Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet. I had such a good, productive time in Manhattan last week. That had a lot to do with the many work parties and meetings I attended (I was on my fall listening tour), but it didn’t hurt that the weather was perfect, the place we stayed was perfect, my kid was perfect, and I got to see lots of friends at The Odeon, Tribeca’s forever cafeteria. I also finagled a reservation at Bridges and spent an amusing evening at young hospitality person Kyle Hotchkiss Carone’s new red-lacquered private club, Chez Margaux. I’ll never be a member but will happily visit with friends who are important enough that Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the club’s chef, comes by and refills their water glasses, himself. (This really happened at the table next to us.)

New York remains the best city in the world. That said, I’m relieved to be back in the republic of California and in the company of my Volvo, just in time for the election. In today’s missive, I’m sharing some of what I picked up during those meetings and parties, including the latest goings-on at Chanel and some LACMA Gala intel. Rachel Strugatz is also here with some Goop news.

🎧 Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, I’m joined by The Wall Street Journal’s Rory Satran to discuss last week’s Innovators party, her recent Marc Jacobs profile, Kamala’s jeans, and plenty more. Very fun! Listen here and here.

🎉 Puck event alert: Many of you like to complain when you are not invited to Puck parties. Well, guess what? We have a teeny bit of space for guild-member subscribers at Stories of the Season on November 15 in L.A. Stories of the Season is an elite take on those not-so-elevated For Your Consideration events where the main attraction is the free food. Matt Belloni, Puck’s king of Hollywood, will be interviewing Dune director Denis Villeneuve and Anora star Mikey Madison for a taping of his podcast, The Town, while Peter Hamby will be chatting with the actors (Zoe Saldaña! Peter Sarsgaard! Jeremy Strong!), Baratunde Thurston is taking on the documentary filmmakers—Matthew Tyrnauer (Carville), Shiori Ito (Black Box Diaries), Josh Greenbaum (Will & Harper), and Morgan Neville (Piece by Piece)—and I am slated to have a spirited discussion with four of the most interesting costume designers working today: Colleen Atwood (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), Janty Yates (Gladiator II), Virginie Montel (Emilia Pérez), and the world’s No. 1 Sue Kroll fan, Jonathan Anderson, who worked on two Luca Guadagnino films this year: Challengers and Queer.

If you’re a paying Puck subscriber and eligible to vote this awards season, please email Fritz@puck.news. I am not joking when I say space is limited, but I would love to have a few more fashion-adjacent people there. Hopefully, we can make it work. (Thanks to our sponsors Polestar, Wondery, HBO and Max, and Mayer Brown!)

Mentioned in this issue: Anna Wintour, Blake Lively, Sabato De Sarno, Stefano Cantino, Gucci, The Row, Leena Nair, Stephane Blanchard, Celine, John Galantic, Diego Della Valle, Chanel, Raf Simons, Marc Jacobs, Hedi Slimane and his tiny tweed jackets, Sofia Coppola, Cathy Horyn, and many more…

• Where art thou, Pierpaolo?: So everyone is wondering why Fendi has yet to announce the Pierpaolo Piccioli appointment. Perhaps something went wrong at the last minute with the contract? (Hey, it’s happened before…) But there are a lot of people close to Piccioli who insist it’s still on. Maybe something is changing with the configuration or structure that caused a delay, or everyone just wanted to take a breather after Fashion Month. Anyway, we are waiting…
• Rachel on another round of Goop layoffs: Just two months after Goop’s sweeping post-Labor Day layoffs, when approximately 40 employees were let go, the company has reduced its headcount again. I’ve heard that about 10 people were laid off on Friday, including V.P. Michelle Nakra, the head of beauty and wellness; design director Samantha Wu; and senior people from the editorial team, including executive beauty director Jean Godfrey-June, a veteran beauty editor (Elle, Lucky, etcetera) who’s been at Goop for close to a decade. In fact, I’m told the RIF hit editorial particularly hard, which is interesting given that content––and specifically, a weekly newsletter­­––is how Goop started 16 years ago. “There is barely anyone left and everyone is very much in the dark,” said a person close to the company, who speculated that it may dissolve all editorial.

