Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet, live from Los Angeles. It’s
Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in the United States, and President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time this morning. I hope everyone is able to take some time for themselves today.
Fashion keeps moving. (We’re already past Pitti Uomo and deep in the Milan men’s shows, with Paris and Couture next.) I’ve got some news from Chanel headquarters, notes on Taylor Swift’s drab
game-time look, a couple Condé Nast updates, intel on who’s looking after Ivanka Trump’s and Usha Vance’s wardrobes, and a digression on the role that fashion might play in Hollywood’s future. Not sure, however, if I have any words for Lauren Sánchez’s exposed bra-top at the inauguration.
🚨🚨 Programming
note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, I’m joined by one of my all-time favorite reporters, Sapna Maheshwari from The New York Times, to chat TikTok, inauguration fashion, Vuori (it never ends), and so much more. Listen here and here. Also, I recently joined What’s Contemporary Now host Christopher Michael to discuss, well, what’s contemporary now. (You can listen to
that, as well as episodes with Tim Blanks, Katie Grand, Edward Enninful, Sara Moonves, and others, right here.)
Dispatch from the donation zone: Roam, a footwear brand with a store in Bel Air, has organized a
donation drive for 150 families who lost homes in the fires. Participating brands include Aviator Nation, Stance, Hoka, and New Balance, but they need more stuff and are happy to take as little as 20 units if you don’t have a big surplus. (Email Bella.roamwears@gmail.com or Sarah.roamwears@gmail.com.)
🛍️🛍️ For those with the shoppies: I doubt many of us are really in a shopping mood, but I cannot wait for Rachel Strugatz to write about Victoria Beckham’s makeup business sometime soon. Is this the most promising beauty brand operating
today? I am already a passionate advocate for the Vast mascara, but recently picked up the lip balm, lipstick, and eyeshadow stick as well. (There’s an
eyeshadow crisis in our culture. Bring back eyeshadow!) Also: Los Angeles-based Sophie Buhai, one of my favorite jewelry designers, has put together a selection of pieces where 100 percent of profits go to the
California Community Foundation Wildfire Recovery Fund. The first thing I ever bought from Sophie were the tiny egg studs and I wear them often.
Mentioned in this issue: Matthieu Blazy, Chanel, Virginie Viard, Blake Lively, Taylor Swift, Karl Lagerfeld, Leena Nair, Hermès, Pierre-Alexis
Dumas, the Wertheimer family, Teresa Ko, Condé Nast, the Trump family, Michelle Obama, Ikram Goldman, Leslie Fremar, Kamala Harris, Adam Lippes, Dior, LVMH, Bernard Arnault, Vogue, Priscilla Chan, Jacques Audiard, Saint Laurent, and many more…
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Three Things You Should Know…
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- Who’s stylin’ who: Pretty much every woman in politics works with a stylist, but many of those relationships remain under wraps for various reasons. Politicians and political spouses often opt for discretion—spending money on a stylist can seem frivolous—even if their heavily scrutinized wardrobes are a primary communication tool. Consider how secretive Kamala Harris and Leslie Fremar
were about their partnership; ditto Michelle Obama and Ikram Goldman in the early days.
When second lady Usha Vance stepped out Saturday for a dinner in honor of her husband, the question of who was styling her became more important, because she looked
so… good. I’m not sure there’s been a better idea than Oscar de la Renta’s strapless, black velvet dress with a sweetheart neckline and three asymmetrical floral buttons up the front. I want that dress. Turns out Isabella Nardone, a virtual unknown, is working with both Vances. (Sounds like a family friend situation.)
Ivanka Trump, who wore forest green Dior to the inauguration, has worked with
Dania Lucero Ortiz, the Town & Country fashion and accessories director, for some time. And everyone knows that Melania’s stylist is a guy named Hervé Pierre Braillard, who used to be Carolina Herrera’s right hand. She wore custom Adam Lippes that I mistook for Dior at first glance. With good reason: LVMH C.E.O. Bernard
Arnault, his wife, Hélène Mercier, and his children Delphine and Alexandre—the heads of the first and second cohorts of kids, respectively—were all in attendance as a show of support for Trump.
I know there’s been some moralizing about all this within the fashion community, but some people—and not just Republicans—view it as purely business. Some may have the financial independence to sit this one out, but not everyone. And
others feel like they simply do not have a choice other than to engage.
