Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Did you order your I Told Ya t-shirt yet?

I just landed in New York. Hopefully I’ll see you in a couple of hours at the Ralph Lauren show and dinner. If not, later this week… or next? I’m inescapable.

🚨🚨 Programming note: A new episode of Fashion People drops tomorrow morning. My favorite American retail analyst, BMO’s Simeon Siegel, stops by to talk Tapestry-Capri calamity and Ralph Lauren. Then, the fun really begins when Marisa Meltzer joins me to discuss Glossier founder Emily Weiss’s major Brooklyn real estate purchase (let’s hear it for the actual #girlboss). Plus: why we can’t get enough of these Hedi rumors. Like, subscribe, suck up here.

If you have a tip for me, don’t be shy. Tips are why last week was so good! I love you. (Also, if you think I don’t love you, I probably don’t. Sign up for Puck to curry favor with me. It’ll work, I promise.)

Mentioned in this issue: Zac Posen, Gap, Richard Dickson, Alexandre Arnault, Anna Wintour, John Galliano, Steven Alan, Met Gala, Carrie Donovan, Zendaya, Challengers, Blackbird Spyplane, Hedi Slimane, WHCD fashion, Boot Barn, Jo Ellison, and many more…

• Spotted on Melrose: Alexandre Arnault doing a channel check in the vicinity of the West Hollywood Louis Vuitton pop-up. The middle child’s main gig at the family firm may be Tiffany (he was in town for a celebrity-spangled dinner pushing their high jewelry), but he also scouts design talent and younger brands, taking some of the credit for Vuitton’s recruitment of Pharrell. I wonder if he stopped by The Row…
• An incremental Givenchy update: Anna Wintour may (or may not) be going to bat for John Galliano at LVMH. (That’s what people told me after I published my missive that addressed rumors about the designer talking to that group about that house.) Anyway, a person in the know said that several young-and-hot designers have been interviewed for the gig. Unsurprisingly, Givenchy decision-makers are taking their time, just as they said they would during fashion week in March. Someday there will be a resolution, I promise.
• Steven Alan is back… really!: As a girl growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in the 1990s, I thought my life would be perfect if only I could move to New York, buff my nails, and shop at Steven Alan. Steven Alan, after all, was a New York retail legend whose Tribeca store perfectly bottled a certain flavor of downtown New York fashion. When he opened the store in 1994, Steven was known for finding and selling the coolest cool-girl brands—Rebecca Danenberg, Daryl K., Milkfed—and he also repped many of those brands through his showroom, where buyers from other stores could see the collections and place orders for their own shops. By the late 1990s, he started making these reverse-seam shirts—casual button-ups, meant to be worn untucked—for guys (and eventually women, too) that every mass brand copied. They even stole his merchandising tricks, like shirts folded and stacked in little cubbies, organized by size rather than style.

  Steven always knew what was coming next, and continued to throw off hits well into the 2010s. He was a big reason for Mansur Gavriel’s early success, along with Acne Studios and Lemaire’s when they expanded to the U.S. The only thing he didn’t envision was the demise of his own business, which got caught in the predictable maw of investor mismatch, retail overexpansion, and website replatforming mayhem, resulting in him starting all over again.

  Anyway, in 2018, after the implosion, he entered a licensing deal with Jachs to produce those shirts, and relaunched his website during the pandemic as a marketplace. Jachs is no longer involved, and I hear he’s producing the shirts locally, like he used to, and is self-funding it all. Now, there’s news of a Chelsea store, which is slated to open during the summer. It’ll be tiny: men’s clothing only, and men’s and women’s accessories. Don’t be surprised if you see Steven working in the shop himself. I could cry. A New York story!

Naturally, fashion cynics began taking bets on just how long Posen might last in the spot. After all, he has no real experience selling affordable clothing, unless you count his six-year stint at Brooks Brothers, which filed for bankruptcy in 2020. (Posen left amid the restructuring.) Six months? A year? Perhaps he’d be gone from Old Navy, maker of American flag t-shirts, in 18 months, after trying to reinvigorate revenue, which dropped from $9 billion in 2021 to $8 billion last year.

And while some brand-adjacent observers remain suspicious of his commitment—“I heard that he is M.I.A., not very involved,” one ex-Gap Inc. insider told me—they may simply be conjuring the old Posen. Indeed, just three months into his tenure, people seem to like Posen, and how he’s handling things—including the fact that he’s delegated a fair amount to Sarah Holme, Old Navy’s head of design. The company’s headquarters on Folsom Street has always felt a bit provincial, but Posen has elevated the working environment. He attends merchandising walk-throughs, and commercial shoots, and is even said to have developed a convivial relationship with C.M.O. Behnaz Ghahramani, who was struggling to inspire staff before Posen’s arrival.

That’s not an insignificant accomplishment. Gap Inc. has long had a hard time persuading design, marketing, and retail talent to live and work in the Bay Area, which is more expensive and less interesting than ever, blanketed with homeless people and too-rich tech dorks who deride the art and culture championed by the old-money elite. I pity the remaining Trainas.

