Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet. I’m so tan! (Wear sunblock.)

In today’s issue, we’re closing some doors and opening new ones. For your eyes only, I’ve got color on the departure of WME Fashion head Susan Plagemann, whose tenure at the agency ended Friday. Over at Condé Nast, Plagemann’s alma mater, everyone’s chatting about how the Vogue U.S. head of content situation will play out, and grading Mark Guiducci’s first month at Vanity Fair. (Long month!) Finally, ever wonder what happened with that whole Law Roach retirement thing? Well, it seems he did have plans beyond the can’t-pay-that-well reality TV projects and posing on the red carpet next to Zendaya. I’m also sharing a robust, opinion-filled reading list. Programming note: Marisa Meltzer, author of a forthcoming biography of Jane Birkin, is my guest on Tuesday’s Fashion People. We philosophize on the early response to the new Outdoor Voices collection, the so-called return of the girlboss, street style at Copenhagen Fashion Week 😬, the comedown from Amy Odell’s Gwyneth Paltrow book, Goop Kitchen’s imminent arrival in New York, and plenty more. Listen here and here. I.R.L. programming note: On Tuesday, September 9, in New York City, I’ll be joined by Marisa; our very own Sarah Shapiro; newbie book author, writer, and vintage expert Erika Veurink; and The RealReal’s chief creative officer, Kristen Naiman, to discuss the state of resale during a live taping of Fashion People. The party starts at 5 p.m. at WSA, and Line Sheet readers will receive priority access. Also, if you work from that wild time of a building, come on down! Just RSVP to PuckEvents@puck.news with the subject line “Fashion People” for more details. Mentioned in this issue: Law Roach, Zendaya, Ryan Destiny, Emanuel Ungaro, Asim Abdullah, WME, IMG Models, Susan Plagemann, Mark Guiducci, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast, Vogue, Anna Wintour, Amy Astley, Jo Ellison, Lindsay Lohan, and many, many more…

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Three Things You Should Know…

