Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Alessandro has a job!!!

Personally, I’m still in New York. My Aunt Janet wants to know if I’m attending the Biden fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall tonight. You know, because Anna Wintour planned it, according to Janet, a loyal Puck subscriber. “Obama, Lizzo, Clinton, many stars,” she texts.

I won’t be there. Starting next week, I will be back in Los Angeles for a whole month. Let’s have lunch. Today, though, is the time to break down this Alessandro news. I’ve also got plenty of niche media dish—my eyes are glittering—plus a little Met Gala speculation and an Estée dispatch from [email protected].

Today’s big story, though, is mostly about P.R. people, who love reading about themselves, so my assumption is that we’ll get a lot of sign-ups. Remember, we offer preferred rates on group memberships—and people who forward this email are automatically banned from the Polo Bar. (Message [email protected] for more details.) If you are currently accessing my agenda-setting work on [email protected], just know that I know.

Mentioned in this issue: Alessandro Michele, Valentino, Bedford Media, Karlie Kloss, Josh Kushner, Art Partner, CAA, Groupe Artémis, Kering, The Independents, Together Group, Vogue Business, Met Gala, John Galliano, Kim Kardashian, Clinique, Condé Nast, Montrose, François-Henri Pinault, more Esprit wreckage, WWD, Luisa Zargani, and many more.

• First off, a big thank you to Valentino for leaking the Alessandro news just in time for Thursday’s Line Sheet to drop: I set up a lot of this for you on Monday, so be sure to read over that, but wow, what a journey it’s been! I did a search, and about a fifth of Line Sheet subject lines since I started a year ago have had the word “Alessandro” in them.

  Big picture, what this indicates to me is that the industry has come to the collective realization that you have to invest in creativity from the beginning in order to make a whole lot of money at the end. Michele does not come cheap, but he may very well be the best person to give Valentino commercial viability. His fans are excited, and they will spend!

  I’ll likely have more on the Alessandro saga on Monday, but one note on the press rollout. It’s very interesting that Vogue Business (and Milan-based writer Luke Leitch in particular) landed the so-called exclusive announcement. My takeaway: This feels like one more nail in the coffin for WWD, whose reporter Luisa Zargani in Milan is really the best in class, and technically broke this news on Monday. Why didn’t they go to Zargani first here? Well, for one, Vogue has a far larger distribution platform than the trades—Vogue Business itself is tiny (and shouldn’t exist I.M.H.O.), but this story is on Vogue.com, too, as well as all the regional U.R.L.s. Plus, Luke is a great wordsmith, and Vogue is only ever going to be a cheerleader.

  What I’ve heard from P.R.s is that WWD gets so mad when they don’t get something first—like, they won’t show up for a runway show if they don’t get an exclusive preview—that it’s almost not worth trying to work with them in many cases. (This has been their way for years, but has worsened as of late.) I’ve always been a reporting-first, access-second kind of journalist, and if WWD wants to remain a valuable resource, that’s how they should be too. It is not 1975, friends!

• Live from New York, it’s the Central Editorial Team: If you ever worked (or work) at Condé Nast, you might remember Montrose, the company’s archive system, where you can, among other things, grab old magazine photos for internet articles when you don’t want to pay Getty or ask a P.R. or whatever. Well, it seems that Montrose is playing a leading role in the development of the fake “Central Editorial Team” that management has organized to get the supposed-to-be-laid-off union folks off the books of the magazines, and certainly for other reasons too convoluted to be explained by me.

  Anyway, the union kids in limbo are being asked to write (or edit) “cultural significance” profiles—their words, not mine—of famous people that Condé publications cover, as well as explainers on how Condé has covered certain people and events in the past. This feels like sub-intern work right out of Severance that I would have been paid to do for $25 per post in 2006. You cannot make this up!

  Also, on Friday the company sent out not one but two notes to employees: one from H.R., one from Line Sheet superstar Roger Lynch. In the H.R. note, whoever wrote it explained that the additional names on the layoff list were added “to offset the salary costs incurred as a result of the union’s delay in negotiating the proposal” and do not represent a new round of layoffs. Okay, I believe you. Roger’s note didn’t say much, although he did promise to be in the office and attend meetings.

