Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet. Don’t freak out, okay, but I’m back in New York for a couple of days. Mostly to attend Thursday’s night launch party for the Morjas x How Long Gone boat shoe…

Psych! I’m still mad at Chris and Jason for refusing to re-record my faulty appearance on their pod because they had to “go to dinner.” (Guys, if you don’t have me on again by the end of the year… I shudder to think what will happen to you.) In all seriousness, though, the shoe is cute (Chris has good taste) and while I won’t make it to the party because I’ll be at the Hermès women’s show (a difficult decision, let me tell you), I am supporting by acknowledging its existence. Everyone else: I hope I see you tonight, tomorrow, or in September.

Meanwhile, my partner in journalism, Rachel Strugatz, is back with an Olaplex scoop and plenty of intel you won’t find anywhere else re: Estée Lauder Companies’ long-awaited acquisition of Deciem. (Quit bothering me and email her directly at Rachel@puck.news.) Up top, I’m asking a lot of questions, providing a few answers. Lots of stuff is happening in Europe. Good thing I’ll be there in just a few weeks to investigate.

P.S., thanks to everyone who made the pilgrimage to Hollywood Boulevard on Monday night for my conversation with HBO and Max Originals’ costume designers Kathleen Felix-Hager (Hacks), Kasia Walicka-Maimone (The Gilded Age), Consolata Boyle (The Regime), Christina Flannery (The Righteous Gemstones), Danny Glicker (The Sympathizer), and Giulia Moschioni (True Detective: Night Country). They were, no lie, incredible. And a big thanks to the HBO team, as well as the team at Puck, for making it happen. Especially Alex Bigler, who was forced to watch me eat steamed vegetables at a diner afterward. (Don’t worry, they were drowning in salt and butter.) We’ll have a transcript of the conversation ready for you soon. If you want to do something like this, you should email her at Alexandra@puck.news.

As always, just a reminder that Puck is way cheaper than “oral small molecule GLP-1RA”… for now, without the, erm, side effects that we’ve all been hearing about in recent weeks. (I’m not going there.) Get Puck while you can afford it! Tomorrow is a good one.

Mentioned in this issue: Olaplex, The Ordinary, Virginie Viard, Fabrizio Freda, Estée Lauder Companies, Kering, François-Henri Pinault, Laurent Claquin, Daniel Lee, Burberry, LVMH, Vennette Ho, Rothy’s, Rod Manley, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Jenny Ming, Gucci, and many more.

• The game of designer musical chairs is back on: Virginie Viard is out as Chanel’s creative director, I hear from multiple sources. (BoF broke the news, and it’s been confirmed.) This is obviously going to be a big deal. Not only because of who will replace her, but because it’ll be the first break in the Karl Lagerfeld continuum since he joined the company in the early 1980s. The obvious choice here is Hedi Slimane, but that could also be wishful thinking among the fashion throngs. More on that from me tomorrow.

  A source close to the company also told me that we should expect to see some major changes at Chanel in the top executive ranks as well. While the company made a point of acknowledging Viard’s work in their recent earnings report, I hear from people internally that her collections themselves were not selling, even if the more commercial product was.

  Meanwhile, the Sarah Burton for McQueen speculation has reared its head, yet again. More tomorrow.

• Laurent in Paris: The Kering reorg that started last summer is not over. Kering Americas C.E.O. Laurent Claquin, a trusted advisor to Kering C.E.O. and chairman François-Henri Pinault, is being “called back to Paris” to assume an executive committee role. (I reached out to Kering for comment and did not hear back.) He relocates in September, but the move will be announced in the coming days. And what will Claquin’s new position be, pray tell? Remember that he opened the company’s U.S. headquarters in 2011, and also ran former Bottega Veneta designer Tomas Maier’s namesake brand when Kering owned it. He not only managed the businesses in the U.S., but also the communications and V.I.P. and V.I.C. relations here, too.

  Pinault has been shuffling around his people (his great bud, finance guy Jean-François Palus, is now the C.E.O. of Gucci) and also hiring big-time executive talent from outside the company. (Everyone loves Stefano Cantino, the new deputy C.E.O., who is clearly being trained for something even bigger.) Meanwhile, the Journal reported today that Selena Kalvaria, the Gucci Americas head of brand and client engagement, is heading to Fanatics to become C.M.O. of its betting and gaming division. (Fashion will miss you, Selena. But there’s always the white party.) More to come on the Kering front, I’m sure. And don’t worry, I’m still watching that LVMH stuff, too.

• Everyone’s talking about Rod Manley leaving Burberry: The company’s C.M.O. is scheduled to exit later this year after a little more than five years in the role. Does he have a new job? Is he tired? And what does this portend about the state of the business, which is getting predictably pummeled in the public market after warning that the going will get tougher in the first half of this fiscal year?

  At some point, perhaps soon, we’ll take a closer look at what’s happening at Burberry—but in short, the company is in a challenging spot. They want to double the sales of shoes and accessories and women’s clothing. I’m not sure that’s possible. (Expanding the outerwear business, which they want to increase by 50 percent, is more feasible.) The question is whether Daniel Lee, the former Céline designer who took a superstar turn at Bottega Veneta, is up to the task. So far, the results have not been spectacular, but even if they were incredible, I’m not sure that they would fix the fundamental problems: Burberry, after all, is an outerwear company masquerading as a fashion brand, a middle-market label that wants to be luxury.

  I haven’t seen Lee’s collections in person, but I think they’ve improved, and the coats are probably gorgeous I.R.L. I actually heard a rumor that former Burberry designer Christopher Bailey—who became the C.E.O., too, for a minute—was consulting, but it’s not true. I assume the rumor came into existence because he is a supportive person who shows up and offers advice when the company asks for it, whereas most people are awful. Anyway, I think someone should buy Burberry and take it private.

