Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Whoa, buds, we had an 83 percent open rate on Monday. I’m flattered. Thank you for reading!!!

Today’s edition is all about the ascent of Will Welch, changes at Byredo and Net-a-Porter, another chapter in the Something Navy saga, and a little thought starter on a brand we haven’t heard about in a long time: Marchesa. It’s back. And yes, I will also address Pharrell.

I can’t even tell you how many things I had to hold for Monday because there is so much going on. It’s one of the many reasons I’m psyched that Rachel Strugatz is joining Puck as contributing beauty correspondent in February!

For the 17 percent of you who didn’t read Monday’s issue, we’re launching a Wednesday edition to house her brilliance and industrial expertise. (Names will be named!) What a time. Anyway, let’s get started.

Mentioned in this issue: Nicolas Cordier, Michael Burke, Byredo, Santal 33, Ben Gorham, YNAP, a Penske update, Anna Wintour, Will Welch, Jenny Lewis, Bethany Cosentino, Pitchfork, Bob Lefsetz, Georgina Chapman, Marchesa, Harvey Weinstein, Arielle Charnas, Matt Scanlan (how excited are you), Pharrell Williams, Sabato De Sarno, Phi, Robert Geller, Emily Oster, Gregg Renfrew, and many more.

• Changes at Puig’s coolest brand: People don’t write enough about Puig, the Spanish beauty conglomerate that does fashion, too, and may go public this year. There’s a lot going on there. For instance, Nicolas Cordier, the global C.E.O. of Byredo, is stepping away, I hear, with no news of a replacement. (In 2022, Puig acquired a majority stake in Byredo that valued the company at €1 billion.) Adam Banfield, the North American C.E.O., is still there.

  Founded by Swedish basketball player-turned-perfumer Ben Gorham, in 2006, Byredo is a powerful force in the indie fragrance boom that we’ve witnessed over the past decade. Le Labo, acquired by Estée Lauder in 2014, kicked it off with their hit, Santal 33; Byredo and D.S. & Durga kept it moving. Designer fragrances still sell, but celebrity scents are all but dead in certain markets. Byredo was a good bet.

  Gorham, still involved, is a pretty traditional startup founder—he has ambitions to grow fast. Companies like Puig tend to be more stable and risk averse. Regardless, Puig is taking the most interesting chances in the space (acquiring Dries Van Noten, Charlotte Tilbury, and most recently Dr. Barbara Sturm). A rep for Puig had no comment re: Cordier’s departure.

• A Net-a-Porter update: Word is that the retailer—still owned, for now, by Richemont—is slashing the number of beauty brands it carries by as much as 50 percent. Will it exit the category? Beauty brings down the average order value—even a fancy cream costs far less than a pair of boots—and it’s simply a different business, with different inventory management systems and related infrastructural issues. If Yoox Net-a-Porter Group is truly streamlining (even contemplating shutting down Mr. Porter), this would make sense. A YNAP rep did not respond to a request for comment.

• Michael Burke happened: After months of speculation, the longtime Louis Vuitton and Fendi executive is now the chairman and C.E.O. of the LVMH fashion group, succeeding Sidney Toledano, who told WWD that he is “not retiring” but will be taking a step back. Burke has worked for LVMH C.E.O. Bernard Arnault since the 1980s and is one of his most trusted advisers. Both he and Toledano are Arnault loyalists through and through, although they have very different personalities. (Toledano is warm, Burke is edgy.) Burke, in his early 60s, is also viewed as a person who could lead the whole group if Arnault were to step away earlier than expected. Maybe now that Burke is in place, we’ll start to hear more about those expected creative director changes?

• Penske particulars: A rep for Penske Media reached out yesterday to let me know that the exact number of layoffs at Fairchild Media Group, which I wrote about on Monday, was 11. The employees I talked to estimated “about 20.” People can often project that downsizing measures are worse than reality, except when they are actually much worse. (See below.)

Pitchfork started as a music blog in 1996, and became best known for its album reviews. People, readers, and musicians alike get emotional about these reviews. Jenny Lewis, for example, had a meltdown last summer about the site’s take on her latest album, Joy’all. Bethany Cosentino, best known from Best Coast, also freaked. They discussed. I remember these incidents because I probably only follow, like, 10 musicians on Twitter.