  I know the union is mad at me right now because I said there should have been even more layoffs, but it’s true, and the big problem here is that there doesn’t seem to be any concrete plan or vision for the company other than cost-saving—a non-strategy strategy that inevitably leads to more layoffs. (Let’s see if we’re here again next year, with Alessandro back in the subject line of this email, too…) All management needs to do is say, “This is a really hard time. We want to make it better. We’ll do that by firing people and investing in the future. Here are the five ways we are going to do that.” It would still hurt, but then people could move on. But leadership has to come up with those five things. Bueller?

• Here’s the first of many Met Gala rumors I am sure I will have to dispel: I heard last week that John Galliano was going to be Kim Kardashian’s date to the ball this year. A likely pairing, I’d say, given that the uncancellable Kardashian clan has favored Margiela as of late. (Kendall Jenner wore a gown from the much-ballyhooed Artisanal collection at this year’s Vanity Fair Oscar party.) Unfortunately for all of us, it’s not true, according to Kardashian’s rep. Got any deets on what is actually happening in the lead-up to the Met? Call me.
• Karlie is not messing: Today, Bedford Media, the new venture led by Karlie Kloss, announced an agreement with Dotdash Meredith to relaunch Life magazine. Bedford will manage the operation from bottom to top, and Kloss’s husband, Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner, will serve as publisher. (I love when people use old-school words like “publisher.” Why do we feel the need to dress things up with contemporary jargon?)

  When I first learned of Bedford and its intention to purchase i-D magazine from Vice last year, I was told that i-D was very much Kloss’s project, and to not get it twisted—Kloss, not Kushner, was the one running the show. (And she is, as evidenced this week as she personally laid off employees in the London office. Any sort of staff reduction is crappy, but a lot of C.E.O.s and founders are cowards and get the H.R. people to do it.) In this case, it seems that reviving Life magazine has been on Kushner’s mind for some time, and Bedford is the vehicle. By the way, Kushner is not going to be running this day-to-day, but there’s clearly a commercial benefit to namechecking him in a public way.

  Why does this power couple want to sponsor these legacy titles? I honestly don’t know, but they appear to be genuinely interested in good brands, and some of the most undervalued brands are media brands. (Look at what’s happening to our friends at Condé, which own one of the biggest fashion brands in the world but definitely don’t make billions of dollars off of it.) Sports Illustrated may be imploding, but Authentic Brands Group (ABG) was brilliant to buy it and license it to smithereens. The issue with Life versus i–D, or W, or Sports Illustrated, or Vogue, is that the sentiment might be missing. Do I think anyone, at all, other than Josh Kushner, cares about Life magazine? No. But please prove me wrong! This is fun.

• A note from Strugatz on Estée’s Amazon play: I was surprised, yesterday, when I received a full-blown press release about Clinique launching on Amazon—after all, it didn’t seem all that revelatory for a scaled beauty brand to sell on the world’s largest marketplace. In fact, that real news is that Clinique, the Estée Lauder heirloom and the “#1 derm beauty brand in U.S. prestige” (the category below luxury), has faded mightily since my mom bought the OG three-step system at the Macy’s in the Kings Plaza Mall in Sheepshead Bay in the ’90s. Which is why it’s crazy to me that Lauder is just now putting this brand on Amazon, a place where hundreds of millions of people shop and buy tons of approachably priced skin care.

  A lot of companies, especially luxury brands, have outdated views on how the world works and how people shop—particularly Lauder, which has stuck to their “Amazon isn’t a luxury retailer” guns. (I get the sense that Lauder uses the words “those people” in meetings when talking about Amazon). But with their M&A coffers depleted, growth has to come from somewhere. It’s a little bit like when Glossier went into Sephora last year, or Goop launched its lower-priced skin care line on both Target and Amazon. I think Clinique will do amazing on Amazon; it was stupid to have waited so long. —Rachel Strugatz

I reached out to Art Partner founder Giovanni Testino to talk about it, but haven’t heard back. (The Groupe Artémis folks also took the “never complain, never explain” route.) Look, I hope for Testino’s sake that the deal materializes if he wants it to: Everyone deserves to be rewarded for excellence, and Art Partner remains the most important creative talent agency in fashion.