- Requisite Condé updates: Last week, Condé Nast announced that Claire Thomson-Jonville was joining the company as head of editorial content at Vogue Paris. I reported this months ago, and intimated that the contract would be cumbersome, too—Thomson-Jonville has a lot of outside gigs, and the company traditionally doesn’t allow freelance work if you’re running one of their magazines. Not sure how that part was resolved.
In other Nasty news, it seems that the class action filed last spring on behalf of subscribers and website visitors by Hartley Law PLLC,
accusing the publisher of sharing reader data with Google et al., is proceeding. On January 15, Hartley emailed participants that the firm plans to move “forward with the class action suit,” which it hopes “will push Condé Nast to engage, whether through arbitration or negotiation, sooner rather than later.” A rep for Condé Nast
did not respond to a request for a comment on the lawsuit. I don’t really blame them in this case.
- The film industry really, really needs fashion: This past weekend, I listened to the latest episode of The Big Picture, my favorite movie podcast, co-hosted by my friend Amanda Dobbins. I fell off when they
started discussing Den of Thieves 2, which I will never see and which, I regret to inform you, has nothing to do with James B. Stewart’s 1992 Wall Street insider-trading thriller of the same name. (If you haven’t read it… what are you doing! Real life is almost always more interesting than fiction.)
Anyway, the top of the show was about the Oscar race, and Amanda and her co-hosts spent several minutes discussing the rise of Jacques
Audiard’s Emilia Pérez as a serious contender for best picture and beyond. Let me remind you that Saint Laurent Productions was a producer on this film, and played an integral role in making it happen. (They came in pretty late, and I’m sure provided much-needed financial support.) This means that a film produced by Saint Laurent may very well win multiple Oscars—maybe, possibly, even best picture.
We talk a lot in this email
about the symbiotic relationship between the fashion and entertainment industries, and last week I wrote about how that dynamic is playing out, in particular, this awards season. (Only members of Puck’s Inner Circle can access that piece, so upgrade here if you haven’t
already.) But a lot of the discussion is centered on the red carpet, the front row, and the associated endorsements. Saint Laurent’s little film side project is actually a big deal, and I suspect that the entertainment industry will increasingly look to the major luxury houses for funding in the future. If you want to learn more about how Saint Laurent and Audiard worked together, don’t miss my interview with Emilia Pérez costume designer Virginie Montel.
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Okay, now on to the main event…
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While the world awaits the Blazy era, the Wertheimer family is
making moves—instituting layoffs, a restructuring, and most tellingly, the appointment of a new board member known for taking companies public.
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Last Saturday, Taylor Swift arrived at
Arrowhead Stadium for the Chiefs-Texans game wearing a head-to-toe Chanel look from Virginie Viard’s final, derided collection, as dreary as the rainy day in Marseille last May, when it was first shown. The outfit itself, a little black romper topped with a brocade anorak and decorated with a jangly pearl belt, was inoffensive. (It was
Swift’s own additions—in particular, tights and a pair of knee-high black boots—that took it from okay to tacky.) But enough about the Blake Lively-inspired look. What’s Chanel’s strategy here?
Whether or not Chanel loaned Swift the garments—the collection is available in stores now, and there’s a big, probable chance that Swift bought the outfit,
estimated at $22,650, herself—there’s clearly a short-term gain for the French fashion house, even as an increasing minority of Swifties acknowledge that their fearless leader has bad taste. After all, a much larger segment continues to worship her personal style, and a subset of that group can also afford Chanel. And
the media impressions keep Chanel in the conversation during this period of limbo, as the brand waits for new womenswear designer Matthieu Blazy to make his debut in October.
Chanel isn’t waiting to make other changes in the interregnum. This past week, the company quietly laid off about 70 people, I’m told, and about 2.5 percent of the U.S. workforce was impacted. While the cuts are pretty small for a global company with 32,000
employees (most of them retail), Chanel is certainly trimming across all regions, prepping for both new executives and new creatives. A rep for Chanel sent me a thoughtful comment about the layoffs, explaining that the “challenging” decision was made after “careful deliberation,” but had to be done after “previous various steps to protect the business and limit spending.” The rep also said that the company is doing what it can to make the exits as painless as possible.
The years-long restructuring can be traced as far back as 2018, before Karl Lagerfeld died, when Chanel moved its corporate headquarters from New York to London.
Leena Nair, who was appointed C.E.O. in 2021, has since pursued a two-fold strategy—streamlining the business cross-functionally (beauty, jewelry, and fashion divisions once operated seemingly independently) while decentralizing decision-making power, particularly on the creative side.
