Frame opened its 19th store, at Cross Creek Ranch, across from the fabled Malibu Country Mart, in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Massenet’s ascent continued. She was appointed chairman of the British Fashion Council in 2013, flying the flag for British fashion across the globe, and was later made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the fashion and retail industries. In 2015, she stepped down from Net-a-Porter when it merged with Yoox.
But Massenet, a serial entrepreneur with a knack for the next big thing, wasn’t going anywhere. In 2017, she co-founded the venture-capital firm Imaginary Ventures with Nick Brown (who is now married to Substack writer and man-about-town Derek Blasberg), which focuses on early-stage fashion-and-beauty investments, and has positions in Skims, Glossier, and Westman Atelier, among others. (Massenet is a personal investor in Electragram, the online-correspondence company co-founded by AIR MAIL Co-Editor Graydon Carter and his wife, Anna Scott Carter.)
Imaginary’s business dealings are closely intertwined with those of the Kardashians, in part because Torstensson’s partner Grede, is a co-founder of Skims, Kim Kardashian’s line of shapewear. According to the lawsuit, Torstensson also has a stake in Skims, the value of which is estimated at over $300 million. (Intriguingly, Grede seemingly owes that relationship to his wife, Emma Grede, a onetime fashion-show producer. She met Kris Jenner at a show in 2015, and went on to co-found Good American with Khloé Kardashian. She is now the host of Aspire with Emma Grede, a podcast about entrepreneurship on which Meghan Markle was a recent guest.)
Massenet and Torstensson lived very large. They hired the interior designer Michael S. Smith, known for his work at the Obama White House, to reimagine their palatial home in South Kensington, and spent six years on first-phase renovations of Donhead House, a 12-bedroom, 300-year-old former rectory in Wiltshire. They also own a home in Amagansett and two adjoining town houses on East 74th Street in New York. (While these were being renovated and combined, the couple and their son lived in a 12,000-square-foot, seven-story rental in the neighborhood.) Torstensson told The New York Times that he was “100 percent living in a bubble,” and added, “But I think that’s very helpful.”
There’s Instagram reality, where Massenet and Torstensson’s social lives and professional successes were breathlessly documented and discussed, and then there’s reality reality.
In 2024, Massenet’s lawsuit claims, she noticed that Torstensson was drinking heavily and disappearing in the evenings. (The couple shares a son who was born by surrogate in 2017, when Massenet was 52 and Torstensson was 38.) She claims that he became “emotionally distant” and suffered from “frequent bouts of bad stomach infections, influenza, panic attacks and hives.”
According to the lawsuit, in January of this year she found a bottle of valacyclovir, a drug commonly used to treat herpes. Then, in May, Massenet claims, she discovered explicit messages and photographs that suggested Torstensson had “maintained multiple affairs with several younger women for years.” One of them was alleged to be an acquaintance of Massenet’s. She confronted Torstensson, who allegedly confessed to being a liar, an alcoholic, a drug addict, and a sex addict.
The Daily Mail, which broke the story, published damning photographs of messages purported to be between Torstensson and drug dealers and escort services. When traveling to Los Angeles for work, the lawsuit alleges, he spent $500 an hour on prostitutes who visited him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On one occasion, it’s alleged that Massenet caught him buying $700 worth of Ecstasy and cocaine.
And then there are the finances. Massenet claims that Torstensson burned through $95 million on private aviation, vacations, homes, and other luxuries on the understanding that she would ultimately benefit financially from the success of his businesses.
But according to the lawsuit, “as soon as he had finished spending Massenet’s money, he left,” leaving Massenet “cash-strapped with his child.” Massenet is now seeking damages for breach of contract, fraud, and infliction of emotional distress.
(Natalie Massenet was not available for comment. A spokesperson for Frame stated, “Frame and Erik Torstensson have agreed to part ways. This is a personal family matter and unrelated to our business activities.”)
The fashion prophet, who foresaw the future of luxury e-commerce, seems to have been quite blind to the man standing beside her.
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast
