A MESSAGE FROM HARRY WINSTON

This holiday season, give the gift that shines forever. Visit your nearest Harry Winston salon and discover a gift that’s as radiant as you.

And now, the main event…

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and, as usual, everyone from micro-celebrities to the legacy media brigade is rolling out their 2025 holiday gift guides in an attempt to make their Q4 affiliate revenue numbers. Some influencers have been teasing their gift guides for months. For others, the final e-commerce sprint of the year has only just begun. Are we having fun yet?

As we tend to note every year around this time, gift guide season can be pretty overwhelming. Part of that is just the sheer volume of brands and writers now financially compelled to play the same game in the name of revenue diversification. And yes, this is an economy and culture predicated on consumption—deal with it! But it doesn’t have to be the stuff of seasonal depressive disorder if you know where to look.

A MESSAGE FROM HARRY WINSTON

This holiday season, give the gift that shines forever. Celebrate the holiday season with the timeless brilliance of diamond jewelry by Harry Winston.

Enter Line Sheet’s Third Annual Guide to Gift Guides, our seasonal exercise in minimizing the pitfalls of year-end shopping—and online shopping discourse—in an era where more than 40 percent of all holiday shopping begins online. These days, there are two types of gift guides. There are the aforementioned affiliate link assembly lines, which are perfectly fine when you’re buying something for someone to whom you owe a gift, but not your time, or much thought. Brands and their publicists have been pitching these guides since the summer, hoping their products land in as many guides as possible, to drive influencer conversation and pump up holiday revenue.

And then there are the gift guides that mimic a well-merchandised boutique, providing just enough narrative to make shoppers feel they’ve stumbled upon something genuinely rare or off the beaten path that they can’t live without. These are usually a better bet, but there are a lot more of them than there used to be, and it helps to have a key. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it’s a good start. Happy hunting…

Legacy Media: The Ones Who Should Know What They’re Doing… But Do They?

We miss when Becky, Rory, and Jacob were doing the WSJ Off Duty Gift Guides (sorry, Dale), but there are still some people working at these places who care and make good on their promise of being arbiters of taste and discovery. T magazine did the thing where they came up with very specific scenarios—nice ex-husband, bedbound mother, primary caregiver dad—and, of course, the results feel more universal and inspired. The Lily Allen t-shirt is funny. Marie Claire’s categories also made me laugh. The Financial Times’s guide is giving humidor-and-high-yield-junk-bond vibes (leather dumbbells from Dunhill, a £435,000 Aston Martin, etcetera).

For those who like to shop Manhattan’s boutiques and boulevards in person, New York magazine’s Strategist has put together a solid guide for the brick-and-mortar inclined. Honestly? That is sorta novel. (New York is under the most pressure to perform, though. Their annual gift guide is the standard-bearer.) Also, it’s not a traditional gift guide, but NPR’s list of books is a solid option for a literary friend or family member. College students are always a tricky category—cash is nice—but Town & Country nailed Gen Z with Longchamp’s Le Pliage, Rhode lip balm, and the Coach Brooklyn bag.

Substackers: If They Don’t Get This Right, They Don’t Get Paid

Most Substack gift guides are link dumps of stuff you already know about. (You could say this about most shopping Substacks, generally.) Experts have emerged, however. Laura Reilly is hands down the best at organizing sales and offering gift ideas every day she publishes. She doesn’t need to build an official guide, although I’m sure she will at some point. Intrepid shopping reporter Emilia Petrarca bravely asked people outside the fashion and media bubble for discoveries I didn’t see on other lists, like Annika Inez earrings. Plum Sykes’s Pre-Gift Gift Guide creates the permission structure to just go ahead and gift a candle (say, a large Baies Diptyque if you’re gonna do it) or, even better, a French butter dish. Katie Elliott’s guide, in her Design School newsletter, has ideas for the pretentious giftee on your list without being pretentious, itself. (Katie is also V.P. of product at Schoolhouse, which has a festive and design-forward holiday assortment.) Monica de La Villardière created a list for neurotics that includes hair clips for French twists and Call It By Your Name bags, the nouveau take on Vera Bradley, straight out of France.

