Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Last week was so nutty. How are you doing? It’s going to be okay, I promise.

To make you feel a little better, I’ve surveyed the Kering situation, from Valentino and Pierpaolo (and Alessandro!!) to Gucci and Sabato. I’ve also got a positive update on The RealReal, some goofy news about Esprit, plus a selection of the best writing on Dries Van Noten, Martin Greenfield, and Pierpaolo. And of course, the requisite Condé murmurs. Did you try to sign up for Puck over the weekend and throw in the towel? Or attempt to buy my book before getting lazy? I am tracking your efforts through spyware and if you don’t follow through, I will get you. Kisses!

Mentioned in this issue: Kering, The RealReal, Roger Lynch, Steven Newhouse, Esprit, Ana Andjelic, Valentino, Mayhoola, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Jacopo Venturini, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Alessandro Michele, Fendi, Gucci, Sabato De Sarno, Paul Mescal, James Franco, Bottega Veneta, zines, Saint Laurent, Robin Givhan, Toni Belloni, Bernard Arnault, GLP-1s, and many more…

• Condé text chain gang: Late last week, the Condé Nast union started a group text in which members unkindly asked if anyone else had heard that C.E.O. Roger Lynch, who was reportedly in California while H.R. head Stan Duncan and the others faced union members in One World Trade, would be exiting post-Met Gala. This seemed like a mean-spirited little tactic designed to cause an unwarranted shitstorm and personalize a brutal and ugly negotiation. It’s totally not true, by the way, according to my reliable sources. Condé Nast management, for their part, has inelegantly managed the negotiations. But only a band of nihilists would terminate a C.E.O. in the middle of this sort of drama. And the Newhouses, with their $26 billion fortune, are not nihilists. In fact, they just made another $2 billion on the Reddit I.P.O.—a 5,800 percent return on a $10 million investment.

  This union stuff is not being handled well, and it’s definitely Lynch’s job to fix it, so he better figure it out. But the union isn’t doing itself many favors, either. For instance: it seems pretty shortsighted to antagonize Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Jamila Robinson, who’s been in the job since September, for something clearly out of her control. Also, if I was the board—and in particular, Steven Newhouse—the union wouldn’t be the thing keeping me up at night. Labor unrest aside, these brands are being decimated, save for Vogue, GQ, and The New Yorker. (The other marquee names seem to have dropped off the priority list.) After all, Lynch was brought in to manage a rocky transition toward a profitable future. His job was to ensure that the Newhouses stopped losing money on the family heirloom.

  If I were Lynch, I would have probably laid off even more people—maybe even closed or sold a couple more properties—and invested in ideas that would attract new talent and get advertisers and subscribers excited. No one is excited about anything other than the Met Gala and Vogue World. Alas, it’s his job to fix that, too.

• An Esprit implosion: A couple of weeks back, marketing guru Ana Andjelic split from Esprit, the San Francisco-founded maker of pastel logo sweatshirts, last popular in the 1980s. (I suggest buying one on Etsy.) Soon thereafter, her team and much of the staff hired to revive the long-dormant-in-the-U.S. label was laid off. (The exits were in the double digits, and people did not receive severance.) I hear that the brand, which is traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange and was revived in 2021 by a group of Chinese investors—including C.E.O. William Pak and his wife, company chair Chiu Christin Su Yi—was seeking outside investment last year but never entered an agreement. The five stores in the U.S. are already closed or will close by the end of spring. We’ll likely know more when the company, which was operating at a loss in the first half of 2023, announces its annual results soon. (It issued a profit warning in early February projecting an annual net loss of something like $250 million.)

  If the current investors are not able to find an Authentic Brands Group-style operation that wants to license the I.P. sooner than later, my guess is that they’ll probably file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. It’s too bad that it isn’t working out, but it’s basically impossible to revive these types of brands at the moment unless you have patience, time, and lots of money. (P.S., I reached out to Andjelic, who had no comment, only to say that she wishes the “leadership in Hong Kong every success in their ongoing business transformation of this iconic brand.”)

• The RealReal is really okay… for now: Remember when I told you that The RealReal had hired a law firm specializing in bankruptcies and restructurings? Well, in case you missed it, the upscale reseller was indeed able to restructure some of its debt originally due in 2025. At the end of February, the company closed on some debt exchanges to push back the due date. Instead of owing $172.5 million in 2025 and $287.5 million in 2029, the company now owns $26.7 million next year, $281 million in 2028, and $135 million in 2029. (Moelis & Company advised on the transactions.)

Who knows. I’ve heard that Piccioli, like many designers, wants to direct movies, so maybe he’s ready to do that. After all, the accessories-driven, global business that Valentino is in—and that Kering and Mayhoola want it to be—is not Piccioli’s natural provenance. He’s a fashion designer, not a designer-marketer hybrid. Regardless, it’s probably time for C.E.O. Jacopo Venturini to bring on a new creative partner.

Venturini, a long-time star behind the scenes, was the master merchant credited not only with Valentino’s Rockstud commercial success in the early 2010s, when Piccioli was co-designing with current Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, but also much of the retail magic made at Alessandro Michele’s Gucci. Chiuri and Piccioli were what the business needed after Valentino Garavani retired in 2008. Piccioli was what the business needed after Chiuri left for Dior in 2016. Now, it needs something different.

