Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. I had dinner at the Tower Bar last night with an old friend from New York. Is there nothing better?

Today, my partner Rachel Strugatz has news and notes on a Sephora battle, plus the data behind a Glossier relaunch. (As always, email her tips at Rachel@puck.news.) I’ve also got an incremental update on the enigmatic LVMH executive shuffle—things are getting peculiar on Avenue Montaigne—and some positive stats from the legacy media annals via Sara Moonves’s W magazine and Bryan Goldberg’s BDG.

Also, don’t forget to check out the latest episode of Fashion People: Style Not Com’s Beka Gvishiani and I talked Louis Vuitton Cruise, Cannes best- (and worst-) dressed, the indie designer crisis, and our dream picks for the next round of designer musical chairs.

By the way, I hope that I will see you on Monday, June 3, at 7 p.m. at the Roosevelt Hotel. I’ll be holding court with the top costume designers from five HBO and Max Originals shows. We’ll have a conversation amongst ourselves, and then I’ll stick around to have a conversation with you, too. RSVP right here.

Mentioned in this issue: Sol de Janeiro, Rare Beauty, Balm Dotcom, Reddit, Bernard Arnault, Serge Brunschwig, Michael Burke, Delphine Arnault, Louis Vuitton, W magazine, Sephora, Bryan Goldberg, Bustle Digital Group, Sara Moonves, Karlie Kloss, Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter, Selena Gomez, and more.

• Serge? Really?: By all accounts, outgoing Fendi C.E.O. Serge Brunschwig is a smart guy. Like his boss, LVMH chairman and C.E.O. Bernard Arnault, he was educated at École Polytechnique, France’s famous engineering school. (Only one Arnault heir, Frédéric, can boast the same.) But is Brunschwig, who has worked for the family firm since 1995, really dynamic enough to oversee the LVMH fashion group? Nevertheless, the behind-the-scenes operator is now rumored to be replacing Michael Burke, who mysteriously stepped back as C.E.O. of the group after only four months in the role. Meanwhile, Burke’s deputy Pierre-Emmanuel Angeloglou is apparently taking over for Brunschwig at Fendi.

  A person who knows each of the players well suggested that this isn’t how the game of musical chairs will end, and I tend to agree. The chief executive of the fashion group isn’t just a vast job that requires overseeing the executive team, managing brands, recruiting designers, and managing up to Arnault. It’s also traditionally been a big personality job. Burke and his predecessors, Sidney Toledano and Pierre-Yves Roussel, were three of Arnault’s most public-facing, iconoclastic deputies. They all made big moves that changed the company, from hiring Phoebe Philo in 2008 to bringing Hedi Slimane aboard in 2018.

  And yet, Brunschwig’s operational bearing may be a representation of the changing times within the Arnault family and their heirloom. All those consiglieri of Bernard’s generation—Toledano, Toni Belloni, Burke—are beginning to recede into the background while the kids, as insiders like to call the five Arnault heirs, grow into their stations and assert their power. Today, leading the fashion group is more of a chairman role.

  I talked to more insiders about what might be happening with Burke, and the narrative is pretty much the same across the board. There may be some personal stuff, and a company like this will do everything in its power to protect the privacy and wishes of a 38-year veteran. So the enigma may remain, but what’s clear is that Burke ran Louis Vuitton the way he wanted to run it for the past decade, while simultaneously training eldest child Delphine Arnault—who worked under him at the brand—on how to do his job. Now she’s doing that job as C.E.O. of Dior, the second-largest fashion business in the company. Meanwhile, she and her brother Alexandre, the middle child, have more influence over their father than ever. Whether or not Brunschwig gets the fashion group C.E.O. job is almost an afterthought compared to all the musical chairs yet to come…

• Hey, guess what, W magazine is not failing!: Before it was the type of thing collected by art directors, W was a broadsheet supplement in the spectacularly trashy Women’s Wear Daily. Several iterations later, it’s a joint venture between Bryan Goldberg’s Bustle Digital Group and a consortium of investors (including Karlie Kloss), led by editor-in-chief Sara Moonves. People were skeptical when Moonves, a recovering Voguette with a famous last name (Les is her dad), took over from Stefano Tonchi (a story for another day). But Moonves has done a good job—with styling, photography, and overall vision—in an era when most magazines are utter trash. And this week, she offered a throwback to W’s broadsheet roots by releasing the digital Beyoncé cover physically through a limited print edition at Iconic magazines in SoHo and at the Air Mail store in the West Village.