Jane Herman, the queen of jeans, suggests that when all else fails, fill a beautiful candy jar with lip balms or fancy toothpicks. (You may want to include Sophie Buhai’s sterling silver fancy toothpick and case as the centerpiece.) Perhaps Michael Williams’s gift guide for guys is coming, but until then, it’s worth referencing his newly published guide to shopping during this season without feeling crazy, complete with a list of 25 small menswear brands you’ll like. Like many Brits, Otegha Uwagba wonderfully walks the line between offhanded accessibility and pure snobbishness, like Laila Gohar’s bird-shaped lemon squeezer.

Personally, I love to give and receive books. Jenny Rosenstrach, who writes Dinner: A Love Story, has a selection of cookbooks, and Amanda Lee Burkett has canvassed the shelves for you. The only downside to buying something secondhand online is that the delivery times tend to be less predictable. Otherwise, just as searching for vintage fashion—be it in store, on The RealReal, or via your Gem app—is now viewed by many as the last truly satisfying clothes-shopping experience, secondhand, one-off items often make the best present. Kellyn Loehr, who writes the fabulous secondhand shopping roundup Best Friends, scoured the web for vintage table decor.

Brands: When You Have to Shill Your Own Stuff But Also Not Make People Hate You

This is potentially the most difficult kind of gift guide to pull off. Ostensibly, brands don’t have to create a gift guide. But good content can drive commerce. Alex Mill partners with enough other brands to make their list fun. Tory Burch mixed in Dries Van Noten lipstick with Holiday magazine and a Louise Carmen leather organizer (more on the site here). Violet Grey is truly the Barneys New York of beauty retail: It’s the only place you can really discover anything. This year, they’ve published multiple gift edits. Attersee’s founder, Isabel Wilkinson Schor, just released her gift edit, with one-of-a-kind jewelry, their beautiful tassel evening bag, and Yaser Shaw’s hand-embroidered pashminas. (Isabel is a former magazine editor, so she feels an extra responsibility to do right by her customers when it comes to recommendations.) Aurora James’s brand, Brother Vellies, has a bodega filled with gifts, including the cloud socks she made famous during the pandemic.

A Little Navel-Gazing

Puck’s fifth annual Guide to Mirth & Merriment includes a Lorenzi Milano micro-viral toothpaste squeezer (for a mere $780); a Refined Roadie flask; hiking socks (on my list this year) selected by Karla Welch, and art by Jake Longstreth.

Our new colleagues at Air Mail have also dropped their own reliably stylish and impeccably sourced Holiday Gift Guide, including Métier’s distinct Vérité Mini; Le Monde Béryl’s Allegra riding boot in plum (sizes appear to be going fast); and Jennifer Alfano’s Bullseye lockets. There are also categories for “Guys” (always tough) and “Loot for Little Ones.” Buy anything Linda Wells recommends. Of course, we also recommend getting co-workers and friends their own Puck subscription. For those who have been on the extra-nice list, go ahead and upgrade them to Inner Circle here.

Finally, the Winner of the Best Gift Guide of the Year Goes To…

If you read only one gift guide this year, it should be publicist-writer/writer-publicist Kaitlin Phillips’s Google doc. The guide, now several years running, has become so popular that Kaitlin actually launched a year-round Substack inspired by it, which now makes her tens of thousands of dollars annually. I cannot tell you how satisfying I find reading Kaitlin’s work and how much pleasure I derived from shopping this gift guide. There are certainly some duds (Phillips’s publicist side let Olivia Nuzzi’s sad rec slide in because it’s a good tease) but generally the recs—from the best and only hand engraver left in New York, to a reworked vintage specialist beloved by Chloë Sevigny—are above and beyond.

The best part of Kaitlin’s guide is that she has only published part one. There is more to come. Also, she says not to read it on your phone, but I did, and it was fine.

Have a great weekend,
Lauren

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