Condé, which bought Pitchfork in 2015, almost certainly never should have made the acquisition. At the time, as you may recall, the company was figuring out which brands to invest in and which to starve—so why buy another small entity just because it was in the live events space, an area where the company already had a core competency? As you also may recall, the management team that bought Pitchfork has been dissolved. What’s more, this deal went down in an era where legacy magazine publishers tried to flex their sagging muscles by acquiring the likes of xoJane and Hello Giggles. What was the point of a $20 million-ish deal on a company that barely made money when the much larger P&L was so embattled. Did Fred Santarpia and Bob Sauerberg buy something just to say that they were in M&A? In all seriousness, what did they expect?

By 2015, it was already clear that the independent music journalism that flourished in the 2000s was fading, and Pitchfork had seen better days. As a Bob Lefsetz-reading friend reminded me, “‘Poptimism’ happened, and every site that was ‘indie’ started reviewing Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande.” It was never a traffic play and it never made sense in the Condé portfolio, either. My guess is that the Pitchfork brand won’t last long under this new structure—feels very Style.com being absorbed into Vogue circa 2015—and that you’re likely to see more consolidation of this sort soon.

Condé O.G.s, many of whom read Line Sheet, will all remember that Condé executives once considered this sort of Russian nesting doll brand strategy—why not move Self under Glamour, say, or maybe put all of it under Vogue? This ideology never made it far in the old world, where familiar and anticipated turf wars were the coin of the realm. But it might be revived now that the org chart effectively raptures everything on the editorial side (even audience development) up to Wintour.

Regardless of whether they keep Pitchfork going, the absorption was understandable from a business perspective. Remember, Condé remains in cost-cutting mode, with union members on the no-fly list still waiting to hear their fate. (Union reps told those slated to be laid off that they need to keep working until it’s all sorted out because otherwise they could be fired for insubordination.) Actually, that reminds me, in a bargaining meeting today, the union told management that nearly 400 members are committed to walking out next week. Will C.E.O. Roger Lynch get back in time? He is currently in… Davos.

Finally, let’s assess what this means for golden boy (more specifically, bleached-blond) Welch and his remarkable ascent since being named editor-in-chief of GQ in 2018. Back when the company moved off Jim Nelson, Welch seemed like a homegrown exemplar of the company-wide trend of replacing legends with anonymous and pliant stewards of managed decline. Welch had successfully created GQ Style, a fashion-safe rump state adjacent to Nelson’s toy, and while it was clear to me that he was being groomed for the big job, he’s probably exceeded most everyone’s expectations.

While the optics of exiting a woman of color and replacing her with a powerful white man are not great—especially one who did so much work to make Pitchfork more diverse in thinking—Welch is actually more than qualified to oversee Pitchfork. He spent significant time in the 2000s at Fader (as did, coincidentally, British Vogue editorial head Chioma Nnadi). A bigger, more thought-provoking question posed to me by an ex-Condé Nasty with ideas: What does this say about Welch’s future at the company?

Look, nobody wants Anna Wintour to retire less than me. She is a fountain. I love writing about her. But she will have to step away at some point. Maybe, if Biden wins, she’ll accept that long-rumored ambassadorship. And even if she never leaves Condé entirely… she cannot have the majority of the company laddering up to her forever. While Welch is certainly not poised to run Vogue (I still have no idea who will end up getting stuck with that one), he is emerging as the clear choice to succeed Wintour as global chief content officer. Who else has the mix of editorial sense, business acumen, hustle, and taste? Oh, and everyone likes him—a rarity at One World Trade. I’ll leave you with that.

Why such slim pickings overall? Post-strike, celebs went gung-ho promoting and attending every event with a step-and-repeat available to them, no matter how garish, and there just aren’t that many samples left. It helps to explain why Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Armani have been everywhere this season. They have the resources (design, tailoring) to make custom pieces and carefully alter samples.

This exhaustion of options may also help to explain, just a little bit, why Marchesa was suddenly back on Monday. After years of hibernation, Georgina Chapman, ex-wife of Harvey Weinstein, re-emerged with enthusiasm, dressing Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham and food personality Padma Lakshmi in custom gowns. Chapman, who now dates the actor Adrien Brody and was out and about at parties on Monday, has also opened up to the fashion press after a four-year hiatus. Her Pre-Fall 2024 collection was reviewed by Vogue Runway, and she also participated in Emmy-related features that ran on Elle.com and HarpersBazaar.com.

