Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet. I spent the weekend catching up on TV
(White Lotus, Severance, and The Pitt)… and exercising. Yes, that means I’m back in Los Angeles.
In today’s issue, I’ve got an update on the LVMH succession wars, the future of New York Fashion Week, shoe designer musical chairs, and what happens now that Jonathan Anderson’s departure from Loewe was finally announced today.
🚨 Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, I’m joined by Los Angeles–based stylist Karolyn Pho. We’re chatting about Loewe, who should go to Balenciaga, and Karolyn’s book, Motivations. Listen
here and here.
🎁 For those of you with the Shoppies: My friend Chris Black is a podcaster-influencer and was dressed for
designer Pelagia Kolotouros’s Lacoste show last week on the court at Roland-Garros, which we traveled to together. Chris has impeccable taste, but is also very trad, so it’s no surprise he chose the brand’s classic fit polo in navy as his, um, look. Anyway, he took
the easy way out, but I really do like those polos—I used to wear vintage ones in high school—and I spent several minutes after the show searching on Etsy for the mid-life version of my high school go-to. (I’m recommending striped, Japanese-made, and
long-sleeved versions. Also the adorable retro shorts.) It’s time for the return of the crocodile as a fashion item, I’d say. And, as Chris pointed out, this is really the sort of thing that is fine, even better, to buy new. (Especially in pastel blue and at least one size bigger than you’d normally take.)
Mentioned in this issue: Bernard Arnault, LVMH, Louis Vuitton, Donald Trump, Frédéric Arnault, Loro Piana, Financière Agache, Anna Wintour, Alexandre Arnault, Delphine Arnault, Succession, Moët Hennessy, The Row, Nina
Christen, Jonathan Anderson, Dior, Loewe, and many more…
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Three Things You Should Know…
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- See
you in September…: I’m hearing that the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and Anna Wintour, who doesn’t work there but wields a lot of influence over C.E.O. Steven Kolb, are advocating for New York Fashion Week to be consolidated into one week per year, rather than two. It would take place in September before the start of the European shows. The argument is that nobody wants to be in New York in February, and all the buying happens after the
shows, in Paris, or virtually. So why not save everyone some time and money and make September pop?
A rep for the CFDA insists that there are no plans to whittle down the schedule, despite murmurs otherwise. “The CFDA has no plans to reduce New York Fashion Week to one season,” the rep said. “We are continuing with the February and September shows.”
Sure, but I know for a fact that there have been discussions, even if nothing has been decided on. And for the contingency that wants
February to disappear, I understand their logic. The value of fashion shows has diminished for brands that can’t afford to spend a ton of money on all the staging and paid marketing required. (The shows used to be for the trade—editors and buyers—but now they are mostly for customers.) And multiple big American designers have already chosen to show off-calendar (Marc Jacobs) or only once a year (Thom Browne). Ralph Lauren and Christopher
John Rogers show on-calendar sometimes, sometimes not, and sometimes they don’t show at all. Practically speaking, this makes a lot of sense, and I could see more designers staging shows and events around the Met Gala, when the weather is nicer and the international crowd is in town.
Still, I suspect there would be serious pushback from designers with means who have made the point of consistently showing in New York. Would Catherine Holstein feel compelled to
move her February show to Milan? Would Michael Kors just show anyway? My philosophy around this stuff is more live and let die: I attend New York Fashion Week to see new collections, yes, but mostly to catch up with people. I don’t think the February shows are harming anyone, even if the week’s contribution to the city’s G.D.P. is dwindling.
- Shoeless Row: Everyone loved The Row’s
shoeless runway show in Paris. (Tights are in, shoes are out.) I assumed this was a clever Brian Molloy styling trick, which had the added benefit of preventing copycats from copying too quickly. But it’s also true that Nina Christen, The Row’s shoe design director, recently left the company. If it was a gimmick, it was well
timed.
As I’ve mentioned before, the importance of a shoe designer at ready-to-wear brands has increased exponentially in recent years: For labels like Alaïa, McQueen, and Balenciaga, shoes are a giant percentage of overall sales. It’s a fast-growing category and often a consumer’s entry into a brand. And shoe designers don’t tend to stay anywhere for very long, because smart creative directors recognize that it’s good to keep that category looking fresh.
Christen, who
launched her own line last year, has designed shoes for Loewe (the balloon heels), Daniel Lee’s Bottega Veneta (square-toe sandals), and Phoebe Philo’s Céline (inflated Blundstones). She went to The Row after the brand moved more of its design functions to Paris; her predecessor, Trevor Houston, headed to Khaite and
is now designing Herbert Levine. As for which shoe designer will land at The Row next? I’m sure they’ll find someone interesting—or already have—but as I always say, at brands like that, the category designers are only as good as the people they’re reporting to. (A rep for The Row did not respond to a request for comment regarding
Christen’s departure.)
- Loewe news raises Dior questions: After months of speculation, Jonathan Anderson took his virtual Loewe bow on Monday morning, complete with several Instagram montages and a press release featuring quotes from Anderson himself, as well as Loewe C.E.O. Pascale Lepoivre, and LVMH Fashion Group head Sidney Toledano. I was taken aback by how emotional the announcement seemed to be for
Anderson—who is very online and loves sharing—but also his collaborators, many of whom posted missives on Instagram reminiscing on their past decade of work at the Spanish leather goods house.