Susan is out: Now that her three-year contract is up, WME Fashion president Susan Plagemann is leaving the company, as I told you months ago. The WME Fashion team—which includes IMG Models, Art + Commerce, and The Wall Group—was notified in a Friday morning meeting, followed by a company-wide email from WME co-chair Christian Muirhead. This was an incredibly undramatic ending to Plagemann’s second act after Condé Nast, where she was a successful publisher for a long time—just the right kind of mean to inspire the team—but ultimately met an unceremonious exit.WME hired Plagemann for her industry contacts and to create some infrastructure around a part of the business that had sort of floated on its own. When WME acquired IMG Models in the early 2010s, Art + Commerce (a small business that reps creative directors and photographers) was tacked on. The subsequent Wall Group (hair, fashion styling, nails, etcetera) acquisition, a couple of years later, was intended to bundle a suite of offerings that would make it easier for the agency to profitably package image-making. All together, this allowed WME to offer brands a product that included a photographer, a makeup artist, a nail person, and a star in service of their campaigns. They just needed a well-connected rainmaker, like Plagemann. That sort of worked, but it was Plagemann’s job to standardize the operations across the organization, and figure out the broader mission of WME Fashion, itself. In the end, there was no broader mission, and many of the ancillary businesses, like the New York Fashion Week events, were shed. Plagemann’s dream of WME Fashion becoming a sort of consulting firm to luxury brands never worked, and showed her lack of understanding of the core business, which is servicing clients. (CAA has also struggled to properly define its fashion division, and, I’m told, has pitched similar services to brands.) Despite their on-the-record insistence otherwise, I know much of WME’s senior leadership team found Plagemann challenging. But in the end, she did bring some structure to the division, and I suspect there aren’t any hard feelings. The exit was positioned as voluntary, more or less—that Plagemann chose to move on, etcetera. Nothing was communicated to staff about changes in reporting structure. For now, Ali Bird, Jeni Rose, and Kate Stirling will continue running IMG Models and The Wall Group. Sally Singer will continue running Art + Commerce. At some point, though, there is likely to be a restructuring: WME’s parent company, Endeavor, which was taken private earlier this year by private equity firm Silver Lake, has become especially focused on its controlling stake in TKO, the entity that owns UFC and WWE. Someone at WME told me to look at the way WME Sports is managed if you want to read the tea leaves on how WME Fashion may be structured in the future. While WME has been in shedding mode, sloughing off companies that don’t serve its core competency, which is talent representation, I suspect they like having the image-makers in the fold. These are solid, if small, businesses for now, although A.I. may change that sooner rather than later. (So few people wrote about Guess’s A.I.-generated ad in Vogue because it looked so bad, but it won’t always look so bad.) In terms of what Plagemann will do next, someone suggested a return to Condé Nast, but that’s delusional. I could see her becoming the C.E.O. of the Council of Fashion Designers of America when Steven Kolb retires, which means she will never rid herself of me. (Disclosure: WME represents Puck.) A rep for WME declined to comment beyond a statement from Muirhead, which thanked Plagemann for her contributions and underscored that she brought “operational excellence” and “unified” the portfolio.
The Vogue waiting game: Back at Plagemann’s old stomping grounds, there was more speculation last week about who is actually getting this Vogue U.S. head of content job, who is still in the running, and who was never in the running.Chioma Nnadi, by all accounts, is not it: Even if they wanted her to consider the role, she didn’t want to apply. Is Chloe Malle even interested? Someone close to Amy Astley claims she is being groomed for the larger chief content officer role upon Anna Wintour’s inevitable retirement, but I am not sure the company plans to keep that role whenever the time actually comes. (Who knows what Condé Nast will look like at that point?) I’m not even bringing up the Eva Chen thing again. And the other Vogue-adjacent potential candidates remain obvious: Selby Drummond, Rickie De Sole, Nicole Phelps, etcetera. One person in the running suggested to me that Jo Ellison, the current editor of what was formerly known as How to Spend It, would make sense. (She was the candidate up against Edward Enninful when Alexandra Shulman retired.) While Ellison is ambitious, I suspect she wouldn’t want to leave England or deal with so many Americans. I’ve also heard rumblings that she’s pitching a book. Then there’s Kristina O’Neill, who makes a joke in her soon-to-be published guide to getting sacked, All the Cool Girls Get Fired, about wanting to be the editor-in-chief of Vogue. O’Neill and Wintour don’t seem compatible, but things change. Alas, I suspect that O’Neill has unlocked new ways to make money since leaving WSJ. and taking on the Sotheby’s magazine gig, so this could potentially be a financial retrenchment. (Her former deputy, Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, would be smart to go for it, although she did just start managing Elle Decor.) Wintour & Co. surely at least looked at Lindsay Peoples, who runs The Cut and is a hit with advertisers. (I could see current New York editor David Haskell wooing Willa Bennett from Hearst to succeed Peoples if she moved to Vogue.) One pie-in-the-sky idea is Times Styles editor Stella Bugbee, who I thought would have been a great candidate for Vanity Fair, but never appeared to put herself in the running. From what I hear, she’s not going for this, either. But hear me out. Bugbee is used to working under strong-willed editors (Adam Moss at New York) and likes challenging, make-something-out-of-nothing projects. (The Cut would not be a real thing if it weren’t for Bugbee, who transformed it into a publication that stands apart from New York.) A longtime art director, she’s also incredibly visual, and would have big ideas on that front. And she knows how to do a lot with little. Years ago, when Bugbee was still running The Cut, I remember receiving reports of her meeting with Jonathan Newhouse on the executive floor. Back then, the idea that she could succeed Wintour was incredibly compelling. It still is, but again, that doesn’t appear to be the assignment.
We’ve entered the era of Mark G.: Meanwhile, over at Vanity Fair, Mark Guiducci is making his, uh, mark. There are mild, previous-regime complaints that are too lame to mention. Some early chirps include that he doesn’t want it to be too “tradesy”—interesting, given how much the magazine has relied in recent years on the declining F.Y.C. business. Also understandable, though, given that F.Y.C. is declining, and there are enough trades.More relevant to our brethren: I hear he is set on either erasing the market pages altogether, or at least reimagining them. That can sound bad for the fashion editors who spend their lives calling in product for those pages (or asking P.R. people to send white-background stills). Market pages also fulfill advertiser expectations in a simple way. But I actually think this makes a lot of sense. First of all, those pages now work better online anyway, and are incredibly difficult to differentiate from an in-flight magazine. (Vogue, to be fair, still does a great job.) Sounds to me that every faction of the staff is concerned that their livelihood is being threatened, a natural reaction when a new person comes in. Guiducci will find other, hopefully more enticing ways to make advertisers happy—or he’ll need to, at least. Also, the layout of Vanity Fair hasn’t really changed that much since the 1980s. The stuff filling those pages has just gotten increasingly boring. Hopefully, he has real opinions about what it should (and shouldn’t) be. A rep for the company had no comment.

And now, on to the main event...

House of Roach

Zendaya stylist Law Roach is lining up financial backers to make a play for Emanuel Ungaro, a struggling, tech-owned French luxury brand that’s cycled through a dozen-odd designers since Asim Abdullah bought it from the Ferragamos, seemingly on a whim.

Lauren Sherman

There was much ado about Law Roach’s “retirement” from the world of celebrity styling more than two years ago. In the end, it meant nothing. Roach still has a lucrative arrangement with his top client, Zendaya, wherein he receives a percentage of her earnings on fashion-related projects. Otherwise, he’s been busy writing a book, appearing on multiple television shows, and adding clients back to his pruned roster, including up-and-comer Ryan Destiny and Ariana Grande.

