Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon medley of Puck’s best new reporting. First up today, Lauren Sherman gazes into her crystal ball and opens her reporter’s notebook to prognosticate the major themes propelling the fashion industry in ’25: What does Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel appointment portend for the luxury landscape? Are department stores toast? And how far will formerly #resistance-friendly, Trump-detesting industry leaders go to avoid getting tariffed into oblivion? Plus, below the fold: John Ourand chats with golf gurus Joe House and Nathan Hubbard about the overstretched PGA Tour and whether the sport is headed for a ’25 upswing. Scott Mendelson offers a timely post-mortem of the holiday box office. And Tara Palmeri sits down with presidential historian Douglas Brinkley to consider how the record books will portray Joe Biden. Meanwhile, on the pods… John Heilemann and non-fiction master Wright Thompson discuss why the story of Emmett Till matters more than ever. On The Grill Room, Dylan Byers and Semafor co-founder Ben Smith survey next year’s media landscape. On Fashion People, Lauren and Sara Shapiro assess the future of America’s mall brands, changes at Chanel, and luxury price hikes. And on The Powers That Be, Bill Cohan joins Ben Landy to discuss how Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet have forced legacy TV incumbents to countenance their own M&A strategies.

After one of the roughest years in recent memory for the luxury fashion industry, Lauren offers her predictions for 2025. Last year, we learned that the status quo isn’t working: The majority of luxury goods being sold are ugly, too expensive, or unoriginal, and this stagnation is forcing executives to rethink their strategies. Will designers start to prioritize capital-F Fashion over other more commercial endeavors? What does the oscillation of retail and D.T.C. businesses mean for fashion M&A? And will Hollywood continue its incursion into the fashion world? Read Now

Professional golf is also a mess, with competing leagues diluting the talent pool and overstretched PGA tournaments that few are watching. But with exciting new talent entering the ecosystem, a pro-merger golf fanatic in the White House, and a new indoor offering, could this year be a turning point? John spoke with two people who know the game and the business as well as anyone: Nathan Hubbard and Joe House, hosts of the Ringer podcast Fairway Rollin to discuss LIV, the doldrums of the PGA Tour, and the coming spectacle of indoor golf coming to ESPN. Read Now

[WATCH] Collaborating with Director Jacques Audiard

Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Karla Sofía Gascón along with many of the cast and crew, detail the collaborative process of working with Jacques Audiard on his audacious, genre-defying fever dream, EMILIA PÉREZ. —

EXPLORE THE EXPLOSIVE WORLD OF EMILIA PÉREZ

[CLICK HERE] — For more information on EMILIA PÉREZ and for upcoming screening opportunities, visit film.netflixawards.com

Scott spotlights the come-from-behind theatrical success stories that compensated for a lackluster summer and illustrated a new post-pandemic, post-strike, post-#Barbenheimer paradigm in this strange new box office world. It was a challenging year for Hollywood, but an encouraging slate of box office returns from the holiday season has left the industry feeling optimistic… even if the decline of once-dominant genres—and studios’ reliance on past-their-prime brands and franchises—are still a real cause for concern. Read Now

Tara presents her insightful conversation with presidential historian Douglas Brinkley about the strange, anticlimactic end to Biden’s remarkable 50-year career, and how his legacy will be measured against Trump’s. Will Biden be remembered for helping pass a major infrastructure package, restoring normalcy after the pandemic, his investments in semiconductor manufacturing, and combating climate change? Or will history remember the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, high inflation, and the border crisis? Read Now

John is joined by Wright Thompson, master of long-form narrative non-fiction and author of the book Heilemann adjudges the best of 2024—The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. Wright explains how he came to write The Barn, in which he blends history, journalism, and memoir to offer a new account of the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till a few miles from Wright’s boyhood home in Mississippi; what he learned in the process about race, the South, and himself; and why, now more than ever, the story still matters. Listen Now

Semafor co-founder and former BuzzFeed E.I.C. Ben Smith drops by to survey the media landscape heading into 2025: how news organizations are bracing for the impact of Trump’s return to the Oval, the recent wave of departures at The Washington Post, and how Semafor is balancing an events-first strategy with breaking news and good-old-fashioned email distribution. Listen Now

[WATCH] Collaborating with Director Jacques Audiard

Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Karla Sofía Gascón along with many of the cast and crew, detail the collaborative process of working with Jacques Audiard on his audacious, genre-defying fever dream, EMILIA PÉREZ. —

EXPLORE THE EXPLOSIVE WORLD OF EMILIA PÉREZ

[CLICK HERE] — For more information on EMILIA PÉREZ and for upcoming screening opportunities, visit film.netflixawards.com

Lauren is joined by Puck’s new retail correspondent, Sarah Shapiro, to discuss the year ahead: the future of mall brands, changes at Chanel, luxury price hikes, the consumer backlash to luxury price hikes, fashion and beauty M&A, and so much more. Plus: Lauren and Sarah also share what they bought over the holidays (mostly t-shirts). Listen Now

Bill Cohan joins Ben to discuss how the triple threat of Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet have forced the legacy TV incumbents—Comcast, WBD, Disney, and Paramount—to countenance their own M&A visions of what Bob Iger famously called the “everything on the table” era. Listen Now

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