We’ll know what’s going on soon enough. While Valentino announced that it will not stage runway shows for men’s and couture in June, Kering is not slow with announcements, and I’d be shocked if a plan isn’t already in the works. As for who it might be, it’s easy for the mind to travel straight to Michele, Venturini’s former collaborator at Gucci, who has made it clear that he has been working in Rome, and wants to continue working in Rome. And wouldn’t you know it, by Monday there was a report in WWD suggesting that Michele was in talks to take over.

It’s probably true, and it would help to explain a lot, but would also require Michele to return to the Kering fold after a difficult breakup. (It’s very likely that the group will indeed seize control of Valentino in the next four years—you don’t structure two-step deals without that intention.) I approve, if only because Michele loves referencing archival fashion in his work, and Valentino’s archives are so vastly different from Gucci’s that it might spark a new idea. Fashion is desperate for those. What’s more, Valentino’s size—still under €2 billion a year in sales—is good for Michele. Like Fendi, where Michele was rumored to be destined this past fall, Valentino has the potential to reach €5 billion, or even €8 billion, in annual revenue with the right creative push.

Another possibility, although much more unlikely, is that Chiuri could return to her previous position. After all, she is said to have discussed the Gucci job with Kering, and is currently busy restoring a theater in Rome; having a day job based there would help, especially if she is ready to close out her blockbuster tenure at Dior.

The company suggested that the results are, at least in part, due to a wishy-washy Chinese consumer, combined with the fact that Gucci designer Sabato De Sarno’s vision isn’t totally represented at retail. Not only do many of the stores still look like Michele, but the products inside of them are from the in-between time.

One thing’s for sure: There’s no way Kering has already given up on De Sarno, who’s been tasked with moving the business from €10 billion to €15 in revenue. It doesn’t work like that, and as I reported last week, I hear his clothes are selling in the U.S. Generally, the Kering brass have the right idea about what Gucci needs to be: clean, easy stuff. And the advertising campaigns work. But when alien magpie Michele got his chance to make over Gucci in 2015, we didn’t know what was coming—and didn’t particularly care, given Gucci’s stale state when he was appointed. Michele’s first collection was thrown together so quickly that one of the Gucci “GG” belts was worn upside down on the runway, and not on purpose.

De Sarno, on the other hand, was given no room for error. Not only have the collections been picked apart, but there are other little things that have bothered people, especially Michele loyalists—from the use of the word “ancora” in the campaign to the botched attempt to show the debut collection outside. I’m sure the company anticipated there would be resistance to the changeover. They went so far as to memorialize the lead-up to the first show, recently releasing a 20-minute documentary, Who Is Sabato De Sarno?: A Gucci Story, narrated by Gucci campaign star Paul Mescal and directed by Supermarché’s Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, of Catfish fame. (Some things cannot be invented.)

This is not the first time Gucci has made this type of film—in 2013, James Franco directed Frida Giannini: A Fashionable Life—and there’s plenty to refer to in the genre, from Valentino: The Last Emperor to Dior and I. And as far as these things go, Who Is Sabato De Sarno? is quippy propaganda. (Yes, I watched it.) Will it help connect the dots for consumers? Maybe more important is that Gucci is presenting its next Resort collection in London, this May, the first sleepaway show since De Sarno’s arrival. It’ll offer the fashion world, and its fans, a greater opportunity to get to know De Sarno. Mostly, it’ll be a test of the hanger appeal of his wares: The Resort and Pre-Fall collections stay on the floor at full price for far longer than Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter. The question, for me, is whether we’ll look back on this last year as a sentence in the Gucci story, or the start of the chapter. For Kering, there is no room for typos.

Is this a good way to run one of the most important companies in Europe? Some financial analysts argue that LVMH is too big for five kids to be duking it out—we’ve all watched Succession and know that doesn’t end well… But I’d argue that none of the Arnault kids will be C.E.O. for many years, and that Michael Burke, Stéphane Bianchi, and others have been put in place to ensure it doesn’t have to happen until it’s meant to happen. [Bloomberg and The Telegraph]

Congrats to Casey Lewis, who quit her job at Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm to focus on After School, her Gen Z newsletter (and much more). [Subscribe Here]

Like fashion, most art does not retain its value. [Artnet]

Tom Ford drag! José Criales-Unzueta is a genius. [Vogue]

If it weren’t for so many Americans buying GLP-1s, Denmark (home of Novo Nordisk) may have had a small recession last year, one writer posits. I’m very much against these types of conclusion jumps—What Ifs are for weak people—but now that Ozempic is one of Oprah’s favorite things, this category is only going to become more important to every wealthy economy. [Twitter]

What Your Sweetgreen Order Says About You. [GQ]

Serious question: Is Ashwin scammier than anyone else who works in restaurants? [This, and then The Fallout]

Also: I was on two episodes of The Motley Fool’s podcast talking Abercrombie and denim. [Here and Here]

Until Wednesday,
Lauren