Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. I’m on the final leg of this trip, and happy for it to close out in Savannah, of all places, at SCAD’s annual student fashion show on Friday night. Thanks to SCAD dean of fashion Dirk Standen, who remains just a little scary, for the invite. (I mean that as a compliment.) I’m excited to get back to Los Angeles this weekend, where I’ll be rolling calls from Monday at 6 a.m. onward.

🚨🚨 A programming note: On tomorrow’s episode of Fashion People, designer slash HommeGirls editor-in-chief Thakoon Panichgul joins me to ponder the future of magazines, content, commerce, and everything in between. You already know this, but he’s the best. Subscribe here.

Today, I’m tying up some loose ends and unspooling fresh threads. LVMH is a hotbed of intrigue right now. Also, I hope everyone at Condé Nast headquarters is enjoying their cocktail party with Roger Lynch on the 35th floor. Send him my regards. Now, let’s get going.

Before we do, though, a final reminder that Puck has updated our Member Information questions for subscribers. (You’re a subscriber, right?!) Do me a solid and take a few seconds to fill it out. I know you love Puck, and it will help us develop new products tailored to your interests moving forward. Just click here, and make sure you’re logged in. Thank you!

Mentioned in this issue: Bernard Arnault, Michael Burke, Delphine Arnault, LVMH, LaLa Anthony, Roger Lynch, Michael Rider, Condé Nast, Hedi Slimane, Sidney Toledano, Silvia Venturini Fendi, Kim Jones, Victoria’s Secret, Les Wexner, Derek Blasberg, Ralph Lauren, Marco de Vincenzo, and many more.

• Michael Rider watch: The feedback from Monday’s news regarding Michael Rider’s departure from Ralph Lauren: Are we sure he’s going to Celine? Here’s what I know: He left Ralph Lauren, and he has a new job in Europe. Is it Celine? That would make the most sense. But Hedi Slimane is still working. If you know what’s going on, I’m always available for impromptu phone calls: +1 646-241-3902.
• The Fendi factor: It’s practically an industry sport to speculate about who might be headed to Fendi, where Silvia Venturini Fendi designs menswear and Kim Jones designs womenswear. Now, the plot has thickened! I hear that the couture show in June is not happening—a notable development. After all, this is the second Kim Jones show to be canceled—or postponed, if you want to be generous—in recent months. (The other was a Dior menswear show in Hong Kong.) This might foreshadow an exit, but I’m not sure Jones is going anywhere… at least not yet. (I reached out to Fendi about the show, but have yet to hear back.)
• The return of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show: Victoria’s Secret, the dead-to-you-but-still-selling-a-lot-of-bras lingerie brand, announced yesterday that it was bringing back its annual runway show. Of course, this escapade had devolved into a raunchy cheesefest that crassly objectified women by the time it was killed off, in the aughts, amid revelations of Les Wexner’s association with Epstein and too-tan marketer Ed Razek’s trashy commentary.

  But it wasn’t always this way. The VS runway show was actually quite an innovation when it was first staged, in 1995, at the Plaza. It marked fashion’s first real push into content and commerce—or retail as media—inspired partly by Wexner’s obsession with Sidney Lumet’s book about the film industry, Making Movies, published earlier that year.

  The Cut’s Chantal Fernandez, my co-author on a book about Victoria’s Secret that conveniently publishes on October 8 (you should preorder it now), reported that the next iteration of the show was slated for November. From my side, I kind of don’t understand how they plan to pay for this. The company, which still makes a lot of money—more than $6 billion in 2023—has been struggling for years and is ripe for a take-private, potentially before the runway show even happens. (There are many, many interested parties.) While sales improved a bit in the first quarter of 2024, a lot of that volume was driven by discounting and lazy consumer behavior; it’s just not a brand people care about anymore.

  Chantal suggested that Victoria’s Secret execs Martin Waters and Greg Unis take a page from the book of Abercrombie & Fitch, which abandoned its Bruce Weber-era prep school orgy D.N.A. and just started making jeans so good that TikTokers couldn’t help but evangelize. I’d go one step further and urge Abercrombie to buy Victoria’s Secret. (Recall, of course, that Wexner once owned both of them.) This would give Abercrombie C.E.O. Fran Horowitz an opportunity to show Wall Street analysts that she’s not a one-hit wonder.

