Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. I’m home for a while, thanks to the blessed gap
between the New York and London shows. I wrote this week’s Inner Circle issue on the plane ride back to Los Angeles. If you haven’t traded up yet, it’s time. Otherwise, you risk being the least-informed person on the LVMH board. 

Up front, we’ve got a beauty industry hat trick. Rachel
Strugatz returns with news of unexpected executive exits at the Estée Lauder Cos., including a MAC Cosmetics mastermind. I’ve got intel on a mysterious beauty-centered title set to launch in the coming weeks, and some thoughts on what LVMH might do with its beleaguered DFS (duty-free shops) biz. For the main event, I turn my attention to Oscar de la Renta, whose C.E.O., Alex Bolen, has pivoted away from the traditional runway in recent years, opting to put his marketing
dollars into celebrity and clienteleing. Now, he’s doubling down on the strategy with a splashy new hire. 

Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, I’m joined by designer Todd Snyder, who dresses both the agents of Hollywood and the guys of
Puck. (Even Bill Cohan is a fan.) We talk about what it was like growing up in Iowa, runway shows, selling his business to American Eagle, being the collab king, and of course, working for Mickey Drexler. Listen here and here. 

Finally, a sort-of correction for the Zola heads: In my mini-rave
yesterday about the new Printemps, set to open this spring at 1 Wall Street, I called it a “department store.” A friendly reader noted that the prelaunch advertising tag line is literally, “Not a department store.” I agree that the unorthodox merchandising and general approach is not very department store-like (at least not by American standards), but we’ll learn more as they open their doors. Let’s go with “emporium” instead? 

Mentioned in this
issue: Erik Maza, Stellene, David Haskell, N.Y. mag versus Town & Country, Oscar de la Renta, Laura Kim, Fernando Garcia, Tom Ford, Alex Bolen, Chloe Popescu, Tiffany Haddish, NYFW, Isabeli Fontana, Lineisy Montero, Ivanka Trump, Gary Fuhrman, Estée Lauder, MAC,
Drewpsie, Nick Vogelson, Paris Fashion Week, LVMH, Bernard Arnault, and many more…

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By Wednesday afternoon,
New York Fashion Week was already a fading memory. At Oscar de la Renta’s Madison Avenue boutique, however, women in lace tights, boucle jackets, and photorealistic-floral cocktail dresses were still holding on to the idea as a musician played the grand piano at the bottom of the marble staircase, and a hungry few did bumps of caviar. 

Unlike
at most fashion shows, Oscar de la Renta designers Laura Kim (in long-and-narrow navy trousers of her own design) and Fernando Garcia (dressed in a pique Tom Ford suit he bought next door, just hours earlier) joined the guests for cocktail hour. Meanwhile, C.E.O. Alex Bolen checked in on the black-clad door girls. His big new hire, C.M.O. Chloe Popescu, was there too, although there was no finicky press to work. Instead, she was
tending to clients; a few (unpaid) celebrity friends, like Tiffany Haddish; and buyers from Saks Global, Moda Operandi, Tootsies, and other key retailers and business partners. If it were up to Bolen, I think, there would have been even fewer influencer types in the room, just clients of all walks. (The goal was to make it feel like a “cocktail party at home,” not a Fashion Week show.)

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Until recently,
Popescu was a talent agent at UTA, where she repped Kim, who became something of an influencer during the pandemic thanks to her turn as an artful home chef. (The fruits of their partnership included a Crate & Barrel deal.) Popescu’s recruitment is a big deal for Bolen—it’s the company’s first C.M.O. ever—and an opportunity to accelerate his relatively unorthodox marketing strategy. 

A few
years back, amid Covid anxieties, Bolen decided to stop investing in runway shows and instead direct his marketing budget toward celebrity dressing. Bolen says the company doesn’t pay for red carpet placements, and yes, I believe him. But it still costs a lot of money (beyond raw materials and hours of labor) to produce those custom gowns and to promote them on social media. Nevertheless, Bolen didn’t just say goodbye to big, expensive runway to-dos; he also declined to share lookbooks with
members of the press, or permit any reviews of collections. The last collection with images available on Vogue.com is Resort 2023, reviewed in June 2022. 

And yet, Bolen didn’t really stop staging shows altogether, and Kim and Garcia didn’t lose interest in them, either. The Very Important Clients, the company’s bread-and-butter, continued to be treated to runway presentations across the country, and even a few in New York. This season, Bolen
cleared out the new store, which just opened last September, and hired top models like Isabeli Fontana and Lineisy Montero.

