Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet, en route to Washington for Puck’s second-annual First Amendment event at the French ambassador’s residence in Kalorama. (If you’re attending, why not wear a French designer? Sandro counts. Message me and we can run through your look…) Then, it’s off to New York for spring break. If we haven’t organized a catch-up, I’ll be back again at least twice in the next couple of months, so don’t worry, you won’t miss me.

Today, though, I’m tracking the luxury real estate wars—in particular, the fate of the Barneys New York building on Madison. But before that, enjoy my kinda-quickfire round of scoopy news.

One programming note: On Wednesday at 8 a.m. (L.A.)/11 a.m. (N.Y.)/4 p.m. (London)/5 p.m. (Paris), I’m speaking at Launchmetrics’ Performance Summit with my friend and frequent collaborator Katherine Knight about how fashion brands can be more strategic. Please join us!

By the way, nobody likes a cheapskate, so if you’ve read this far without subscribing to Puck, you should be deeply embarrassed (because you’re a real dirtbag). For shameless types, let me remind you that you’re missing out on fashion industry intel you can’t read anywhere else. Then there’s the peerless work of my Puck partners, including Rachel Strugatz (beauty), William Cohan (Wall Street), Dylan Byers (media), Matt Belloni (Hollywood), and John Ourand (SPORTS!). Last week alone was worth the (very affordable) $100 annual membership—from Rachel’s scoop on Glossier’s dalliances with a banker to Matt and Dylan’s coverage of the truly entertaining MediaLink-UTA legal battle. Join for me, stay for them. Let’s go!

Mentioned in this issue: LVMH, Barneys New York, Phoebe Philo, Vanessa Friedman, Chanel, Lauren Santo Domingo, Ivanka Trump, Moda Operandi, Condé Nast, Matches, Tim Hamilton, Jackie Skye & Marlon Muller, half-zips, Valérie Duport, Colby Mugrabi, Karlie Kloss, Tory Burch, Nikki Ogunnaike, Rodarte, Kate & Laura Mulleavy, the Werthheimers, Ben Ashkenazy, the Safra family, and many more.

• Phoebe speaks!: Vanessa Friedman nabbed the first (and potentially last?) chat with Phoebe Philo, who hasn’t been properly interviewed by a journalist in a decade. I liked the profile because it was straightforward in the same way Philo’s clothes are straightforward. (She tells Friedman that she doesn’t get the point of doing too much storytelling around clothes; they are what they are. I agree, but she also communicates a lot in her designs. Most creative directors have little to say.) I am pretty obsessed with the way companies manage the press—most do a bad job—and this was a necessary move by Philo and her team.

  For Friedman, the interview alone was the feat. However, it left many of us wanting. While the piece mentions the brand’s challenges with returns and such, and touches on Philo’s reasons for returning to fashion, it does not address—or attempt to address—any of the much-speculated-about challenges, both personal and professional, that Philo has endured. I’m confident that Friedman pushed as far as she could, but I do wish that there had been a little bit more interrogation of the process of shipping the first collection, which was not easy—and it’s not just insider readers of Line Sheet who know that. It would have also been nice to have a little bit of insight into what’s next. (By the way, Laura Neilson covered the Phoebe malaise in Air Mail a couple of weeks back, and credited some of my reporting on this saga.)

• More Condé layoffs: The company quietly eliminated positions in the digital sales department earlier this month, I’m told. Meanwhile, the bonuses finally came in, but people remain confused about the whole sales-being-“flat” narrative. Perhaps this goes back to the concept of adjusted EBITDA… (A company rep—you know the one!—didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
• Another punch in the stomach from Matches: The affiliate links used by influencers to generate a commission on sales are no longer working.
• Nike poached Tim Hamilton… a year ago: The former chief creative officer of The North Face (and one of my favorite designer-executives) just joined Nike as V.P. of design, per his LinkedIn. Tim was very effective at The North Face, so let’s see what he can do at the quasi-impenetrable Nike now that he’s done with his yearlong gardening leave. (By the way, Tim, Outdoor Voices founder Tyler Haney seems interested in collaborating.)
• Did you see that Valérie Duport left Kering?: Somehow this news got buried (damn PDF), but Miles reported at the end of Paris Fashion Week that Kering’s longtime chief communications and image officer recently departed. Valérie is best-in-class—and so is her team. I wonder how Kering, which is in a moment of transition, as we all know, will restructure. The chatter around Paris during Fashion Week suggested that a certain high-profile Italian comms executive, currently residing in the LVMH stable, was headed to the other side, but not in Duport’s former role.
• What’s up with this freaky Lauren Santo Domingo ode?: Let me just start by saying that the premise of this completely insane piece, published on the website of the Sporty & Rich knockoff brand Recreational Habits, is pretty spot-on, at least the parts of it that are decipherable. (I encourage you to consider reading it as a little treat, especially the “editor’s note.”) Lauren Santo Domingo is indeed the “last swan standing.” (They don’t make tall socialites like her anymore, I guess.) Apart from that, though, Santo Domingo is still an utterly compelling, multiple-profiles-worthy figure—at once willing to confront her former friend, MAGA fille Ivanka Trump, on Twitter (read this now-deleted comment), while exhibiting the wherewithal to keep Moda Operandi alive through the online luxury wars. At Moda, she hired the right operator (Jim Gold), got the bad investors out (Apax), and the company is still moving while Net-a-Porter, Farfetch, and MatchesFashion are all relatively stuck.

  Of course, you wouldn’t be able to discern that from the essay, written by former Barneys New York executive Jackie Skye Muller, co-founder of Recreational Habits with her husband, Marlon Muller. I don’t want to make too much fun of the Mullers—it’s far too easy—and I hope they are seeing a lot of traffic from this piece being passed around. I’m skeptical of the whole content-to-commerce model (because it doesn’t work). But in this case, I suspect they sold a few more half-zips than usual.

