Hi, and welcome back to a very special Art Basel Miami edition of Line Sheet. How much art I’ll get to see during this brief stopover remains to be seen, but I’ve been impressed by fashion’s contributions thus far.

Was sad to miss Cultured magazine’s Sarah Harrelson interviewing the Coperni boys yesterday, as well as the Japanese women’s wrestling league Sukeban battle in costumes designed by Olympia Le-Tan and faces done up by Isamaya Ffrench. (I heard it was… “really fun.”) Today, I endeavor to go see Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton collection. By the time you read this, I might already be on my way back to Los Angeles, so enjoy the latest chapter in one of my favorite family dramas, as well as my hotly anticipated gift-guide guide.

I know you know, but the very best gift you could give this season is a subscription to Puck.

Mentioned in this issue: Roger Lynch, Vanessa Kingori, the Taylor Swift Time cover, Dawn Ostroff, Oren Katzeff, the Bon Appétit brain drain, Delphine Del Val, Kate Wolfson, the Fleischmann butter heirs, Danielle Carrig, Jalil Johnson, Vogue World, Agnes Chu, and fashion press trips to Aspen.

The better is that interesting people with clear ideas are sharing them, the worse is that making a good gift guide is actually very hard, and few get it right. And like I said, there’s also a tendency these days to only include links that are part of an affiliate program—which requires a brand or online retailer to give a cut of the sales to the publisher, and sometimes a third party, too. Getting too obsessed with affiliates can occasionally fuck with your editorial integrity. (Although I promise I’m not judging. No, really! I love affiliate links.)

For your convenience and my self-satisfaction, I’ve organized a list of my favorite gift guides from this year, many of which were created by friends. Thanks for your recommendations, too; it did widen my scope. Happy Holidays, and if you buy or receive anything from this list, let me know…

• My friend Delphine Del Val’s Instagram is private, but she does one of the best gift guides around in her Stories, and she has agreed to open up her account for a little while so you can read it. To give you a sense of Delphine and her interests: She is French and has an apartment in Paris, but is married to an American and has lived in America for 20 years, where she runs a small talent management agency. Her picks are ultra-specific and not too expensive. She loves the FT Weekend Edition.

• I assume most of you have already looked up Kaitlin Phillips’ unedited holiday gift guide, featuring recs from everyone from Cecily Brown to Daphne Merkin. How?! I love it.

• Chris Black is the person I ask when I need to know if it’s “okay” for me to buy something, like a branded baseball cap from a skate shop.

• I met Michael 15 years ago or so when I used to have to write a lot of articles about men’s style; he was a menswear blogger back then, and my favorite expert source. He still sometimes helps me buy gifts for my husband, most famously a beloved shoehorn. For his annual gift guide, Michael also enlists our friend Laurie, one of the greatest stylists around, to pick some things for ladies.

• Emilia is so funny! And I already bought something from her guide.

• If you’re too tired to read, Claire and Erica, but also Amanda and Juliet, have dedicated episodes of their very popular podcasts to gift guiding.

• Becky is honestly the best gift guide maker in the world (okay, maybe tied with Claire and Erica). As a subtle pushback to the overwhelming number of gift guides on the internet, she really focused this year and is doing scarfs only… for now. Let’s see what happens before December 25.

• Town & Country proves that magazines can still be fun (and funny), and this wild wishlist delivers.

• For people who need to buy a lot of presents, here are easy, can’t-miss suggestions in fashion, home, beauty, and travel from Hunter Harris, Hillary Kerr, and Yolanda Edwards.

• My sources tell me that Kate Wolfson was responsible for a lot of Goop’s early, genius email subject lines, and her entire Substack, stuffed with gift guides, is like that.

• Kelsey Keith, who works at Herman Miller, is one of those people who posts photos of cool things on Instagram all the time, but never tags them so you have to ask her directly about it or spend hours Googling for more info. That’s why this design gift guide is such a gift.

• If you are more altruistic than me: Tory Burch created a guide to all the stuff made by the entrepreneurs she supports through her foundation. (I’m eying the Money Management Workbook… for my kid! Wink.)

• Helen Rosner’s food gift guide is always so good that I am sure every other food writer is super jealous of it.

• Sarah de Mavaleix is the reason I own so many Charvet shirts and Hervé Chapelier bags, and I love that she shared her holiday wishlist with Isabel Wilkinson Schor and Attersee, in which she included a Charvet shirt and Chapelier bag lol. The brand is strong all around.

• Please buy Alessandra this trash can.

It’s logical that Lynch would want to be in London, in person, for this occasion. He is, after all, the global C.E.O. of Condé Nast, the first executive ever to hold that august title—itself an unintentional reference to the era when the Newhouses operated Condé Nast as two companies, one in the U.S. and the other in the rest of the world, just because. Now it’s all one entity, and Lynch has often reiterated the global nature of his remit. Last June, for instance, Lynch hosted a company-wide meeting from Beijing. Plus, given the past two weeks of layoffs in New York, not to mention the exit of top British executive Vanessa Kingori, who decamped to Google in November, the team in the U.K. needs to know their value to the future of the business.

