Hi, welcome back to Line Sheet, and welcome to a new era in American politics? I hope you got back to Europe okay after the Gucci party. Or that you were able to act like the global tech meltdown didn’t exist because you weren’t flying anywhere and you haven’t used a P.C. since college. (Long live eMachines.)

More on Gucci-at-the-Chateau below. Meanwhile, I wonder what the Gucci people think of what’s happening at Tom Ford. On Friday, I broke the news that creative director Peter Hawkings was out. The official announcement was made this morning. This is quite a complex situation, involving two public companies (Estée Lauder Co., the owner, and Zegna Group, the operator of the fashion brand), and ELC expert Rachel Strugatz and I are watching it all closely. In today’s issue, I share the latest, plus intel from Calabasas, Paris, and beyond.

🚨🚨 Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, Jacob Gallagher and I discuss everything from the Supreme acquisition news and the Tom Ford change-up to fashion at the Republican National Convention (which Jacob covered!). Don’t miss it.

By the way, are you bracing for the Olympics? There is going to be a deluge of coverage in the next few weeks, so let me know what’s not already being written about. And just a reminder, what you get with me you can’t get anywhere else, so it’s time to bother signing up for Puck.

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Mentioned in this issue: Tom Ford, Peter Hawkings, Hedi Slimane, John Galliano, LVMH, Maison Margiela, Chanel, Bernard Arnault, the Wertheimers, Martina Tiefenthaler, Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Skims, Gucci, Miley Cyrus, Zegna Group, Estée Lauder, François-Henri Pinault, and many more…

• Bruno’s exit strategy: Amid the abrupt exit of Chanel creative director Virginie Viard, there was a lot of speculation that Bruno Pavlovsky, the company’s longtime president of fashion, was on his way out, too. Pavlovsky subsequently got all defensive (apparently on behalf of Chanel), suggesting that it was his decision to fire Viard (with the backing of the Wertheimer family, of course)—therefore implying that his status was secure.

  More recently, I’ve heard that the company is already searching for a successor, and that Pavlovsky will leave (retire from?) the position within the next two years—a decidedly managed departure at a company traditionally averse to change. There has been plenty of talk about reorganizing the business—that chief executive Leena Nair wants to break down the silos, that there will be creative directors for each major category—but whatever happens, it’s safe to say that Chanel, the organization, will look very different in the not-too-distant future. A Chanel rep declined to comment.

• The Galliano chatter: Another, potentially more immediate exit is on everyone’s lips in Paris. Just a month ago, there was chatter that John Galliano was leaving Maison Margiela for an LVMH house and had already been replaced by Martina Tiefenthaler, a former Demna right hand who broke from Balenciaga nine months or so ago. (Additional fodder: Stylist Ellie Grace Cumming, a friend of Tiefenthaler’s, was styling there.) Now, Astrid Wendlandt is reporting that Galliano will not renew his contract with OTB-owned Margiela, and that, yes, he is headed back to LVMH—potentially to Dior.

  A high-level source on the OTB side told me that Galliano is still working at Margiela as usual, and that he has a good relationship with the house, and that rumors are rumors.

  On the first part: If Galliano’s contract is up in October, as Wendlandt reported, and if he’s not renewing, it’s probably already sorted (and perhaps the plan is to do one more show this next Paris Fashion Week). Regarding the second part: I would be shocked—wildly, wildly shocked, even—if the Arnaults (paterfamilias Bernard and prodigal daughter and Dior C.E.O. Delphine) put Galliano in the driver’s seat at a business like Dior, where womenswear alone generates several billion dollars a year. After all, this is not Galliano’s Dior any longer. The overall business is probably something like $10.5 billion at this point, maybe more. It was estimated at about $9 billion in 2022—up from something like $2.5 billion in 2017, more than five years after Galliano’s exit. (It was probably only making a billion or so dollars per year when he was ousted for his antisemitic rants.)

