Happy Fashion New Year—and welcome to Line Sheet. It’s warp speed ahead from now on. Get excited! In this issue, you’ll find plenty of news and notes, including the first interview with editor Kristina O’Neill since she left WSJ. Today, she relaunched Sotheby’s Magazine with some old friends on hand (including partner-slash-creative director Magnus Berger and visuals director Jennifer Pastore) and an array of advertisers that have her back. More on all that—plus some very fun, kick-the-year-off-right scoops—below. But first, I’ve got a slew of Very Important Announcements for you:

🚨🚨Programming note: Today on Fashion People, my guest is Sporty & Rich founder Emily Oberg. We talk U.S. Open fashion, her controversial (lol) Wall Street-themed collection (it dropped last week), Paris versus Los Angeles, and why Chanel needs to go easy on the pink and purple. Listen here or here.

🗓️ 🗓️ Editorial calendar note: On Thursday, September 12, my plan is to run a very special end-of-Fashion Week mailbag issue. If you have questions, send them to me ASAP by responding to this email. Nothing is off-limits, of course! (Just don’t be creepy.)

📲📲 And a note for Puck’s paying subscribers only: Starting tomorrow and just in time for Fashion Month, I’m launching a Line Sheet SMS channel. Sign up here to get daily updates on what I’m hearing at the shows, dinners, parties, dinner parties, afterparties, and car rides in between. Think of it as my gift to you for doing the right thing and joining Puck. Much love!

Mentioned in this issue: Kristina O’Neill, Sotheby’s Magazine, Patrick Drahi, Clare Waight Keller, Uniqlo, Miu Miu, Dior, Abask, Natalie Kingham, the Mothay siblings, Polène, L. Catterton, Condé Nast, Vogue Arabia, Samuel Schler, Collab x Collab, Jacqueline Kennedy, Annemarieke van Drimmelen, the Venice Film Festival, Bob Lefsetz, Yohji Yamamoto, Nicole Kidman, Loewe, and many more…

• Tom Chapman just can’t quit you: The Matches co-founder is adding a fashion element to his home decor play, Abask, which launched in the fall of 2022. It launches Thursday, it’s called The Closet, and Natalie Kingham, the brilliant fashion director who worked alongside the Chapmans at Matches for years, is heading up the buy, I hear. My understanding is that it will include a tight edit of indie brands, most of which the Chapmans and Kingham knew in their previous life. One-off caftan maker Nazzy Beglari, knit-queen Ryan Roche, and babouche purveyor Calla are all involved. The whole point of Abask is to bring difficult-to-source objets d’art and other home items to a concentrated, curious audience—so my guess is that the fashion won’t feel so overwhelming at launch. What made Matches so great (and I think I speak for a lot of you when I say this) is that, no matter how many styles were on that site, it was fun to shop.
• On the Polène-L. Catterton deal: In case you missed it, the LVMH-linked investment fund has taken a minority stake in the mid-priced French handbag line founded by the Mothay siblings in 2016. (There isn’t much info on them, but their great-grandfather, Léon Legallais, was the founder of Saint James, the Breton-stripe shirt brand.) It seems that L. Catterton has taken over where Otium Capital—far-right rich guy Pierre-Édouard Stérin’s investment firm, which previously backed Victoria’s Secret competitor AdoreMe as well as France’s cutest clean beauty store, Oh My Cream!—left off when they exited.

  Why is L. Catterton interested in Polène, a French competitor to Mansur Gavriel in terms of price and audience? In Europe, mid-priced brands have fared far better than in the U.S., partially because there is much more of a walking culture, and therefore more of an in-store shopping culture. Private equity firms, including L. Catterton, have a habit of buying up these brands, helping them expand internationally by giving them the capital to open retail, and scaling from under $100 million a year in sales to closer to $500 million. Then, if they’re successful, they flip them via an I.P.O. or a sale to a strategic.

  Many of L. Catterton’s former and current investments fit into this category, including ba&sh, Ganni, A.P.C., and even Birkenstock. Will it work with Polène? Well, there’s certainly a market for mid-priced handbags, and in Paris, you see sensible people on the Metro regularly carrying bags from A.P.C., Sézane, Soeur, and yes, Polène. Americans who know about these bags will like and buy them.

  My bit of feedback is that the gold-foil-embossed logo on all of these bags looks super dated. (I almost bought this bag from A.P.C. the other day and stopped myself because of the logo.) I understand that these more affordable handbag lines need to do something to distinguish themselves for consumers, but embossing without the gold is perfectly acceptable. And I know this seems like a minor thing, but it’s not, and it’s the reason that many consumers will wait until a brand like Savette—which brands itself with hardware—or Métier or (the more affordable) Hunting Season goes on sale.