Of course, skeptics see Lynch’s London trip as a way to avoid an in-person confrontation with the union back home. (Enraptured by the zeal of collective bargaining, employees have twice stormed his office at One World Trade, a very personal tactic.) Earlier this week, they filed a “charge of intimidation” against Condé Nast management through the National Labor Relations Board, citing their use of security guards during union protests.

While nonunion staffers across departments are being let go, I hear that union members on the now-infamous layoff list still don’t know what’s going to happen. Management apparently wants to finish contract negotiations before anyone in the union is laid off, a generous omen that might lead to some concessions, but a drawn-out way to fire people—especially since so many names are already out there. The union members who’ve been marked for sacrifice were told that their last day would likely be January 1. For now, they wait.

But who knows what kinds of adjustments are being made to qualify that growth. Before he started at Condé Nast, I’m told that Lynch made sure certain company legacy costs—like mortgages and pensions and long-term payouts given to high-profile editors and executives—would not be included in his P&L, since they weren’t his decisions. Regardless, EBITDA positive or not, it’s estimated by some executives at the company that Condé Nast has lost significant sums during Lynch’s four and a half years at the helm, albeit for some decisions made before his time. One person close to the board and Newhouse family said that they could not confirm an exact number, but that it was a “colossal amount of money.” (In a statement, Carrig underscored that, “For the last three years, the company has been break-even to EBITDA positive.”)

Internally, senior leaders wonder how reaching even break-even on paper could be possible in 2023, given that the company simply does not have enough traffic to meet their advertising goals. Inventory is down by as much as 50 percent in parts of the business, I have heard. (Someone close to Lynch has disputed this in the past.)

One of Lynch’s early strategic decisions at Condé Nast was to institute a paywall at publications like Vogue and GQ. Ostensibly, it was a brazen and overdue decision by a proven executive and fiduciary with a global, outsider’s perspective, which is what the Newhouse family assumedly wanted in their chief executive. And yet… it also represented the sort of naïveté of a person unfamiliar with the company’s history and quirks.

After a generation in which the digital business was largely ignored or undernourished under Chuck Townsend, former Condé Nast C.E.O. Bob Sauerberg and former chief digital officer Fred Santarpia followed the vision of BuzzFeed and Vice and tried to build a traffic-at-all-costs machinery—with a few exceptions—that began, inadvertently, diluting the value of cherished brands in the name of scale and site speed. It wasn’t all their fault: At the time, Condé Nast needed to catch up quickly with its peers (Hearst in particular was ahead on this), and almost every new idea seemed like a good one. But the work of growing upscale, niche brands, especially as many functions began to be centralized, soured quickly. By the time Lynch came along, many titles had been compromised: They’d traded their long-term audiences for next-gen viewers who liked slideshows and Game of Thrones recaps, and demonstrated little affinity. The Condé digital properties had become pure traffic plays, all while traffic declined.

Lynch could have either re-accelerated the traffic growth (a bad idea) or rebuilt the properties for a subscription era—effectively figuring out how to express each brand through a germane digital strategy. Instead, he put paywalls on them, whether it made sense or not. It may have seemed like a good idea in the boardroom, but it was a tough sell to people both inside and outside the building.

These days, some executives argue that the rigid paywall has contributed not only to decreased traffic at some brands (not all), but to stalled subscription uptake. Others say that the issue is bigger than any paywall: Consumers are simply not going to URLs anymore, a trend that has been accelerating for a decade, since the height of Facebook and Twitter. Now they’re spending more and more of their time on TikTok, Instagram, and other social media. And while Condé does make money on some of those platforms, including TikTok, it still relies heavily on direct-sold campaigns—the company’s mother’s milk and the revenue that feeds the joint’s salesperson-first culture. Regardless, nothing will ever cover the loss of the six-figure magazine ad page.

According to the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) subscription numbers, most subscriber bases are at least flat. The New Yorker, for instance, has around 1.2 million subscribers in total—including digital-only and print-and-digital combined—the same number it was touting six years ago. Condé Nast publications are no longer included in the AAM quarterly report that tracks publications across channels, but I was still able to pull stats on the publisher’s five marquee brands: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, and Bon Appétit.

The New Yorker marketing team also relies on heavy discounting, a common tactic, which minimizes the ARPU. Years ago, when he was leading the paywall charge, David Remnick rightly pointed out that a subscription to his beloved media entity shouldn’t cost the same as a cup of coffee. Alas, years later, despite all its success, Instagram has been littered with deals for The New Yorker, often bundled with another Condé brand and/or a tote, for the price of a Levain cookie.