It was a real we’re-in-this-together moment as Anderson enters another leg of his remarkable journey. It’s been confirmed to me every way to Sunday that he will be the new designer of Dior womenswear and menswear, and that the announcement is being delayed, at least in part,
because current Dior womenswear designer Maria Grazia Chiuri has two more shows to go—Kyoto in April, and Rome in May. LVMH’s decision not to immediately announce Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez as Anderson’s replacement is more mysterious, but I guess there’s no reason to flood the market at this point.
While we await the official Anderson appointment—I was told by insiders that it’ll happen within the next six weeks, others said
after the Rome show—I swear you can already see the tides changing at Dior, where Anderson is working out of the men’s building. Check out this online advertisement for the new Dior D-Journey bag, starring ambassador Rosamund Pike and directed by Benjamin Vu. It has a deadpan, black-comedy style that I could see dovetailing with Grazia Chiuri’s own
sense of humor, but feels new and out-of-left-field for a self-serious, right-down-the-middle brand like Dior. We’ll discuss this in depth once more details of Anderson’s arrangement are revealed, but one of his challenges is going to be to make people like me want to want Dior. I still would not buy said banana-boat-style bag, but the ad did get me excited for his take on the Bar jacket.
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As Bernard Arnault attempts to extend his reign for another nine years, the question of
who will replace him seems as far off as ever. And yet, as Delphine contends with Dior and Antoine contemplates another Olympics, two boys from his second marriage, Frédéric and Alexandre, make their cases.
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Last week in Paris, I was interviewed for two separate documentaries about the
luxury industry in France. Of course, most questions were about Bernard Arnault, who is the primary reason there are (at least) two documentaries being made about the luxury industry in France. Arnault schemed to acquire control of LVMH in 1988, when he was just 39. Even then, reporters referred to LVMH, already the
largest luxury conglomerate in the world, as an “empire.” Since then, Arnault has grown LVMH’s portfolio to some 75 companies, worth €330 billion (on a bad day), making him among the five wealthiest people in the world.
Arnault is the proverbial king of France, wielding tremendous influence over its government, co-producing its Olympics, and
engaging in global trade negotiations via his longtime friendship with Donald Trump. But, at 76, there are questions in Paris about how long Arnault’s reign could, or should, endure. Last week, he took another step toward immortality, announcing that LVMH would propose to shareholders that he be allowed to remain chairman and
C.E.O. of the group until he is 85. (Shareholders will undoubtedly approve the change in April, not that it really matters since the Arnault family owns the majority of the voting rights.) That gives Arnault père another nine years to determine, once and for all, which of his five adult children are best positioned to succeed him.
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Even so, Bernard has been under pressure to accelerate the corporate training his kids have been receiving
in roles across the company, providing amateur LVMH kremlinologists with endless signals regarding who is up, and down, in the Arnault hierarchy. Most recently, LVMH announced that Frédéric Arnault, Bernard’s 29-year-old son, would be made C.E.O. of Loro Piana, one of the fastest growing (if not the fastest growing) businesses in the portfolio. His appointment, quietly criticized by many people in the company, has set off another round of succession speculation.
Frédéric is young, yes, but he’s been given a tremendous amount of responsibility, fast, not only at the Italian cashmere mill, but also as the managing director of the family office, Financière Agache (where he replaced Nicolas Bazire, a longtime right hand who ran into legal trouble in 2020). Last year,
I reported that Frédéric was being given extra attention, with Michael Burke, the longtime LVMH executive, taking him around and introducing him to people in and outside of the group.
Of course, Frédéric is still young—a decade younger than Arnault was when he took control of LVMH. (Loro Piana, as one insider put it, is a good opportunity for him to learn the fashion business without being thrown into the deep end at Louis Vuitton or Dior.) I’d love to tell the Hollywood
executives and book agents who regularly call me to ask what an LVMH version of Succession would look like that Frédéric is the one—or even in the top spot. Perhaps he is currently his father’s favorite. But I suspect that, similar to Logan Roy, Arnault has trouble envisioning a world where he is not in charge.
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Arnault has spent the last year nudging an entire generation of executives out the door,
much as his contemporary and longtime collaborator, Anna Wintour, discarded all of her peers at Condé Nast a decade ago, installing less-experienced, more malleable people. That’s given him more control over the organization, but also opened space for the next generation of Arnaults, who have been busily filling those roles. Senior executives who haven’t been trundled off have been attached to one or another of the kids like a pair of training wheels.
Many of Arnault’s most recent, most consequential changes at the company—moving Frédéric to Loro Piana, appointing Alexandre to run Moët Hennessy, etcetera—were made possible thanks to the abrupt exit late last year of longtime LVMH human resources head Chantal Gaemperle, who was escorted out of the building when she got fired. (Whatever she did, there’s a high bar to fire people in France.) Gaemperle was a known
shit-talker, which made many executives within the company rejoice following her departure. “Every single person hated her guts—the kids and the execs,” one person close to the company told me at the time. And yet, she was part of the Arnault brain trust. “She kept all those boys in line.”