• The Vogue Arabia situation gets weirder: Remember when I reported that Condé Nast was attempting to exit its partnership with Middle East publisher Nervora? Well, it seems that the company is still moving forward with that plan, with or without the cooperation of Nervora. The current staff of Vogue Arabia is still working, but Condé Nast is simultaneously staffing several positions—including head of contents for Vogue Arabia and GQ Middle East—with an eye toward a November relaunch, I’m told. I asked Condé Nast comms what was up, but did not receive a response.
• On Clare Waight Keller’s Uniqlo promotion: Some big H.R. news from Europe coming in hot. First up, Clare Waight Keller is now the overall creative director of Uniqlo, on top of designing her ongoing capsule for the brand. (Vogue broke the news.) I’m scheduled to meet with Waight Keller tomorrow afternoon, so hopefully I’ll have more for you later this week, but I’m curious to know what this means for Christophe Lemaire, who designs his own line for the Fast Retailing-owned basics giant and leads up an “R&D” center in Paris. (Maybe nothing, but he was supposed to be contributing to the main line, also.)

  An executive in this world told me this morning that the main problem Uniqlo has had in the West—and the U.S. in particular—is that it doesn’t lead the business with creativity. Is Waight Keller the right person to change that? I’d argue that the biggest problem at Uniqlo is the marketing, and that the product itself is generally good enough to earn its place in your closet through word of mouth. (Also, its approach to collaborations, which we’re about to get into, is pretty unique and probably its most successful form of marketing.) Anyway, more soon, I’m sure.

• As for Miu Miu C.E.O. Benedetta Petruzzo becoming the managing director of Dior, reporting directly to Delphine Arnault…: Wow, what a get for Dior. Two initial things to think about here. To start, as I’ve mentioned before, Dior and Louis Vuitton are so giant that they are essentially their own companies, or a collection of companies within a company, which is within another company—the parent company, LVMH. That Russian doll of a biz requires very, very senior leadership across the C-suite. (Think of when Angela Ahrendts left Burberry to run stores at Apple.) There is also the matter of the talent drought on the executive side of the fashion business, and LVMH and Delphine are doing the right thing by hiring someone like Petruzzo, who oversaw incredible growth at one of the group’s only legitimate competitors.

Line Sheet: Why are so many collaborations lame?

Samuel Schler: Because they don’t align with either brand’s business objectives, they’re poorly executed when it comes to either product or marketing (or both), and/or there is a disconnect between all the different teams. Sometimes, the product is good and nobody even knows it exists. Sometimes, the marketing is good but the product is crap. Few companies hire someone to manage this part of the business, and it requires understanding on every side.

When a collaboration is good, what do the brands get out of it?

There are two types of collaboration in my eyes. Some are significant revenue generators, but those are usually long-term, multiyear deals. Others are a pure marketing exercise that won’t generate a lot of money. There is power to the one-off collaborations, but the longer-term ones can be more valuable. If a collaboration hits, it can create brand loyalty and attract new customers in a way pretty much nothing else can. Not only will you get new customers to shop this drop, but you’ll get them to shop again down the line. [Ed. note: Think about the Dôen x Gap collaboration or the Maryam Nassir Zadeh collaboration with J. Crew. These both served as customer acquisition tools for the bigger brands.]

If you could give brands one piece of unpaid advice regarding how to do collaborations right, what would it be?

Assess if it’s worth the time and money. (This is especially important for small brands that don’t have a lot of resources.) Think about whether your partner is going to be relevant in 12 to 18 months, because that’s how long it takes for these things to materialize.

Most people in O’Neill’s situation slink away to consulting or working in-house for a brand, never to return. But O’Neill still wanted to make a magazine in some shape or form. “Charlie called me the day I got fired,” she told me, referring to Charles Stewart, the C.E.O. of Sotheby’s. Stewart was appointed in 2019 after Swiss-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi took the auction house, a popular activist target, private at a 61 percent premium with $1.88 billion in debt. (Stewart had been the C.F.O. of the U.S. division of Altice, Drahi’s telecom firm, when it went public in 2017.) After a few months of consideration, O’Neill agreed to join Sotheby’s as the head of a newly created media division. Among other things, she was given the opportunity to relaunch the in-house magazine and related digital content, plus throw some cool parties and intimate dinners.

Aesthetically, it’s not so different from O’Neill’s WSJ.—there are even thumbnail drawings of all the experts featured, although they’re Joe McKendry illustrations, not headcut stipples. O’Neill spent her formative years at Harper’s Bazaar, which is obviously built around fashion, and her WSJ. was modeled on the lifestyle arts. For its part, Sotheby’s Magazine is organized around collecting, with plenty of nods to the auction process. After all, this is really a business proposition: The aim is to reach the auction house’s clients—and to attract new ones.