GQ lost the least amount of print subs over the time period (65,271) and Bon Appétit lost the most (a staggering 630,323). The Bon Appétit numbers in particular raise a red flag. While digital subscriptions were up significantly over the two-year period from a very small base—to more than 138,000, from 50,000—the print drop-off is massive, far more than any other title. Also, YouTube is no longer the revenue generator it once was for the business. Part of that is a macro issue: The Alphabet-owned platform is no longer prioritizing 5-15 minute videos on phones—the thing the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen does so well—but rather short, sub-2 minute videos.

After several major and micro scandals, Bon Appétit—despite still attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers on most videos—has also failed to mint new stars. (So as not to pick on Bon App, it’s fair to note that Vogue hasn’t had a breakout video hit since “73 Questions.”) Whether any of this resulted in the pre-layoffs exit of Condé Nast Entertainment head Agnes Chu, and the dissolution of that unit, is an open question. Some believe the division was doomed from the beginning, and Chu was just the first of many cuts that Lynch needed to make this year in order to hit his numbers. (Experts will recall that Chu was only hired after Dawn Ostroff left for Spotify, and the company replaced her with this guy Oren Katzeff, who came from a thing called Tastemade and lasted about 12 seconds.)

In a statement, Carrig said that global advertising revenue is projected to be down “less than 3 percent” this year from 2023, which Carrig said mostly comes from an expected decline in print. I’m hearing that advertising revenue in the U.S., where the business generates about $1 billion a year in sales, is down more than that—in the vicinity of 5 or 6 percent. Because of the decline, it’s likely that there will not be end-of-year bonuses. (Carrig said that decision has not been made yet.) Additionally, it’s important to remember that these numbers are not what was budgeted. The financial goals that were budgeted were far higher than last year’s recorded revenue, and therefore are significant misses.

Lynch has mentioned in interviews that doubling down on e-commerce is part of his current strategy, and affiliate marketing is certainly one way to increase the numbers. But affiliate links are a tricky business, heavily reliant on the whims of Amazon, and only serve as a boost, not a supplantation. In fact, the knock on Lynch during his tenure is that he’s been able to cut, but not to innovate. The question is whether that’s a failure of strategy or execution, or simply a secular reality of the company.

Perhaps the only thing Lynch needs to worry about is managing the board, which may uniquely understand his challenges. In the end, many management teams resemble their ownership structure, and Lynch reports to a board controlled by a media dynasty now entering its fourth generation. Si Newhouse, the delightfully capricious godfather of the business, has been gone for six years, and the family has other, far more material business interests—to wit, it remains the largest individual shareholder in David Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery and a major investor in Reddit, which might I.P.O. in 2024, plus Charter, the cable entity that just hit the mattresses with Disney. (Advance, the family’s parent company, also owns The Ironman Triathlon for some reason.) Meanwhile, it’s also hard to imagine drastic changes at the helm while Anna Wintour remains chief artistic director, and the majority of the business—including video now—reports to her.

But many former and current executives nevertheless still want to know why Lynch is there. Why did the Newhouses, the family that created this company through decades of M&A and brand revival—don’t forget that Si bought The New Yorker from the Fleischmann butter heirs, resurrected Vanity Fair, and so much more—hire him to lead an era of consolidation? To sell? Almost zero percent likely. To ruthlessly manage a declining business? Perhaps. Or was it to create something new with what’s left of the old?

That’s my guess. The problem, though, is that he hasn’t done that—partly because he’s the first leader hired from outside the company, forced to have to learn on the job, and secondly because he still has a lot of disgruntled near-lifers laying booby traps for him, perhaps unaware of the magnitude of his Sisyphean task. That’s a relic of the good ole days, to be sure, and maybe a sign of the company’s enduring culture.

Farfetch is thinking about selling the department store Browns, given all its financial problems, according to this report. I’m not sure how much that’ll help, but hey, if you’ve got a family office and you like shopping, might I point you in this direction? [WWD]

The Fashion Awards, the British Fashion Council’s annual gala, happened on Monday night. [New York Times]

I’ve been admiring Jalil Johnson’s style from afar; so glad Leandra Medine profiled him. [Cereal Aisle]

Love the choice of Heidi Bivens to style the Taylor Swift Time cover. Love Taylor in Alaïa!!! Love Taylor in Ralph Lauren!! Love Taylor in Area!!! Love Taylor’s hair, too. As for the cover art… [Instagram]

Fashion press trips that actually look very fun: Hermès hosted a winter camp in Aspen (Alison Roman and Evan Ross Katz showed up), Prada took everyone to Shanghai for a new exhibit, and Chanel headed to a Manchester United football game before their annual Metier d’Art show.

And finally… what’s up with people wearing house slippers outside of the house?