  And LVMH, which does not break out sales of its brands, has admitted that Dior has been challenged in recent quarters. So I can’t imagine them replacing an incredibly commercial, broad designer like Maria Grazia Chiuri with someone whose focus is exquisite but extremely narrow in comparison. If Galliano does return to LVMH, I think the most likely scenario would call for him to run his namesake label, which has been all-but-dormant since he left. Givenchy is also a possibility. But, as I said last week, these decisions are made by one person and one person only, and sometimes everything changes at the last minute. For instance, in 2016, Wendlandt reported that Louis Vuitton was looking to replace Nicolas Ghesquière with Jonathan Anderson. That never happened.

• They know it’s not high fashion, okay?: Two points on my Skims story last week by the Kardashian Kamp. First, Kylie Jenner has never posited that Khy is “high” fashion—only magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar and Elle, have used that word. Also, Jay Sammons and Kim Kardashian never said that they were aiming to raise $1 billion to $2 billion for SKKY, their private equity firm. The New York Times and Forbes put that out there.
• As for Gucci showing up in Los Angeles: What a fab, easy time. You may have heard that Miley Cyrus performed, which she rarely does these days, and yet has done so at the Chateau twice in the past 12 months. Maybe because it’s still sort of magical? (Also… the first was because it was her birthday, and the second because she’s a Gucci campaign star.)

  Plenty of other celebs were there, too, wearing Sabato de Sarno’s cute little numbers: Kendall Jenner (she looked real good), Salma Hayek Pinault (didn’t see the husband), Gia Coppola, Laura and Nathalie Love; apparently Nan Goldin, David LaChapelle, and Donovan Leitch appeared, also. Sabato flew all the way from Milan for it, as did deputy C.E.O. Stefano Cantino, Alessio, and Federica… it was a mini moment, a reminder that Gucci will be back-back in L.A. for the LACMA Art+Film Gala in November. Afterward, I went to see my friend and her son at their hotel in Beverly Hills and contemplated why everyone puts fruit in salad. (It only works with stone fruit, and even then…)

• P.S.: Do you know about the news supposedly coming from Ralph Lauren later this week? If so, call me!

My source was half right. A year after Hawkings got the job, he was fired, as I reported on Friday. The news was officially announced on Monday before the opening of the U.S. markets, where both Estée Lauder Companies, the owner of Tom Ford, and Zegna Group, the operator of its fashion business, trade publicly. Unfortunately, the press release didn’t offer much besides the usual pablum about a “successor” being named “in the near future.” I’m told that a new designer has already been chosen, but I can’t confirm whether the contract has been signed. (We all know these things aren’t official until they’re official.)

One smart person who knows the whole story explained the shake-up this way: What happened at Tom Ford is what typically happens in these types of situations. Hawkings didn’t fulfill the extremely challenging brief, which was to take a brand envisioned by an exacting, uncompromising founder and ensure it remained desirable. To start, the women’s clothes weren’t selling. Yes, they were never a big part of the business, but Ford did have a loyal private clientele, and the runway served as a marketing tool for beauty and fragrance. Hawkings’ proposition was essentially a neutered version of the Tom Ford and Gucci archives. While I thought this approach might click with consumers desperate for straightforward clothing, the strategy backfired: Hawkings’ work was too generic to justify the prices.

But the speed at which Hawkings was dismissed—in just one year—illuminates that there is more to the story. The Zegna Group knows how to sell clothes, and could manage a ho-hum lineup through good merchandising and sharp distribution. Hawkings, however, was not able to develop a strong relationship with the executive teams at Zegna, nor at Estée Lauder. Without getting too accusatory here, some parties took issue with the heavy involvement of his wife, Whitney Bromberg Hawkings, whom Hawkings met while she was working in public relations for the brand. (After officially leaving Tom Ford in 2015, after 19 years of working for the designer, Bromberg Hawkings founded flower delivery service Flowerbx.)