• Traffic, traffic, traffic: For the past 15 years, the Met Gala has been a reliable source of internet traffic for publishers that still depend on impressions generated by slideshows (remember those?). I heard from some publishers that Met-related website traffic was, if not record-breaking, at least like “the old internet” last week—and not just for Vogue.com and other Condé properties, but for rivals, too.

  At Vogue, which posted 570 stories globally—lol, it reminds me of when I used to publish 10 blogs in one day!—there were 64 million livestream views, up 20 percent overall. Total video views across platforms hit more than 1 billion, up 71 percent from last year. (I have some feedback on the live stream: mostly that LaLa Anthony is great, but they need to bring back Derek Blasberg and also speed it up.)

  This Met bump is notable because traffic has been down pretty much across the board for traditional media sites: People don’t want to read about Trump anymore; Facebook News referrals are going away and screwing everyone, etcetera. According to one editor, the peak of Met Gala on the interwebs might have been the 2018 and 2019 seasons, when the themes were Catholicism and Camp, respectively—a “one-two punch,” as this person put it. Whatever the case, the Gala remains an easy thing to package and sell to advertisers—something that soon-to-be-departed chief revenue officer Pam Drucker Mann was very good at doing. “Pam is the only reason we have made money on the Met, Vogue World, etcetera,” one person inside posited. Good luck to everyone next year. I mean it.

Moving in, at least temporarily, are Sidney Toledano, the previous fashion group head, who has returned from semi-retirement, and favored daughter Delphine Arnault, the current C.E.O. of Dior, who is now working more broadly across the group, as I reported a few weeks ago. Of course, there are a great many questions raised by this sudden, unexplained reorganization. Burke—incredibly sharp, occasionally cruel—may not be family, but he accepted the Fashion Group position as a sort of interstitial executive or contingency plan. If Arnault were ever unexpectedly forced to leave before his children were ready to take over—i.e., a sudden health issue—Burke, still in his early 60s, would bridge the gap.

Burke first made his name in luxury as the C.E.O. of Fendi during the 2000s, after LVMH bought the business, and he was particularly proud that he was able to reshape that messy family org into an It-bag machine without expelling Silvia Venturini Fendi, the sister who wanted to stay on after the sale. In 2012, he won the top job at Louis Vuitton, where he hired creative directors Nicolas Ghesquière, in 2013, and Virgil Abloh in 2018. (Ghesquière was also championed by Delphine, who was intensely involved in the Vuitton business in the 10 years before her appointment to Dior.)

In the 24 hours since I first heard that Burke was no longer acting as the head of the division, I’ve been fed several competing theories. Burke is mercurial, often playing bad cop to Toledano, and there is speculation that his inability to sign Alessandro Michele to Fendi, among other missteps, may have frustrated Arnault. Michele “had the Fendi deal on the desk,” as one familiar person said, when Mayhoola—and, by proxy, his old employer Kering—swooped in to deliver him to Valentino. Arnault did not learn of Michele’s Valentino appointment until it was announced in the press, I’m told.

But that also may just be gossip-hungry fashion shit-starters stirring the pot. I’ve heard that there may be more personal—or interpersonal—reasons on Burke’s side for the new arrangement. That would explain Arnault’s decision to bring in temporary support. After all, Arnault isn’t petulant and LVMH is not the sort of company to suddenly cut ties with someone as trusted as Burke, who was only in his new role for a quarter. A company rep did not respond to my request for comment.

After the Kaiser’s death, Kim Jones was willing to work with the remaining Fendis and take on women’s. I’m told that Jones thought his role at the Rome-based brand would end in 2023—rumors of Michele’s appointment were that strong—but nothing happened. Recently, Delphine started renegotiating Jones’s Fendi contract, stepping in for Burke.