  This was a clever way to turn the Beyoncé cover—published digitally for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the Cowboy Carter album release was not in sync with W’s print schedule—into a collector’s item that advertisers would be more than willing to support. The magazine’s internal stats suggest that the online version garnered more than 3.5 billion press impressions—I can’t even begin to decipher what that means or the number of abacuses that they used—and 348 million social media impressions. Apparently, print is working for W, whose circulation is up 21 percent in the first half of the year. Overall revenue (including digital and experiential products) is projected to be up by double digits, too. Moonves and Goldberg have not only managed to upsell traditional luxury advertisers, but also draw new entrants in prestige auto, hard luxury, and fashion.

  Among the reasons for skepticism of the BDG deal, back in the summer of 2020, was that Moonves was essentially unproven, the business was not clearly worth saving, and Goldberg cosplays as an insecure rich guy. But she has given him exactly what he needed: a foothold in luxury, especially important now as brands allocate their shrinking budgets away from digital banner ads. All I heard at the shows last season was that luxury brands want print, print, print, and they want print that they’re excited to read.

  Advertising hasn’t been easy for BDG over the past couple of years. Goldberg & Co. started babbling about events as the answer, and lost chief revenue officer Jason Wagenheim (Teen Vogue Forever) at the end of 2023. But since W is run slightly apart from the rest of the portfolio, and because it’s luxury, an opportunity remained. Now, BDG is benefiting more broadly from the demand for print, and relaunching Nylon as well. (Also, the group publishes a decent amount of good work via publications like The Romper and Bustle, I swear. It’s not the content farm it used to be.) Anyway, that concludes my rant on why you should be jealous of W.

The contest isn’t particularly close, either. According to YipitData, Sol de Janeiro’s Sephora sales in the U.S. are approaching $120 million year-to-date. (That’s retail sales, not revenue. Brands typically split their revenue with Sephora, although the retailer’s cut varies; Glossier, I’m told, gets a better margin than less desirable brands.) Rare, meanwhile, sold about $82 million through Sephora in the U.S. during the same period. That’s still impressive: Barbara Sturm’s skincare line, according to a confidential brand deck that I viewed, didn’t hit its projected net sales of $83.5 million in 2023, the year it was acquired.

Correcting the mistake was imperative for Glossier. Since its launch, way back in 2014, Balm Dotcom has been a top seller thanks to some very clever branding of what is ultimately a pretty mediocre salve. And preserving its most important franchises is a priority for Glossier, especially as it explores a potential sale in which Thrive, Forerunner, Index, and Sequoia expect a return on their collective $266 million investment. Alas, the Balm Dotcom misfire came at an inopportune time in Glossier’s lifecycle: It had just kicked off a major brand reset, which included a Sephora rollout and the splashy reopening of a SoHo flagship—some of the first public-facing initiatives under still-newish C.E.O. Kyle Leahy.

There’s a lesson in all this, perhaps, for beauty companies looking to align their products with younger millennials and Gen Zers, who demands that their makeup and skincare products mirror their values. Brands need to be vegan and cruelty-free, but the products still need to work—and, importantly, can’t be noticeably poorer than their non-vegan predecessors. Anyway, for all you ethical consumers out there, you can still find some pre-reformulated Balm Dotcoms on Glossier’s site for 50 percent off.

Until tomorrow,
Lauren