• Yes, you read that right, Colby Mugrabi raised $6.4 million for her “Web3 fashion startup,” mmERCH: How was Colby Mugrabi, the influencer married to art dealer Alberto “Tico” Mugrabi, able to raise that much money for a fashion line? Well, let’s start with the obvious. Mugrabi, whom I was introduced to years ago by my favorite billionaire, is smart, driven, a hell of a dresser, and capable of securing all the right meetings. That said, $6.4 million is actually a lot of money for a fashion startup of any kind, and her lead investors—Liberty City Ventures, with participation from 6529 Holdings LLC, Christie’s Ventures, and Flamingo DAO—probably aren’t going to throw that much cash at a vanity project. (Although Karlie Kloss and Tory Burch went in on it, too, adding some star power.)

  Mugrabi is aiming to fix some big fashion industry problems with her “one of one” fashion. (I’ve said a million times that excess inventory is the industry’s biggest challenge, and investors should put money into technology that solves it.) There is also plenty of talk about the blockchain and algorithms in the press release. Mugrabi is going to have to spend a lot of money on developers and servers to make this work at scale. I’m deeply skeptical of pretty much everything, especially anything with the word “blockchain” in it, but like many people, I am charmed by Mugrabi. Let’s see.

• Nikki Ogunnaike tests her star power: I’m disappointed to miss the Marie Claire editor-in-chief’s first major live thing, Power Play, happening in Santa Monica today through Wednesday. The conference-ish event is a riff on the old Power Trip concept, where the magazine, now owned by U.K.-based Future Publishing, would fly a group of high-achieving and slightly thirsty female executives on a chartered plane to some resort or another to do yoga and listen to chats. This is similar, minus the chartered plane gimmick, which was a cute photo op but probably not worth the trouble. The TL;DR: We all know that live events can be incredibly lucrative, even if they usually aren’t. If Ogunnaike nails this, advertisers will notice.

For some, the Barneys building—owned by a consortium of investors, including Ben Ashkenazy and the Brazilian Safra family, who own the air rights—will always be the Barneys building. And it’s also become a microcosm of the macro convulsions in luxury—consolidation, tremendous profit generation, preparation for an inevitable decline. In the five years since the store closed, the rules of selling fashion have changed so dramatically that it’s impossible for another department store to replace it. Instead, there has been speculation that a megastore from one of the megabrands might end up there, even if there are few companies that could afford it.

The luxury industry, after all, is really a real estate business. Without the right location, and the right price, it’s difficult to make a store profitable. And since retail rents for prime Manhattan locations have skyrocketed in recent years—Dolce & Gabbana, for instance, paid $12 million in annual rent for the old Hermès space on Madison Avenue, according to reports—everyone is looking around. In certain parts of Manhattan and Paris, on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, and in other major metropolitan cities, it just doesn’t make sense to rent anymore.

In January, Bloomberg reported that LVMH was eying 745 Fifth Avenue, home to the Bergdorf men’s store, and now there is talk that the group is looking at several buildings on 57th Street, including 9 East 57th, where there is a Burberry store, and also 15 East 57th Street, for which Chanel paid nearly $82 million in 2018. Grabbing that chunk of 57th Street would give LVMH prime connectivity to their Tiffany building on the corner of 57th and Fifth. And for a family like the Werthheimers, the acquisition of 660 Madison (if it happens someday) could provide a steady stream of generational passive income, just like what 754 Fifth Avenue offered the Goodman family. (Not that they don’t have enough of that already.)

Last summer, amid rumors that Bernard Arnault was once again after Bergdorf Goodman, I reported that LVMH would buy in places where it was beneficial to own for the long run. According to LVMH C.F.O. Jean-Jacques Guiony, there are certain places in the world where, even if the real estate depreciates, it makes more financial sense to own. “There are not many places like that,” he said in a call with investors. “You can mention Paris, London, New York and Fifth Avenue, and probably Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. And that’s about it. We just buy exceptional buildings in very safe and stable locations.”

While LVMH lost a public vote to install a Cheval Blanc on Rodeo Drive in May 2023, it still owns the building—the former Paley Center and Brooks Brothers—which it will likely tear down. (LVMH did not respond to a request for comment regarding this.) This slow-building portfolio, which is almost like a real estate investment trust, is a clever way of diversifying, especially in down times.

Will the Chanel deal ever go through? It’s contingent on several other things happening exactly right, obviously, but the whispers speak volumes. It was only a few decades ago when luxury brands were licensing their names to others in the U.S., operating stores through third parties. Now, they own every inch.

Consider someone like Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri. She is an executive: She manages a giant team of people who fulfill her vision—couturiers, handbag designers, marketers—on top of being a skilled designer. It’s a different job. You know what I want the Mulleavys to talk about? How the heck they have managed to stay in business for nearly 20 years. [WWD]

There may be no middle class left, but there is an upper middle class, and Todd Snyder is dressing it! Adored this, good job Jacob. [Wall Street Journal]

Nicolas Di Felice is next up to design Jean Paul Gaultier. [WWD]

The love between Dov Charney and Kanye West seems to be very real. [Complex]

Did anyone watch the Sabato doc? If I get enough good responses, I will do a feedback section on Thursday. [WWD]

Matt says that David O. Russell punched somebody at last weekend’s Charles Finch-Chanel dinner. What a night! [Puck]

Also, I cannot get enough of the MediaLink and UTA’s delightfully fashion-fueled dispute. [Puck]

Karla Welch did a fun breakdown of how America Ferrera’s Barbie-pink Versace look came together. [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

Until Wednesday,
Lauren