• Who wears Rothy’s? Vennette wears Rothy’s!: A Line Sheet reader-slash-spy informed me that superstar beauty banker Vennette Ho was wearing Rothy’s shoes at the Business of Beauty Global Forum in Napa Valley on Tuesday. (Yes, I used to work at the parent company, Business of Fashion… and don’t forget, I have equity and would love it to sell someday.) Anyway, the reader wanted me to know that Ho chose to wear her Rothy’s onstage—and to the dinner afterward. It must say something about the state of the brand, right?

  As a reminder, Rothy’s hired one of my faves, retail executive Jenny Ming, as their C.E.O. Her vision for the woven-shoe biz is far broader than pointy-toe flats (as evidenced by the very popular Mary Jane, braided slide, and more). In the first financial quarter of this year, sales were up 10 percent, and the company lost $1.5 million (compared to a $7.3 million loss in the same quarter a year earlier.) Perhaps it’s time to start sending me photos of Rothy’s looking good in the wild.

• Can they just do it and get it over with? People are wondering why the Neiman Marcus-Saks Fifth Avenue deal hasn’t gone through. I really don’t know the answer, but maybe I will tomorrow?

This is some of the best money that Lauder, which has seen its market cap decline by $22 billion in the past year, has spent in a decade. Back in 2014, of course, it was widely reported that the company paid $60 million (I actually heard that it was $130 million) to buy Le Labo when its sales were touching $30 million per year. Today, Le Labo’s sales have reportedly increased tenfold. Of course, Deciem offers products at a much lower price point—–The Ordinary’s AHA and BHA exfoliants cost $9.50 while Le Labo’s perfumes run well over $300—but one Lauder executive suggested that Estée Lauder C.E.O. Fabrizio Freda was eventually persuaded by the value of the lower price point. “He has come around to the idea of accessibility,” this person said. (A spokesperson for The Estée Lauder Companies declined to comment.)

And yet, despite buying Deciem, the executive continued, there’s a sense that Lauder doesn’t really get it. The historic company still adheres to a set of obsolete guiding principles—delineating between mass, masstige, prestige, luxury, etcetera—that the average consumer just doesn’t care about anymore. Its C-suite, which long thumbed its collective nose at the simple notion of selling on Amazon, is also fixated on acquiring brands that “will last the next 50 or 100 years,” according to an investor who’s had a conversation with Lauder’s M&A team. Indeed, in the TikTok era, it’s hard for a beauty line to maintain relevance for even 10 years.

As a result, Lauder’s M&A strategy has lagged behind its peers, which have scooped up brands that might’ve fit nicely in Lauder’s portfolio, like Youth to the People, Briogeo, Ilia, and Paula’s Choice. “They haven’t had a stand-alone, proactive M&A deal in a long time,” this investor said. “They look through a lens that’s too cloudy.”

There are a few brands currently exploring a sale that could do wonders for Lauder, like Summer Fridays, which has shown strength in multiple categories (skin, sun, and lip) and comes with a younger customer base that Lauder needs to cultivate. There’s also Merit, which feels like a more modern Bobbi Brown. Lauder could always wait another year or so for Makeup by Mario, or Westman Atelier, two of the hottest makeup brands to come along in many years.

Perhaps Olaplex will have recovered from its reputational damage by the time of the skincare launch. But some insiders are skeptical. “No one is putting that on their face,” said a beauty founder. I might have agreed if Baldwin hadn’t taken over. When Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Supergoop in 2021, at a reported $700 million valuation, revenue at the time was said to be around $70 million. Under Baldwin, it more than doubled. She has the marketing chops (she worked in that function at LVMH, Lauder, and L Catterton) and a deep knowledge of sunscreen, notoriously one of the most challenging products to formulate.

For now, I’m hearing that Baldwin is focusing on a “bigger plan” that involves new haircare, and a long-overdue campaign to regain customer trust. Beyond its legal troubles, Olaplex lost its early market advantage when it got clobbered by competition, namely K18, a similar but more expensive hair treatment line that enjoyed a meteoric three-year rise before Unilever snatched it up for around $700 million last year. Olaplex had to know others were coming, and should have launched new products and categories two years ago. Instead, Olaplex is now playing catch-up. We’ll see if it’s too late.

I’m paraphrasing here: A friend of Craig Kostelic, the Condé Nast business executive likely in the running to replace outgoing chief revenue officer Pamela Drucker Mann, thought my description of him as her “Jared Kushner of sorts” was a bit rude. In fact, Kostelic is from Southwestern Pennsylvania, like me (!). That means he’s got to be harmless, unlike Kushner. He has also done a lot of work there, especially on the digital side. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have an update on this race soon.

On Raf Simons at Calvin: “It was mostly his fault. It could have gone so well. He was (wrongly) given the keys to the kingdom and then really made fun of the house codes (quilts? Jaws?). They all might be very talented, but we know how it ended and what it cost. The ad campaigns were equally weird and unmemorable. (I will agree that the company under PVH did not have the infrastructure…) —A very respectable executive with whom I very much disagree, except for on the infrastructure bit

On Abercrombie: “The turnaround is impressive, but I think brands without real value systems don’t have longevity.” —A person who knows a lot about Abercrombie

On my tendency to refer to Omaha when I’m talking about consumers in the middle of the country: “Quit dunking on Omaha.” —A faithful Fashion People listener

On the ongoing mystery of the Olsen sunglasses that Jessica Testa and I talked about on Fashion People: They’re almost definitely Maison Bonnet, I’m told. I’m also told that getting fitted for a pair of glasses there in Paris is the definition of a luxury shopping experience. I might try it in June! Can I expense those? —Me, using intel from a rich person

Until tomorrow,
Lauren