So, along with a jazzy auction calendar in the front and pages upon pages of real estate porn in the back (also known as Sotheby’s Realty house ads), the book is sectioned off into three “acts,” beginning with The Opening Bid, a news and notes spread, and closing with a one-page quickie—Going, Going, Gone—a nostalgia play spotlighting a memorable sale. (First up is the string of pearls from 1996’s Jacqueline Kennedy auction.) To give it some weight with the collector crowd, O’Neill has also engaged auction specialists to share personal quirks and tout upcoming sales. This time, head of modern collectibles Brahm Wachter recalled first holding Michael Jordan’s 1996-97 Chicago Bulls away jersey—made by the NBA’s previous outfitter, Champion, worn at least 17 times over the season, and sold by the private owner who bought it directly from the NBA. It’s expected to fetch more than $4 million on October 8.

In between the words (and there are a lot of words), you’ll find the requisite gorgeous fashion spread, reimagined as an artist’s portfolio by Dutch photographer Annemarieke van Drimmelen, and a slew of advertisers: Condé Nast defector Celine took the coveted backpage, with contributions from Bottega Veneta, Tiffany, Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Armani, Zegna, Ferragamo, Graff, Cartier, Neiman Marcus, Lafayette 148, Frame, and Ulla Johnson, but also wealth management firm Whittier Trust. (I didn’t clock State Farm, one of the underwriters of Vogue World.) A sales deck pegged the asking price at $30,000 per page, but the rate card is usually ignored for a debut issue in order to make sure that all the brands show up and create FOMO in the marketplace.

O’Neill told me that she has tripled the circulation base (listed in the deck as 35,000), which is populated with people on “preferred lists” who are “highly active in the Sotheby’s ecosystem.” According to the deck, the top tier of these clients spend $200,000 or more a year at Sotheby’s, and 7 percent of those clients own collections worth more than $100 million. They’re also older—40 percent are between the ages of 45 and 64. Think of it like an in-flight magazine, or an elite version of custom publishing. Showing up in front of this highly qualified audience is “the exciting piece for the advertiser,” O’Neill said.

But can O’Neill, a traditional magazine-maker of the glossy era, make a product that these hard-core collectors truly value? Does a collector want to read a piece on an artist by a liberal New York Times columnist? These days, successful publishing concepts increasingly focus on providing business intelligence more than the fluff and magic of yesteryear. Sotheby’s Magazine will be published six times per year, and while O’Neill appears to have been given a respectable budget to produce the first issue, she’ll need to prove that she’s creating an effective customer-acquisition tool. After all, Sotheby’s likely won’t tolerate a vanity project. As my partner Marion Maneker has noted in Wall Power, his excellent private email on the art world, Sotheby’s has been caught between a slowing art market and its nearly $1.9 billion in debt, all while still paying out a hefty dividend. (Drahi recently raised $1 billion from the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi.)

Anyway, O’Neill certainly has the backing of Stewart, who enjoys being in the rooms with the right people, including many of O’Neill’s personal friends. Projects like these can coast if they are able to break even, or only lose a little money in the name of raising awareness and generating sales leads. O’Neill, though, is determined to make it more than that. Whether this is her next big thing, or an audition for her next big thing, remains to be seen: “One of the things I realize,” she told me, “is that I do really well pushing up the walls of an institution.”

Emilia is throwing a party at Outline in Brooklyn on September 11. I have an internal Puck thing so I won’t be there, but you should go! [Shop Rat]

Read Bryanboy on the dire state of advertising campaigns. I’m a firm believer that you can’t go back, but I’m also a firm believer that everything can be improved. [Instagram]

Wow, what did we do to deserve Bob Lefsetz’s take on Harrods (he loved it), but also luxury goods in general. He even drops B.A.’s name and squeezes an Oasis reference in there. He is my forever inspiration. [Lefsetz Letter]

Annual sales for Victoria Beckham’s biz jumped more than 50 percent to something like $117 million in 2023. The company nearly broke even, too. (It lost about $260,000.) Rev was certainly boosted by Beckham’s presence in the popular Netflix documentary about her husband, and now she’s gearing up for her own doc. Grey sweatshirt lovers, unite. [The Guardian]

Little boys are really into cologne the way little girls are into fancy beauty products. [NY Post]

Rachel Kushner, dining at Taix. [NYT]

The faded plaid of Angela Chase’s shirt in My So-Called Life was the basis of my wardrobe for the entirety of middle school. [Vulture]

Right through the heart! [Twitter]

I’ll probably sit out on this Alexa Chung x Madewell collaboration, but I did enjoy this profile in which she talks about wearing too many Peter Pan collars circa 2010. Relatable. [NYT]

Until tomorrow,
Lauren