Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Things are ramping up fast. We’ve got Willa Bennett-to-Cosmo intel and thoughts, an executive shake-up at Jenni Kayne, a reality check for young-and-naive designers, plus a few can’t-miss updates from the streets of New York and the top of my inbox. Most importantly, Rachel Strugatz is here with a story about one of LVMH’s biggest beauty brands: Givenchy. Yep, you read that right. Forget about who the next designer will be for a minute. The trouble in the beauty division—which is run separately from the fashion division—is this week’s main event.

💌 💌 You’re invited: My book, Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon, co-written with my longtime work wife Chantal Fernandez, is out this fall. There will be events in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and beyond. First up: a book launch conversation with Glossy author Marisa Meltzer at McNally Jackson’s Seaport location at 6:30 p.m. on October 8. Click here to RSVP.

Mentioned in this issue: Givenchy Beauty, Prisme Libre, Sephora, Willa Bennett, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Condé Nast, Joanna Coles, Debi Chirichella, Vogue, Interior, Julia Hunter, Jenni Kayne, Khaite, Adam Sandler, Blackbird Spyplane, Makeup by Mario, Alessandro Valenti, LVMH, and many more…

• Willa is a Cosmo Girl now: There are a million reasons Highsnobiety’s Willa Bennett is a perfect choice to be the next editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, such as they are, as announced by WWD on Tuesday. Bennett is a student of youth culture. She cares about journalism. She is not a prude. Advertisers love her, too.

  Hearst has been searching for a replacement for Jessica Giles for months, according to those in the know, and the remit was to hire someone who was less of a brand manager (Hearst has plenty of those) and more of an editor-editor—a person who wants to dig into features and really, most importantly, give Cosmo (and Seventeen) a sense of purpose years after so much of their value was stripped away. Like Glamour over at rival Condé Nast, Cosmo was once an extraordinary, company-defining business for Hearst, generating hundreds of millions annually, especially in the Kate White years. It was a triple threat in magazine terms—robust newsstand sales, a large rate base, and hugely profitable. A very memorable 2012 Times Magazine story on White, entitled “99 Ways to Be Naughty in Kazakhstan,” noted that the magazine then had a print circulation of 3 million and 64 editions in 100 international markets.

  Today, though, people scroll TikTok and binge episodes of Esther Perel’s podcast for sex advice. CPG and beauty advertisers have better things to do than sponsor Cosmo content. When Giles, good at managing up and managing advertisers, took over the magazine in 2018, she set out to modernize it—meaning less skinny, less blonde, and fewer white women covers. While most of the cover stars—it is still printed on paper four times a year—are still skinny, there are plenty who aren’t white. And yet, Cosmo is more vanilla than ever. Even if you weren’t a regular reader during the White or Joanna Coles days (or, for some of you, the Helen Gurley Brown days), you were aware of it. There was a sharpness, a jazziness, a cleverness to Cosmo. That’s gone. When was the last time you noticed a Cosmo article being passed around social media? As for Seventeen: Amazing that it’s still around, right?

  The Hearst brass, however, must see an opportunity here, or perhaps they simply see an opportunity in Bennett, who is skilled at attracting attention. A great example: A few weeks back, Highsnobiety released an editorial package depicting bins going through security at TSA, a send-up of the classic “What’s in Your Bag?” magazine feature. (These bins were filled with designer goods.) It was a simple shoot, nothing sophisticated, but it got passed around for days.

  Hiring Bennett—a cool kid in a building where the old men love to grumble about cool kids—is a pretty punk move for Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella. This is her first significant creative hire since accepting the role in 2020. Debi is a finance person, and she comes from Condé Nast, where she wasn’t considered C-suite material. When she replaced Troy Young after his peak-pandemic cancellation, the reaction from the Hearst team was something like, Well, she’s here, she’s a suit, and it’s very unlikely she’s going to get canceled. What I’ve heard since from senior-level editorial people, though, is that… they think Debi is pretty cool.

  Look, it’s all relative, and Hearst has plenty of problems. It’s not just Cosmo that is boring. Whether or not Bennett will be able to turn things around, or attract fashion and luxury advertisers to two titles that have never courted them in earnest, who knows. This may be a Hail Mary, especially for Seventeen. Perhaps Chirichella has observed the success of Stellene Volandes’s Town & Country—where they still seem to be having fun writing cover lines—and also Elle Decor, run by Asad Syrkett, and realized that the key to making a great magazine is playfulness.

  As for what happens at Highsnobiety? I haven’t done any reporting on that side yet. Here’s what I will say. Everyone is replaceable, but not everyone is replicable. I suspect they’ll be able to coast for a while on the fumes of Bennett’s vision, but then they’ll have to bring somebody new in to shake things up.

• I don’t want to eye-roll at the closing of an independent company, but…: You may have read the article in Vogue this week about Interior, a New York-based label (please don’t call it a brand) shutting down after three years in business. “I did everything I could to fight against this,” co-founder Jack Miner told my king, the fashion writer José Criales-Unzueta.“No founder or designer wants to end up in the position I found myself in.”

  They sure don’t, Jack. And despite the melodramatic tone, you have to give him credit for being honest about the fact that he was closing up shop, and explaining his relatable financial troubles. A lot of designers deny they’re going out of business and instead claim they’re taking a “pause,” which always makes me sad.

  However, as a person who has covered many, many label closures, I’d argue: Did Interior ever really exist? Like, sure, it existed, but it wasn’t anything any of us ever needed to pay attention to. I never bought into the proposition—not even that U-neck sweater beloved by young fashion editors and newsletter-ers alike—and it turns out I was right not to.