The only ingredients missing from Wednesday’s affair were journalists and editors. Bolen let me in on the
runway presentation because we agreed a few weeks back that I wouldn’t review the clothes. Bolen insists that reviews are a distraction—for his team, his designers, and Bolen, too, probably—and, to be honest, I don’t necessarily disagree with him. They placate designers and offer chew toys to journalists, but are as financially relevant in this multichannel world as a book tour or Hollywood junket. 

Back in the day, sure, journalists had to describe the clothes for the reader because
there were no pictures available—and buyers relied on critics to inform their decisions about what collections to stock in their stores. Today, you can see writers, in many cases, struggling for something insightful to say that a consumer would care to read, or that a buyer would care to consider. Reviews—from TikTok videos to The New York Times—help us understand general sentiment around a brand. But no actual buyer is looking at reviews of Oscar de la Renta when considering
their orders. (Apologies if I have just killed traditional fashion criticism.)

Anyway, in the end, the friendly press ban has gotten Bolen more attention than any review ever could, and it speaks to the sort of anti-establishment establishment marketing we should expect from the company as Popescu settles in. Popescu, after all, is a Hollywood person, not a traditional marketer, and Bolen is leveraging her relationships to
follow a playbook established by the large European houses, which have shifted their budgets to celebrity dressing and campaigns. For a brand like Oscar, independently owned, with one outside investor, the results can be even more potent. ODLR’s privileged position on Launchmetrics’s red carpet ranking after most awards shows suggests that the earliest iterations of Bolen’s plan is working.

After all, Bolen realized before many other American brands that he couldn’t compete
meaningfully with the European leather goods houses on accessories. Dresses, on the other hand, were a more even playing field. (The vast majority of the company’s north-of-$125 million a year in actual revenue—not retail revenue—comes from ready-to-wear.) During the hours after Ivanka Trump wore one of Garcia and Kim’s gowns to a pre-inauguration party, the company
received four preorders. They had not yet even landed on a final retail price.

Indeed, a brand of Oscar de la Renta’s size does not typically compete for mindshare among mass consumers. While it has the deep history of a Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein, those companies grew by selling linens and underwear, not a heritage
in couture. In some ways, that makes the current iteration of Oscar an appealing target for investors who are looking for brands that can endure beyond a single consumer cycle. Last year, the company hired Rothschild to help weigh its options, although nothing materialized during that period, I’m told. While I assume that the company’s investor, Gary Fuhrman’s merchant bank GF Capital Management, would like an exit (it’s been 14 years), it’s also clear that Bolen, who is married
to the late Oscar de la Renta’s stepdaughter Eliza, plans to keep the business in the family, which obviously narrows the prospects. Good thing he likes his job. 

Sorry, Oura rings are super lame and stressy.
[Bloomberg Businessweek]

Former leading Condé Nasty Pamela Drucker Mann is launching a media company with producer Ilene Chaiken (best known for The L Word) and Jennifer Beals
(star of The L Word and, of course, Flashdance), with early projects slated to riff on the success of that series. Everyone is like, “Yay, Pam!” [Variety]

I’m very excited about this year’s lineup of LVMH Prize semifinalists.
[WWD]

Did you know there are protein Cheerios now? The worst part is that you can’t get plain Cheerios with protein, because I assume the protein comes from some gross dusting on the cereal. Everyone needs to settle down.
[New York Magazine]

Nigo and Pharrell are all up in this Not a Hotel concept out of Japan. [Press Release]

Miu Miu has a new C.E.O.; she sounds cool.
[WWD]

The W magazine “Directors Issue” covers started dropping. First up, Denis on Timothée. (By the way, pegging “Great Performances” to the start of the Oscars race, and “Directors” to the end, is a genius way to elbow Vanity Fair’s moved-up-in-time Hollywood Issue out of the conversation. Just saying.) [Instagram]

From what I’ve heard from multiple people, this rumor about Ryan Murphy adapting Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards is true and that’s an “ick, no” from me. [X]

And finally… Does anyone have a copy of the process book
Dior designer Jonathan Anderson created for Queer and sent to friends and select press? I know someone who is obsessed with the movie and would like to buy it from you. Unfortunately for them, my copy is not for sale. But I am happy to make a connect!

Until tomorrow,

Lauren 

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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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