But even if Hawkings was difficult, and even if his wife was unusually close to the business—and even if the clothes, themselves, weren’t selling—perhaps none of that would have mattered if the beauty and fragrance business was on fire. Tom Ford is, and has always been, a beauty brand first—all the way back to the launch of the first fragrance, in 2005, which predated the clothes by a year. Alas, it was not.

The appointment of Hawkings, who had been running the men’s studio out of London since the brand was launched in 2006, made sense. Only 12 years Ford’s junior, Hawkings understood the brand’s mission better than anyone, and there was the promise of continuity—especially at Zegna, which saw Tom Ford as an opportunity to continue building out its group and wade further into women’s apparel. Hawkings hadn’t touched womenswear previously, but crossing over isn’t so rare. Anyway, it seems that everyone involved—Ford, Estée Lauder, Zegna—embraced the semblance of normalcy amid this transitional period.

Of course, Hawkings couldn’t have been expected to truly replace Ford, even if he was resembling him more and more every day. Executives inside and outside the company have commented on the increased similarity in their appearances, with Hawkings growing out his facial hair and adopting the same oversized sunglasses as his old boss. But like many founders, it turned out, Ford’s impact was sui generis. He famously exerted tight control over everything to do with the brand—enforcing consistent messaging and visuals across menswear, womenswear, eyewear, and beauty. Estée Lauder, its longtime partner even before the acquisition, had to let Ford do what he wanted for the most part. He even shot some of the advertising campaigns.

My partner Rachel Strugatz will have more on the state of Tom Ford Beauty later this week, but the big takeaway is that the business—in particular, makeup and skincare—is perhaps not growing in the way the company would like. While Hawkings’ firing was not due to any sort of performance issues at Tom Ford Beauty, the big red flag for me is the deflation of the beauty line in an era when high-margin luxury beauty and fragrance dominate. Remember, Ford no longer consults on the brand in any capacity, and Demsey, once his shepherd, is long gone. Last fall, I mentioned the launch of a fragrance called Vanilla Sex, and poked fun at the oxymoronic name. But in all seriousness, what were they thinking?

One could lay the blame squarely on Guillaume Jesel, who manages the brand on the Estée Lauder side, but that could also be considered unfair. His task, in some ways, was far more difficult than Hawkings’. When he fully took the reins, Estée Lauder was already struggling.

What will Zegna and Estée do about the empty creative director role? There’s an argument that they don’t need one, at least not right now, and that they should close the women’s business and focus on menswear. And while I’m all-but-certain Hedi Slimane is not the new designer—like I said, too pricey and too much of an aesthetic left turn—I could also see Ford being happy with him in the driver’s seat. The two men have far more in common than you might think. Slimane, like Ford, is a merchant-designer, he has a vision, and he is uncompromising. Ford did the right thing by leaving, but he may have done the wrong thing by believing preserving the past would help guarantee the future.

This Nick Kostov joint on François-Henri Pinault is a rare example of a general interest publication getting its coverage of the luxury industry right. This piece is broad enough, but also insightful enough. [Wall Street Journal]

Mattie Kahn explains why the side part will never die… in Washington. [Vogue]

This is an interesting profile of a newish agency in Paris that matches (mostly) French athletes with brands. [New York Times]

This interview with Joan Didion’s former companion is super weird, but there’s a notable Phoebe Philo anecdote in there, recounting the shoot of that famous Céline campaign. [Airmail]

Becky answers the question a certain subset of fashion consumer desperately needs answered these days: How do I dress a little skimpy without looking like a ho? [Five Things You Should Buy]

Nike is apparently doing a Wizard of Oz collaboration that’ll be at least partially inspired by Dorothy’s ruby slippers. [Elden Monitors via Footwear News]

Condé Nast sent a cease-and-desist letter to an A.I. search engine. [The Information]

I liked this interview with Jerry Saltz, although I think he should revise his stance on visiting people’s homes to check out their private art collections. [Cultured]

Bryanboy is one of the fashion industry’s greatest critics. [Instagram]

What teens bought on Amazon Prime Day. [After School]

Until Wednesday,
Lauren