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Jon Kelly
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Good morning,
Thanks for reading The Backstory, your weekly review of the incredible work at Puck.
It was another extraordinary week: Matt Belloni examined the Dana Walden–Kamala friendship; Kim Masters ran the numbers on the Warners slate; Eriq Gardner probed a Lionsgate legal nightmare; Lauren Sherman
assessed the Demna-to-Gucci shocker; Sarah Shapiro previewed a Rent the Runway revival; Rachel Strugatz explored a new Louis Vuitton strategy; Marion Maneker perused the London hammer ratios; Julie Brener Davich de-gendered the timepiece market; Bill Cohan revalued Trump’s crypto bros; Dylan Byers uncovered a generational split at The Washington
Post; and John Ourand chronicled a former ESPN executive’s quixotic revenge. Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell conjured Chuck Schumer’s Hamlet-itis; Julia Ioffe revealed Putin’s latest chess move; Abby Livingston detailed Trump’s unified theory of House head-rolling; and Peter Hamby analyzed Gavin Newsom’s podcasting strategy.
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Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it
all came together.
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
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Major League Baseball opens its 2025 season with the MLB Tokyo Series presented by Guggenheim with the defending
World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers facing the Chicago Cubs at the Tokyo Dome on Tuesday, March 18 on FOX and Wednesday, March 19 on FS1. The Dodgers are led by National League MVP Shohei Ohtani, who is one of five Japanese-born players on the two teams. Last year’s World Series averaged a record 12.1 million viewers in Japan.
In addition to the highly anticipated match-up on the field, the
Tokyo Series will be a bonanza for the baseball-loving country with multiple fan events; collaborations with popular global entertainment brands including Demon Slayer, Fortnite, Pokémon, Chiikawa and the world-renowned artist Takashi Murakami; 23 sponsors; the largest retail footprint ever at an MLB event; and global distribution to more than 200 countries.
Learn more about the MLB Tokyo Series here.
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FASHION
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Lauren Sherman
peers into the Demna surprise.
and…
Rachel Strugatz stress tests Louis Vuitton’s new beauty play.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro catches up with Jenn Hyman about Rent the Runway’s reboot.
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ART MARKET
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Marion Maneker
plunges into the London numbers and previews a Phillips sale.
and…
Julie Davich
explains the untapped potential in timepieces.
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HOLLYWOOD
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Matt Belloni
gets into the Walden-Harris friendship and figures out which studio makes the worst movies.
and…
Kim Masters
captures the turmoil, self-created and otherwise, at Warner Bros.
meanwhile…
Eriq Gardner chronicles the “creditor-on-creditor violence” at
Lionsgate.
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WALL STREET
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MEDIA
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Dylan Byers
uncovers a generational fault line at The Washington Post.
and…
John Ourand catches up with former SportsCenter guru Norby
Williamson.
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WASHINGTON
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Leigh Ann Caldwell
details the division within Schumer’s ranks.
and…
Julia Ioffe parses Putin’s
latest Ukraine posture.
meanwhile…
Peter Hamby critiques Newsom’s campaign-in-waiting while Abby Livingston evaluates Trump’s vote-whipping.
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PODCASTS
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🎧 Dylan and the Journal’s Emma
Tucker discuss the future of the media industry on The Grill Room.
and…
NWSL commish Jessica Berman contemplates the future of her league on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren assesses the Gucci of it all on Fashion People.
and…
Former
Labor Secretary Robert Reich talks stagflation with John Heilemann on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Bryan Freedman, the power litigator representing Justin Baldoni, get into it on
The Town.
and…
Abby and Peter discuss Schumer’s terrible options on The Powers That Be.
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As a reminder, you can update your profile at any time to get more stories like these directly in your
inbox. Click here to customize your email settings.