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However, it seems that Roach does have something unexpected in store: The image architect may soon become a brand proprietor. I’m told that Roach has assembled a group of investors to buy the French fashion house Emanuel Ungaro from Asim Abdullah, the Silicon Valley tech investor who acquired the brand for $84 million from the Ferragamo family in 2005. The Ferragamos had purchased a majority stake less than a decade earlier and enlisted a young Giambattista Valli to design it, but never managed to turn a profit. (Ungaro, the eponymous designer who founded the brand in 1965, died in 2019.)

Abdullah’s story is pretty extraordinary. As documented by Cathy Horyn in The New York Times five years after the purchase, he bought Ungaro on a whim after growing bored with the tech industry that made him rich in the first place during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. “The fashion thing was not a planned event,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. “And even though I knew very little of it, I knew with a brand like Ungaro, I could refurbish it, and that I’d be able to do other things as well. It gives me a platform to build upon. I’m very committed to this business, but I see it as a stepping stone to other things.” At the time, the dizzying prints that made Ungaro famous in the ’70s and ’80s were discordant with the ’60s-informed styles of the mid-aughts, best represented by Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga, Phoebe Philo, and others. Abdullah hired several ill-fated creative directors—from Peter Dundas to… Lindsay Lohan—and by 2010, there were already rumors that he was angling to sell. Twenty years since his purchase and nine designers in (a lot, even for the musical chairs era), Abdullah somehow still owns it, despite persistent speculation that he’s saddled with debt. In 2021, he contracted Israel-born, New York–based Kobi Halperin—whose namesake line performs well at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue on the contemporary floor—to design the collection. In 2021, Abdullah signed a 10-year deal with Inter Parfums to create and distribute fragrances. I hear the real value, though, is in the archives in Paris, which are robust. Enter Roach, who has long been obsessed with Ungaro, and seems to have found some money to make this dream come true. I don’t know (yet) who is backing Roach, but it’s worth noting that he has worked with India’s Ambani family and has access to many people of that financial stature. If the deal goes through, Roach would own a majority stake in the business.

As for what his exact role will be, that’s still undecided. He may hire a new designer, he may design the collection himself; no matter what, he’ll have creative control. Not a giant leap, given that stylists like Roach often design red carpet garments in collaboration with the V.I.P. teams—and many stylists have gone on to be costume designers. (Never forget Rachel Zoe’s role in Harvey Weinstein’s ill-fated purchase of Halston.) But does Roach have the ability to make people care enough about Emanuel Ungaro for this to work? It’ll be tough, even with the right talent in place. The infrastructure needs to be there, too. Roach declined to comment when I called him. A representative for Ungaro and Abdullah did not respond to a request for comment. I’ll report back with more details soon.

What I’m Reading… and Listening To…

Ever wonder how LVMH got hold of 23 percent of Hermès’s shares back in the early 2010s? The story of a black sheep Hermès heir (who met with Bernard Arnault multiple times during the period, while still claiming he had no intentions of selling shares to LVMH) and his financial advisor (who died earlier this summer) sheds some light. [WSJ]

Re: the Food52 person who charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to the company to go on trips abroad and acquire clothes… I’m not buying the whole “seems to have coded her fraudulent expenses to make them appear related to the advertising campaigns she oversaw.” Someone was inept here! [New York] This writer took screenshots of Ty Haney being “Elon Musk’s reply guy” so you don’t have to go on Reddit. My take: Yes, it’s weird. But also, she is weird. She runs a “blockchain rewards platform” and was involved (on one level or another) with Musk in the past, so what do you expect? Also, Outdoor Voices has barely relaunched. Let’s discuss Ty and her strategy when O.V. performs and becomes a thing again. [A Grande Illusion] On the subject of Ty and her cohort, Danielle Prescod’s interrogation of the “return of the girlbosses” is worth a read. I don’t agree with everything she’s saying here, but I also think that that recent Bloomberg piece was stupid—positioning the reconstitution of many of these once-deflated execs as a “comeback” is propping them up in an artificial way, which was the problem in the first place. These women used—and were used by—lazy media to make their businesses seem more significant than they ever were, because it was fun to write about pretty (and, as Danielle points out, predominantly white) girls. [Highly Recommended by DP] I shared my favorite “L.A. food, drink, and leisure recs” in Emily Wilson’s very good newsletter. [The Angel] I’m usually straight-up callous about media layoffs, but Eater, which let go of 15 employees last week, is a solid brand that could have made a lot of money if it was managed properly. I could write 5,000 words on this. I won’t. But if you want to talk about it, I’m around. This is definitely someone’s fault, and the buck ultimately stops with Vox C.E.O. Jim Bankoff. Maybe Vox should let Lockhart Steele buy it back from them and then he could hire Emily Wilson to run it? [Puck] The Infatuation definitely benefited from the bungling of Eater. The pub, which was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2021, just launched a cute podcast with a name (sort of) inspired by us. [Restaurant People] What fashion people are reading this summer, other than Yiğit Turhan’s new novel. [Style Not Com]

Until tomorrow, Lauren

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