  Young fashion is emotional: There’s truly no reason to start a new brand. You have to be a little crazy (and, in most cases, a little rich) to do it, and even crazier—and richer—to succeed. (Even then, the definition of success is very loose.) When my instinct is to say, I don’t have time for this, a designer’s instinct should be to say, I will make you have time for this. If they don’t want to do that, or they can’t do that, they need to stop. It’s okay that Interior failed, and that dozens of other brands failed. More brands should fail so that the people behind them have a chance to succeed… at something else.

• The magical executive behind all those oatmeal-colored sweaters is leaving: I’ve heard through the grapevine that Julia Hunter, C.E.O. of Los Angeles-based fun project-turned-serious lifestyle brand Jenni Kayne, is on her way out, and that Kate Watters, who has been with the company for over 7 years, will assume the role of President. When Hunter became C.E.O., in 2015, Jenni Kayne was just another contemporary brand: a cute, California preppy concept with a shop or two. Hunter doubled down on paid marketing, physical retail, category expansion (home, accessories, beauty), and, most importantly, she priced their white jeans and v-neck cashmere sweaters better than designer comps. By 2023, annual revenue was over $100 million.

  I have no idea if Hunter has another gig lined up, but it sounds like she was ready to move on and is helping manage the transition over a several-month period. I thought they would have sold to private equity by now, but nobody wants to buy brands like this, even the good ones, at the moment. I reached out to Hunter and the Jenni Kayne folks to see if they wanted to comment and they sent me this statement: “After a successful ten years at the helm, Julia Hunter will be stepping down from her role as C.E.O. of Jenni Kayne, effective October 4, 2024. During her tenure, Julia played a pivotal role in shaping the Brand, driving growth and solidifying Jenni Kayne’s position in the marketplace. We extend our deepest gratitude to Julia for her tremendous contributions, and are pleased to announce that she will remain on the board of directors.”

• What’s in Adam Sandler’s Khaite bag?: I’ve gotten a lot of requests to investigate what the comedian was hauling out of the Khaite Soho store during a walk with his buddy, Chris Rock. Do you think he set up this pap shot to coincide with his Blackbird Spyplane interview, released within hours of each other? Can you imagine the word “Khaite” being printed in Blackbird Spyplane? (Of course not, we’re not talking C.P. Shades or C.P. Company here.)

  Anyway, neither Adam Sandler’s team nor the Khaite team wished to comment. Just tell me, it’s not a big deal! Also, I will find out.

• Totally forgot to say that: Leslie Fremar, Kamala’s stylist, is Canadian. Also: She was the inspiration for Emily Blunt’s character in The Devil Wears Prada.

The online feedback was fast and furious, with people claiming the new iteration made their faces look shiny and magnified texture, the very opposite of what the product was supposed to do. Beauty influencers went nuts, and there was a very online scandal involving reviews from dark-skinned creators. One TikToker blamed Sephora for the reformulation. (A source with knowledge of Sephora’s business told me the retailer “did not have anything to do with the brand reformulating this product,” but I did hear that Sephora is launching a new “story” at the front of the store that will be focused on “talc-free” products.) The uproar was more proof that everyone supports clean beauty, until the clean version of their favorite beauty product leaves them stranded.

Anyway, Givenchy stopped posting on Instagram for a week, and Prisme Libre 2.0 is no longer available on Givenchy or Sephora’s website (the blush and a limited-edition shade are available on the brand’s site). A spokesperson for Givenchy didn’t respond to request for comment, and Sephora declined to comment.

Givenchy’s botched rollout and mishandling of the situation has implications not just for LVMH, but the beauty industry writ large—especially when it comes to reformulations, crisis management in the internet era, transparency, and overreliance on a single product. The worst part, in many ways, is the irony in all this: By trying to make the most responsible corporate decision, Givenchy alienated its customers. Alas, in retrospect, the brand should have appropriately communicated or messaged why it decided to reformulate its bestselling product, given that everyone was perfectly happy with the original. I also reached out to cosmetic chemists and product developers, who all told me that the risk of contamination in talc is very, very low. And results from the most recent F.D.A. studies testing random cosmetics containing talc for contamination have been “consistently favorable” (read: no asbestos) over the last three years.

Givenchy named Alessandro Valenti C.E.O. in July, but I’m not sure how much oversight he’ll have over beauty. One frustration for former C.E.O. Renaud de Lesquen, who spent over a decade at L’Oréal before heading up Dior’s perfume business, was that he could not touch the beauty business in any way. At Givenchy, and LVMH more broadly, fashion and beauty operations are generally managed separately in order to maintain a competitive environment, even if it means sacrificing efficiency. However, as LVMH professionalizes and starts to run more like a CPG conglomerate, that’s changing at certain brands, and there are more shared resources on the back end. Either way, Givenchy can’t really afford to pause on Prisme Libre.

Regardless, it’s still inconceivable that a label with LVMH’s resources could wind up with a reformulation of its hero product that’s so vastly different from the original. Is this something Valenti can help remedy? Will Givenchy kill it off and backtrack? I know Glossier dealt with something similar when everyone hated the vegan Balm Dot Com 2.0 and they had to bring back the original, non-vegan formula. Of course, how LVMH decides to address this remains to be seen, but there’s at least one other brand that may benefit from Givenchy’s misfortunes. For Makeup by Mario, the timing couldn’t be better.

Until tomorrow,

Lauren