Indeed, were she still at the company,
it’s likely Gaemperle would have blocked Frédéric’s appointment, or at least given Arnault reason to second-guess the decision. Instead, with Gaemperle and other longtime deputies gone, there are few obstacles to the continued elevation of Arnault’s kids—each of whom, to their credit, has demonstrated an unusual degree of ambition for born-on-fifth-base billionaires. Arnault is famous for having raised his children with pretty strict discipline and high expectations, creating a sort of closed
meritocracy among them. Like any family, especially a blended one, there is tension between siblings, and disagreements, but what they share is deference and admiration for their father. I wonder whether, on some level, they too believe he is irreplaceable.
But if you did want to play the succession game, here’s how I see it as it currently stands. Jean, at least for now, is a nonstarter: He is 27, and running a watch division within a €22
billion company. We cannot yet evaluate his capabilities. On the far other end of the spectrum is near-50-year-old Delphine, inarguably the only one with enough business experience to potentially run all of LVMH tomorrow. Her work ethic and diligence are undeniable, as is her desire to recruit, develop, and retain talent. (She worked tirelessly to keep Jonathan Anderson at the group, winning him an expanded purview at Dior, and was instrumental in
bringing Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez to Loewe.) But whether or not she actually wants to be the boss—or simply feels that she has a duty to fulfill—is a question.
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Antoine, whose remit appears a bit nebulous to those on the outside, has settled into
the role of peacemaker among the children and advisor to his father while managing a lot of the external relations and projects, such as the Olympics sponsorship. In some ways, it’s apparent that the eldest two children, from Bernard’s first wife, Anne Dewavrin, were not born into the kind of wealth that their siblings were. The ambitions are quieter, and they were not given as much operational responsibility so early in their careers.
Among the children from Arnault’s second marriage, the competition appears to be much fiercer. The brothers who seem most pitted against each other publicly, intentionally or not, are Frédéric and Alexandre, whose fate also seems to be connected to the exit of Gaemperle. Whether the competition between them is real or the stuff of HBO-style myth, Frédéric has been rising the fastest of Arnault’s children, in part because he is the second youngest and has
the most to prove in the least amount of time. Alexandre is more of a known quantity. His run at Tiffany was choppy and complicated, yes. But in the end, sales are up, and the performance looks far more like an LVMH business than it did before, which was the point. (Whether you like the new-money revamp or not, LVMH did not buy Tiffany for $15.8 billion to have all those
bridge-and-tunnel lifers let the stores collect dust, and Alexandre achieved what he was told to achieve: Make Tiffany an LVMH brand, and an LVMH company.)
Yet I keep returning to the fact that Bernard continues to stick Alexandre with the toughest jobs at LVMH.
Sure, at his new gig at Moët Hennessy, he was paired with finance guy Jean-Jacques Guiony, but that’s likely an indication that Bernard is contemplating spinning off the division, rather than a lack of confidence in Alexandre, who also finds himself in the middle of a trade war with Trump. My point being: God only gives you what you can handle, and in this case, Bernard Arnault is God.
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A lot of times, a fashion designer profile in a general interest publication can leave
those of us who know too much wanting. Not the case with this Jonathan Anderson deep dive, which arrives perfectly timed with the Loewe announcement. It helps that Anderson is a generous subject. [The New Yorker]
Hudson’s Bay will likely
liquidate unless they find last-minute financing. [WWD]
Forever 21 might be really done for good this time. [NPR]
I rarely feel the urge to shop when I’m reading Concorde, the always-excellent girl “vertical” of Blackbird Spyplane (I’m too conventional and hate muddy colors), but it’s a great educational tool and this time, they featured Chloë Sevigny’s Ecco lace-up sneakers. I guess people would
call them sick? I would never wear them, but I love them. This issue took me down a BBSP rabbit hole, where I found some sneakers I already own and resisted the urge to buy a vintage DMB t-shirt. But it was another reminder that we should embrace our past selves and erase the shame of teenage indiscretions.
[Concorde]
I can’t wait to see Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, not only because this writer says it renewed her “faith in modern cinema,” but also because my friend
Amanda, whose review of the film was “no notes,” did note that the costumes are very good and Cate Blanchett may be wearing Phoebe Philo. [Vulture and
The Big Picture]
Luca Solca and his team over at Bernstein reviewed the season’s collections. His favorite was Hermès, calling Nadège Vanhee’s latest “terrific, sleek, and elegant.” [Inbox]
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And finally… These
photos are almost as disappointing as the potential hair implants!
Until tomorrow,
Lauren
P.S.: We are using affiliate links because we are a business. We may make a couple bucks off them.
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An essential, insider-friendly Hollywood tip sheet from Matthew Belloni, who spent 14 years in the trenches at The
Hollywood Reporter and five before that practicing entertainment law. What I’m Hearing also features veteran Hollywood journalist Kim Masters, as well as a special companion email from Eriq Gardner, focused on entertainment law, and weekly box office analysis from Scott Mendelson.
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