  “As Goop continues to restructure and move toward a new organization design focused on fashion, beauty, and food, we have made a small reduction in staff headcount to optimize operational efficiency and revenue growth in our key verticals of beauty and fashion,” said a spokesperson. They added that sales for Goop Beauty and G. Label, Gwyneth Paltrow’s apparel line, are up 21 percent and 45 percent year-to-date, respectively, but declined to share any revenue figures. Alas, I’m told the layoffs aren’t over. ––Rachel Strugatz

• The art of Gucci at LACMA: I messaged various attendees after Saturday night’s LACMA Art+Film Gala, honoring Simone Leigh and Baz Luhrmann and underwritten by Gucci. No complaints. They raised more than $6 million, Charli XCX performed, and one person called it “more fun than normal,” despite an “uneven” crowd. (I guess we all really missed Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons.) Notably, Anna Wintour actually showed up to support her close friend Luhrmann. “Her speech was funny,” one typically critical onlooker noted. Others suggested “funny” may be going too far, but insisted that her genuine affection for Luhrmann came through. (Of course, Wintour didn’t miss a chance to mention the Met Gala, to which the LACMA Gala is occasionally compared.) Another guest suggested the better ode came from Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who gave an opening speech dedicated to Leigh.

• The evening represented the first real opportunity for Gucci creative director Sabato De Sarno and incoming C.E.O. Stefano Cantino to demonstrate a united front and articulate their fully realized relationship with Hollywood. The read: Everyone should look hot? Best dressed included Kaia Gerber and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson in Gucci, Greta Lee in The Row, and Blake Lively (I know) in Tamara Ralph. Once again, De Sarno released a capsule evening collection (Gucci Notte) just in time for the event, and given the traction with his ready-to-wear, the private clients should be pleased.

  Is it worth it for Gucci to sponsor this event year after year? They’ve been on board since 2011, and have carried on through three creative directors. But maybe there’s no better, fresher way to embed in Hollywood. The whole night is a giant Gucci advertisement, with dozens of people dressed by the brand, hundreds of potential clients in attendance, and a direct line to both the art and film worlds; it really does share the evening with LACMA, and everybody wins. I can also see a world where Kering expands the scope to include all of its brands, not only freeing up some of Gucci’s budget to support different projects throughout the year, but also to freshen up the proceedings. Imagine if this was a wider Kering night, with dozens of looks from Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, and Alexander McQueen, too…

In New York, for instance, the company has been trying to recruit a new U.S. head of brand communications. Easy enough, right? What fashion-y comms person wouldn’t want to work at Chanel? The mandate from U.S. president Stephane Blanchard, who joined in 2023 after John Galantic took the opportunity to replace Diego Della Valle at Tod’s, was to find someone who could successfully manage across each of the three divisions, which always interacted, but didn’t always act in accordance with one another. This role would also be different from the one previously held by Rebekah McCabe, the well-liked Chanel executive who was promoted to U.S. general manager of the fashion division last year after Joyce Green headed to Paris. (McCabe’s current gig is ultra-focused on managing customers—the P.R. role, I’m told, will have a direct line to Blanchard. A rep for Chanel declined to comment.)

Of course, the company may be staggering the hire until the new creative director is appointed. Even if the role reports to Blanchard, most big-name designers want to bring in their own people, and their people will want to bring in their own people. Not every designer rolls as deep as, say, Hedi Slimane, who completely transformed Celine’s communications and design departments when he replaced Phoebe Philo in 2018. But much of that depends on how much latitude this designer is given—which will depend, in turn, on whether Chanel wants to bring in a Lagerfeld type, who will define the brand for a generation, or more of a Viard, who will merely try to manage the codes in their shadow. Or even go the route of the leather goods houses, which have hired divisional heads to oversee various departments and balkanize power.