What some staffers can’t get behind, however, are Posen’s initial concepts. They worry they may be too hokey, devoid of the tongue-in-cheek humor that made Old Navy so successful in the 1990s. Anyone who has followed Posen’s career, especially at Brooks Brothers, knows that his taste is very specific, and formal—but one Brooks Brothers executive insisted to me that he does have a commercial eye. Posen’s challenge will be channeling the winking, inverted snobbery relayed by the chilly New York fashion editor Carrie Donovan in those famous black-and-white commercials. If he can pull that off, he’s got something.

Brands go in and out of favor, and instead of letting Gap and Banana Republic recede, previous management forced an oversupply of units out the door through deep, and damaging, discounting. Old Navy, which had an incredible 30-year run, may finally get boxed out. A proven operator like Jenna Lyons, whom Dickson allegedly courted before turning to Posen, would have faced the same challenges. Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy all need to shrink to grow, as the analysts like to say—and, most importantly, shrink to grow profits.

The Posen hire indicated that Dickson believes that marketing and so-called buzz will be key to getting these brands in order. Remember, Dickson got the Gap Inc. top job by piggybacking off the work he did in brand partnerships at Mattel during last year’s Barbie craze, which boosted gross billings of dolls by 8 percent in North America. Sure, Barbie and Gap have little in common other than their heritage as iconic emblems of bygone American consumerism. But turning around the Gap, and the other Gap Inc. subsidiaries, will require something to happen in the culture that essentially forces people to shop there. Abercrombie & Fitch, for example, has succeeded by making just-right fashion for TikTokers, not because of jazzy advertising campaigns or brand collaborations, which can seem like stale marketing tricks.

Posen’s touch won’t be felt in stores for months. But he’s likely to be present on the social calendar, back in New York to see and be seen on the spring party circuit, maybe even at the Met Gala. As with many designer appointments, there have been whispers that Anna Wintour campaigned hard for Posen to win the Gap Inc. role. People with direct knowledge of the situation say it’s not true, and that Wintour didn’t know about Posen’s appointment until it was announced publicly. But the very notion speaks to a greater illness plaguing much of the industry, and one that Dickson must be careful of: remaining stuck in the past.

More Challengers: “The star of challengers is Zendaya’s Panthere watch.” —Naomi Fry (on Twitter, but too good not to include)

Even more Challengers: “I loved it: The nostalgia fashion and the unabashed horniness both.” —Another editor

On Zendaya’s red carpet run: “The Vivienne Westwood bunny tail Zendaya look may have been the cherry on top of the tennis ball madness!” —An entrepreneur

Sorry, but we have not reached peak stuff. [The Atlantic]

Gahhhh, I love this suit, what’s happening? [People]

I need the Blackbird Spyplane Chris Pine interview ASAP!!! [Crazy in LA at a premiere, Cleaned up in D.C. with Doug Emhoff].

Best Dressed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Scarlett Johansson in Armani, Rachel Brosnahan in Jonathan Cohen, Ashlyn Harris and Sophia Bush in Harbison Studio, Chris Pine, and Billy Porter. [Just Jared]

Puig is going public in a raise that’ll value the company at close to €15 billion. [Bloomberg]

Gyms stand to benefit from the rise of GPL-1 drugs, according to a Morgan Stanley report. (Gotta build those glutes back up post-muscle loss.) [Quartz]

I went inside a Boot Barn for the first time ever this weekend. Decided to hold out for a pair of Luccheses. But I’m in the minority: Boot Barn, which is public, keeps beating analyst estimates and remains one of the hottest retail stocks. [Yahoo! Finance]

If you want to actually learn more about Hedi Slimane, read this previously unpublished interview with Dana Thomas. [The Style Files]

I listened to this podcast about Challengers while running a race (just 11 miles, calm down, anyone can do it) on the edge of the earth this weekend. I agree that the movie is about Cartier, the Cincinnati Applebee’s, and thighs. [The Big Picture]

Dan Frommer, my husband, wrote about the demise of Foxtrot, the chic 7-11-style convenience stores that were everywhere but New York and Los Angeles. You should read his take because he did a lot of good reporting, and the story will hit close to home for many fashion execs, and also: Dan has devoted his life to me, our son, and visiting shops like Foxtrot, which makes his take the best take. [The New Consumer]

As someone who has had to make awkward small talk with Jo Ellison many times, I really enjoyed this. [Financial Times]

Now this is it. [Zendaya in Alaïa]

Zero Bond is so grotesque, I would be happy to have a drink with you there any time: We can choke down Cosmos. (J.K., I would never, not even as a joke. Too much sugar. But I’ll go there with you!) [Airmail]

Remember when Christian and Laurie and Diana and Esther all worked at MedMen, and Christian, remember when we were going to do that story about MedMen being the Barneys of weed? (In a good way.) Well, MedMen finally, like Barneys, went bankrupt. Love you all. [Businesswire]

Thanks to Emily Sundberg for being so nice about Fashion People, but also for keeping us updated on the other Emily’s real estate endeavors. [Feed Me]

If you want even more info on the Brooklyn brownstone, might I suggest watching Casey’s explainer, which features additional reporting. [TikTok]

Until Wednesday,
Lauren