Particulars aside, the ongoing Art Partner speculation highlights a much, much bigger movement happening in the fashion-adjacent agency world. These types of service businesses are constantly bundling and unbundling, and we’re in a bundling period. Indeed, while making some calls about the Art Partner murmurs, I was fed crumbs about at least three New York-based fashion P.R. agencies that could be bought: some have engaged bankers, some are just in the heavy petting stages. Some are not actively pursuing anything. I’ve heard there’s interest in Pierre Rougier and Sylvie Picquet-Damesme’s P.R. Consulting, as well as KCD, and that Bismarck Phillips (Vanessa von Bismarck and Carrie Phillips) are open to a deal, too. DLX is being watched by investors.

In Europe (and increasingly, the U.S.), Lucien Pagès is the hottest P.R. firm. This past Paris Fashion Week, there was plenty of speculation going around that it was setting up for a sale after its namesake owner earned a glowing profile in Business of Fashion. My two cents on that one, as someone who wrote those types of stories for years for that very publication: Yes, people use trades like BoF and WWD to generate investor interest all the time, but in the case of Lucien Pagès, my educated guess is that this was simply an opportunity to have the very personable Tim Blanks write a personable profile on the most important (and also very personable) publicist in fashion—nothing more. Definitely celebratory, way less consciously strategic than any of you would like to think. (Also, people: bankers create sales, not reporters.)

And then there’s The Independents, which owns P.R. firm Karla Otto, and events production groups Bureau Betak and Keith Baptista’s Prodject, among several others. The Independents is backed by Neal Moszkowski and Ramez Sousou’s TowerBrook Capital Partners and sports betting firm FL Entertainment, from which it raised $400 million last year. At the time of the funding announcement, The Independents said that it planned to double its revenue by 2025, which means it needs to acquire other companies. It recently picked up Kennedy, a creative agency out of London, but there will certainly be more deals announced soon—and maybe with one of the aforementioned P.R. agencies.

Whether you’re representing talent, flacking, or producing events, these are all service businesses that can be very profitable if they’re mashed together appropriately and operated efficiently. Fashion P.R. is probably the most challenging of the three from a profitability perspective, because the brands are cheap and impatient when it comes to press R.O.I. Also, the blessing and curse of it all: these are not easy people!

We saw what happened with Matthew Moneypenny’s Great Bowery experiment, when he raised $150 million from Waddell & Reed in 2015 to great fanfare, then split just two years later. Great Bowery, remarkably, is still around after merging with MAO Management Artists in 2018. The lesson there, I suppose, is that these businesses all operate pretty well individually. If being a part of a larger group makes some cross-company collaboration easier, wonderful. If it doesn’t… that’s okay, too. The myth of synergies is great. It’s mostly about growing the topline.

Beloved Gucci P.R. Benjamin Cercio also has a new job! [WWD]

Gap brand President Mark Breitbard sold over $485,000 worth of shares recently. Shrug! [Investing.com]

Great advice. (CC: Danielle and Roger.) [Brooke’s Twitter]

Relatedly, I love this idea! [Delia Cai’s Twitter]

If you feel bad about your Kate Middleton text chains (and even if you don’t), read this! [Garbage Day]

I love this wacky magazine cover starring jewelry designer Irene Neuwirth and a horse. [Town & Country]

Never heard of this guy before, but did you know that Athletic Greens is now just called AG1? (Also, they should advertise in Line Sheet!) [New York mag]

Love that they recognized the multi-hyphenate Dara and her work with Hunter Schafer here in this increasingly meaningless, but still interesting, list of the most powerful stylists in Hollywood. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Jenna Lyons will be a Housewife once again. [New York Times]

The commodification of the Miami Design District is a thing to behold. I am endlessly impressed by the Craig Robins P.R. machine. He really did it. [WSJ]

Until Tomorrow,
Lauren