For now, then, everyone continues guessing. In London, insiders last week were harping on the idea that members of the Wertheimer family, the longtime proprietors of Chanel, had made a strategic investment in The Row to persuade the Olsens to come aboard. This, from my view, seems like utter bullshit. The Wertheimers have invested in The Row to build the next Chanel, not distract the Olsens from executing their vision. And their partners in the venture—the Bettencourt Meyers family office, Imaginary, and Lauren Santo Domingo—sure didn’t invest their capital in the business to have the Olsens abandon the company. (Fashion people, sometimes…)

Then there’s the working, increasingly convincing theory around Pieter Mulier. The Alaïa designer has sufficient experience dealing with multiple ateliers and managing large teams from his years working under Raf Simons, most notably at Dior. Plus, he has shown that he can transform a precious brand without demolishing what came before him in the process.

When all this Chanel talk started, a former Marc Jacobs employee recalled how Robert Duffy, the designer’s longtime business partner, would make jokes back in the brand’s heyday about how Jacobs’s Chanel contract was already signed. He was being facetious, but there’s no denying Jacobs would restore the Chanel fantasy. His Louis Vuitton fashion shows were some of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen.

Of course, there are still plenty of people rooting for Hedi Slimane and his tiny tweed jackets, although I heard once again this morning from people close to the situation that he may very well be staying within the LVMH group, despite his exit from Celine in September.

In a far less exciting scenario than any of the above, Chanel could opt to mimic the Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Dior strategy and hire different people across the maisons—i.e., the brand manager route. Perhaps that’s why Hermès’ womenswear designer Nadège Vanhee’s name keeps popping up. I suspect that Cathy Horyn, who mentioned her name in a piece for The Cut last summer as a potential idea for Chanel, conjured that particular rumor into existence, and that Vanhee is better off staying put at the other independent luxury brand.

As I have underscored previously, the multi-designer strategy works better at companies like Hermès and Louis Vuitton, which are rooted in leather goods, than Dior, which is rooted in couture. Today, consumers shop leather goods brands partially out of practicality (or at least they like to think so). They shop fashion brands entirely out of frivolity, which requires more convincing and a strong point of view. The reality is there is no perfect person. Every candidate will check many of the boxes, but not all of them. Nair and the Wertheimers appear to know what kind of company they want to be, but who will build it for them?

When I first moved to New York, I was pretty fascinated by the insane story of a Fairchild Publishing editor named Peter Braunstein who dressed up like a fireman on Halloween in 2005 and turned into what seemed like a really scary person. Now Esther Haynes, who worked with Braunstein back in the day and has a history with criminals (see her work with Michael Alig, the Party Monster), has revived the story with her own account of what happened… and a sort-of update on where Braunstein is now. This piece is almost as crazy as the original account! Love Esther! [Another Jane Pratt Thing]

Gift guide queen and queen publicist Kaitlin Phillips on books-as-Christmas-presents, but also on the greatness of Ann Patchett and her “excellent, if inappropriate” Truth & Beauty. I love this book and urge you to read it, and I also love Patchett, who is great at writing about being selfish. [Gift Guide]

Jacob wrote about a menswear store in Carroll Gardens that sells The Row (!) just a couple blocks away from the Tuddy Balsamo shrine. I figured it wasn’t worth linking to, but then my husband went there and they helped him with a decade-long fashion problem. This place is magical! [New York Times]

Dylan and Charlotte Klein rank New York’s harsh, revealing media-people portraits from best to worst. (To be clear, it’s mostly Dylan passing judgment.) [The Grill Room]

Jeff Goldblum! In Loewe! At the Wicked premiere in Australia! [Red Carpet Fashion Awards]

This story about a reclusive Hermès heir has it all: mystery, scandal, and Bernard Arnault. [WSJ]

What the delay of a five-story Louis Vuitton megastore project in China says about the state of luxury. [Bloomberg]

My friend saw Maya Rudolph shopping at the Phoebe Philo kiosk at Bergdorf Goodman on Friday. On Saturday, she was wearing these shoes on the Saturday Night Live stage. [SNL, you gotta fast-forward to the end]

Until Wednesday,
Lauren

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