In many ways, this strategy has been no different from the management philosophy that has descended on other
creative industries, from book publishing to Hollywood. It’s not dissimilar, either, to the structure of Hermès, where Pierre-Alexis Dumas is the artistic director but individual designers lead each maison, working in unison. The idea is to make the brand the center of attention, thereby eliminating the vulnerability of key man risk. After the Kaiser, the Chanel brand was king.
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The business principle underpinning these changes, according to the
rhetoric emanating from the Chanel offices, was to futureproof the company—to protect it against the whims of the industry or changing taste, etcetera. But there has also been speculation that the Wertheimers, the century-long stewards of Chanel, were surreptitiously setting the business up for some kind of liquidity event, such as a public offering, or perhaps a two-class Hermès-style float that ensured the family retained control. And this sort of hypothesizing went into
overdrive amid the recent appointment of Teresa Ko, a securities lawyer and China chair of the global law firm Freshfields, as a non-executive director to Chanel’s board. “Teresa is the I.P.O. queen,” one person told me. According to WWD, the other two new board members are Simone
Bagel-Trah—chair of the supervisory board and shareholders’ committee of Henkel, the owner of Dial soap—and William Touche, a Deloitte executive.
The three new members replace Olivier Nicolay, John Galantic, and Richard Collasse, all former longtime Chanel executives who have exited amid the restructuring. (Nicolay and
Collasse retired; Galantic took a job running Diego Della Valle’s Tod’s Group.) In a statement, a company rep said that Ko, Bagel-Trah, and Touche are all “widely respected global business leaders,” chosen for their “multicultural experience and other external expertise.”
Anyway, it’s no wonder the appointment of three outsiders—including one with I.P.O. experience—is fueling questions about whether the Wertheimers could take Chanel public. This
has always seemed unlikely to me—as farfetched as the Newhouses offloading Condé Nast. (Nair told the Financial Times in 2023 that there were zero plans for an I.P.O.) Nevertheless, with the hiring of Nair and the latest boardroom shakeup, Chanel is prepping for a new era. And even if this is all rampant trouble-making, it merely underscores how
significantly the company has changed in such a short period of time.
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Genuinely thrilled for everyone involved that Lemaire has grown
from $10 million in annual sales, in 2019, to $100 million last year. As a consumer of Lemaire and a reporter, I’d argue that they’ve really nailed the four Ps of this era: product (you can’t find that croissant bag anywhere else); price (not too expensive, not too cheap); place (wide distribution, but not too wide); promotion (showing at Men’s Fashion Week only). I would love to see a
strategic group made up of brands like this: how about Auralee, Lemaire, Tory Burch, Acne, and Isabel Marant? [BoF]
I admire The Menswear Guy’s wish to help the
people of the world look better, and there are some great dressing tips in this thread. (The rule of thirds is one to live by.) That said, this thread made me feel resigned to the idea that what looks good is subjective. And even if poor fashion choices show a certain kind of weakness, not strength, resistance is the fashion statement here. [X]
LVMH once again became Europe’s largest company on Friday, after shares of Ozempic and Wegovy-manufacturer Novo Nordisk fell once again. (They are down 40 percent since June because of increased competition, supply issues, the uncertainty over Trump, and potential price cuts in the U.S., which could shrink profits.)
[Bloomberg]
Liana Satenstein hosted a live Neverworns event in New York on Sunday where she
auctioned off some pretty incredible stuff, including Gucci-era Tom Ford items and a Fashion Cafe jacket. It’s hard to link to anything because of the ephemeral nature of the event—and Liana’s ephemeral nature—but Emily Sundberg dug up one still. Also, it’s worth reading Sundberg’s report from the Free Press party in Washington, D.C., on Sunday night. [Feed Me]
There’s a chic rumor that Nepenthes, the store in New York’s Garment District where I first got to really know Engineered Garments, is closing. [X]
All the
designer looks from the 1995 Parker Posey vehicle, Party Girl. (Todd Oldham, Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, and Comme des Garçons are represented.) [Looks on Screen]
I loathe Sundance portrait galleries. They are so lame. Have been for years. However, this late-’90s
series works, from Kirsten Dunst wearing pink eyeshadow (inspiring) to Josh Hartnett dumping his cellphone in the trash. (Also starring Kristen Stewart, Sofia Coppola, Kate Hudson, Ben Affleck, and everyone else who became famous in that era.) [Capsule 98]
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