Why all the fuss over a sub-€2 billion brand? Well, it could be far bigger, and Arnault certainly smells opportunity. LVMH also likes, and needs, to own top talent, and Michele’s exit from Kering in 2022 made for a perfect opportunity to kick the competition in the shins.

What happened, then? There is speculation that Silvia signed some sort of lifetime contract when LVMH bought the business some 25 years ago, which would explain why they have kept her around for this long. But a company like LVMH has the cash to do whatever it wants. Also, I find it pretty hard to believe that such a contract exists beyond the form of a publicity stunt—and if it does, that it’s sophisticated enough to be enforceable. (This is what lawyers and publicists were put on earth to unwind.)

Beyond Fendi, the wider organization is also in a state of unusually transparent disarray. Givenchy has yet to announce a designer. Rumors that LVMH was in talks to sell the Marc Jacobs business, eventually debunked, nonetheless caused tension. It’s very unlikely that Hedi Slimane will remain at Celine. Other top design talents are frustrated with the state of affairs, and are weighing their options. And while Louis Vuitton is holding steady, sales at Dior are down, indicating that it may be time for a creative change in that business.

For the most part, too, LVMH is able to hide any of its messes behind the diversity of its portfolio. If Tiffany is lagging, Sephora can pick up the slack, and investors won’t know any better. LVMH doesn’t break out brand performance for its investors—a flex only achieved through Arnault’s ability, with Burke by his side, to turn his emporium into a $424 billion behemoth. Kering, its closest rival, must wear its trials and tribulations on its sleeve because it’s a smaller group that breaks out numbers for each brand. It’s not easy for either at the moment: Not only are consumers having second thoughts about how they spend their money, but manufacturing issues across the board are causing major headaches on top of it.

Toledano surely doesn’t mind helping Arnault out one last time. But it’s Delphine who is emerging as the secret weapon here, providing her leverage over her siblings in the endless rivalry that has become their very existence, even if they strive to be cordial. She may not present as a killer like her father, but she has shown her value, not only as an operator but as a champion of creative talent.

Toledano won’t be in this interim role forever, but Arnault might not be incentivized to hand back the reins to Burke. No matter who is in charge, LVMH’s Machiavellian culture will remain in place. There are too many high-octane situations, too many big personalities, and too much money to be made (and lost) not to stir paranoia and encourage a certain amount of scheming.

On Roger Lynch’s Condé strategy: “Cost-cutting is important, sure, but if you fail to keep the brands relevant you’ll end up like Hearst or Meredith. How embarrassing that would be!” —A perpetually irate anonymous publicist (her words, not mine)

A correction: The P.R. behind the Beauty Sandwich wanted Rachel and me to know that Jennifer Lawrence and Jennifer Lopez did not end up getting facials from Iván Pol, even though they were supposed to, according to a list provided by said P.R. that Rachel viewed. Next year!

Burberry, oh man. They are trying, but it’s hard when you’re a public company. Jonathan Akeroyd is a solid executive. It’s a tough situation, both macro and micro. I wonder if someone will take advantage and scoop it up. There’s so much potential there. [The Guardian]

Dylan managed to work Phil Picardi into his Pam Drucker Mann story. [Puck]

The new medspa routine: a few weeks of Ozempic, followed up by some Botox and fillers (maybe a thread lift?) to soften the effects. [BoF]

I like fancy chain restaurants. Especially Houstons. [Eater]

Not Sabato calling out Tim’s review! I love this pseudo battle. [Instagram]

Sundberg on the phenomenon of people decorating their phones with SVB stickers. [GQ]

Haider Ackermann is the new creative director of Canada Goose. We love him. We also love it when Tim writes anything. [BoF]

That Margiela Artisinal dress on Greta Gerwig? In the blinding light of the Cannes photo call, it wasn’t right. On Karla Welch’s feed, it was right. My verdict: I’m glad it happened. (But yes, the YSL won. Actually, the Armani. But actually, the Celine.) [Red Carpet Fashion Awards and Instagram]

And finally… If you were wearing a navy skirt suit with Gucci slingbacks at the show on Monday, can you let me know where the suit was from? I need it. Appreciate you!