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On Wednesday afternoon, I received a text from my partner Lauren Sherman
that hinted she might be on to some pretty significant news. Every year, the largest fashion houses engage in a collective cyclical game of designer musical chairs. Inevitably, one creative director at a top house retires or steps back, or perhaps is relieved, paving the way for his and her peers to quietly angle for the job. And, this being the fashion industry, the politicking is almost invisible on the outside (the largest conglomerates essentially muzzle the solicitous trade press)
and unbelievably ferocious on the inside. And since one vacancy begets another, a kinetic chain reaction ignites.
This year has been particularly active in the maison free-agent market. Ever since the powder keg first erupted last June, with the departure of Virginie Viard from Chanel, a subtle recomposition of the business has been afoot. And, naturally, Lauren has been updating the industry on the sweeping changes in real time, often months before
the creative director appointments are publicly announced. Meanwhile, the largest vacancy officially opened just last month: After numerous quarters of disappointing sales, uninspiring financial results, and wan reviews, Kering-owned Gucci finally defenestrated Sabato De Sarno, who had never been able to re-create the economic and aesthetic wizardry of his predecessor, Alessandro Michele. Lauren had a beat on Gucci’s replacement.
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
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Major League Baseball opens its 2025 season with the MLB Tokyo Series presented by Guggenheim with the defending
World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers facing the Chicago Cubs at the Tokyo Dome on Tuesday, March 18 on FOX and Wednesday, March 19 on FS1. The Dodgers are led by National League MVP Shohei Ohtani, who is one of five Japanese-born players on the two teams. Last year’s World Series averaged a record 12.1 million viewers in Japan.
In addition to the highly anticipated match-up on the field, the
Tokyo Series will be a bonanza for the baseball-loving country with multiple fan events; collaborations with popular global entertainment brands including Demon Slayer, Fortnite, Pokémon, Chiikawa and the world-renowned artist Takashi Murakami; 23 sponsors; the largest retail footprint ever at an MLB event; and global distribution to more than 200 countries.
Learn more about the MLB Tokyo Series here.
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As it so happens, I took the call from the 10th floor waiting room of a State Department
outpost on Hudson Street, not far from where I grew up, in Greenwich Village. (The department misspelled my younger son’s middle name on his passport… It’s a long story… and you don’t need to bother…) Anyway, a lounge pit inside our winnowing federal bureaucracy is a funny place to receive the news about the next creative director of Gucci, but it also perfectly framed a larger point about the direction of the industry.
Throughout my career in media, I’ve watched with wonder and amusement the many ways in which C-suites try to minimize the impact and value of elite creative talents, often to their own detriment. After all, while these enterprises have to be sufficiently operationalized, they aren’t bureaucracies—readers, viewers, listeners, and consumers can all spot a lack of vision when they see it. And Kering, which has seen its stock price erode by some 70 percent since the summer of
’21, knows this better than anyone else: François-Henri Pinault, its C.E.O., owns both CAA and Christie’s.
I won’t pretend that De Sarno’s replacement of Michele, who now designs for Valentino, was the only factor that reversed Gucci’s fortunes. Indeed, the Covid-era luxury boom faded, an economic malaise descended on China, and the U.S. market has suffered through its own fog of
stagflation. But the fact of the matter is that De Sarno wasn’t his predecessor’s equal, and there was no convincing the consumer otherwise.
During our chat, fascinatingly, Lauren expressed vexation that Gucci might bring in Demna Gvasalia, a magnificently talented designer who founded Vetements and ushered Balenciaga to new heights. Despite his obvious talents, she reflected, he had the
wrong aesthetic—harsh and unrelenting—to endow upon a warm and lush brand. It didn’t make sense, she told me. It seemed off. And yet Kering announced the news the very next day.
In Pinault Noir, Lauren deciphers the Demna news: what it means for Gucci, the industry, and the next round of designer
musical chairs. In other ways, it’s a story about how creativity plays a role in our largest and most consequential industries amid secular platform shifts and business model innovations—the endless transformation that defines our age. It’s the story of our time and precisely what you should expect to read in Puck.
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Have a great weekend,
Jon
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