Chapman first sought redemption in 2018, when Anna Wintour, her longtime friend, let her say her piece in Vogue. Wintour was criticized at the time for giving Chapman, who started dating Weinstein in 2004 and married him in 2007, a platform. But whether you viewed Chapman (or Wintour) as a Weinstein victim, enabler, or both, nobody thought much about what would happen to Marchesa, which, like many fashion brands built on a certain type of vanity, had mounting debts and a lack of purpose.

To be perfectly fair, Marchesa made pretty dresses, and still does. (They are sold at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and Bergdorf Goodman at present.) But it takes more than a little baking soda and white vinegar to remove the stain of Weinstein. When I asked around about who was backing Chapman, the sole designer of Marchesa since her co-founder, Keren Craig, departed in 2019, most people retorted with some version of, That still exists?

How Marchesa was financed was always a bit of a mystery, even if it wasn’t. Weinstein denied that he was funneling money to the business, especially toward the end. Eventually, it came out that he was at least indirectly funding it. At one time, though, Weinstein had real fashion ambitions, licensing the Charles James name in 2014. (James, an English American couturier who reached the height of his fame in the 1950s, was the subject of a Metropolitan Museum of Art costume exhibit that same year.) Before that, in 2007, he bought the famed American brand Halston. “This partnership will further the natural connection between the adjacent worlds of entertainment and fashion,” he told The New York Times back then. Nothing came of either venture.

Now divorced from Weinstein—who was recently sued for sexual assault and battery in Los Angeles while serving out a 23-year prison sentence in New York—Chapman appears more committed than ever to making Marchesa a success in the eyes of Hollywood insiders. Fashion-world approval likely means less to her at this point. (Craig, often given more design credit behind the scenes, is now catering to that world with an upscale loungewear line, Nidra Devi, launched in February 2023.)

But the question persists: Who is paying for Marchesa? The company, run by Chapman’s brother, has always mostly operated through a series of licenses. (The lower-end Notte line, both costume and fine jewelry, and others, are all manufactured through license agreements.) However, any operation that produces $5,000, $6,000, and $7,000 gowns for retailers—on top of creating custom pieces for private clients—needs a lot of cash.

As for the clothes themselves, I heard a few weeks back that Williams was going full Cowboys and Indians, and am unsurprised he thought to recruit Native Americans to help design some of the pieces. Stablemate Maria Grazia Chiuri employs a similar tactic when she references Indigenous designs: If you include the appropriated, is it appropriation? Williams is full of good intentions, and he did a clever thing by having Stetson boots finished off at the brand’s factory in Texas. He’s selling Americana, made in America.

Usually, reviews of these things are totally empty, but I encourage you to read Joëlle Diderich’s report in WWD, which interrogates every element of the show without totally dragging Williams. Diderich took issue with the theme-iness of it all—saying he came “dangerously close to Ralph Lauren territory”—but I’d argue that Pharrell needs it to look costumey in order to sell the individual pieces of the puzzle.

Williams made a telling comment to the backstage scrum. “If you’re going to spend your disposable income at a time like this, it needs to be for something that’s actually really going to last,” he said regarding the brand’s collaboration with Timberland boots. “It’s something that we love,” he also noted, “but at the same time, whether you’re, like, in the hood or you’re like, somewhere in a factory, Timberlands, they last long.”

How wild is it that one of the world’s biggest pop stars, who is being paid millions of dollars to put on a show that costs millions of dollars to stage, in order to sell billions worth of clothing and accessories, is talking about the price-value equation? It says a lot about the state of things. “Luxury fashion peaked in 2022—all the cool kids are spending more on design (furniture, objects, vintage cars, etc.),” an industry executive recently wrote to me. “A selfie with a Paulin chair is cooler than a selfie with your outfit.”

I was thinking of that comment when I looked at Sabato De Sarno’s first menswear collection for Gucci, a mirror image of his women’s debut, which received tepid reviews. I suppose I wasn’t surprised that he doubled down on every last bit of it, from the set design to the jewelry. With Gucci and other big brands, I can’t truly judge it until I see how the consumer responds, and his wares will not be in stores until the fall. Theoretically, this is what you wear when you are taking a selfie in your Pierre Paulin chair.

The problem was that someone (probably IHL) leaked the story (to WWD) too early, and Charnas and the Naadam Group received quite a bit of inbound interest from other parties, some of whom presented better offers. Just this week, IHL got fed up with waiting, and bowed out of the process, even though the group probably wouldn’t have won anyway. In an email to Charnas and Naadam’s Matthew Scanlan, a lawyer representing IHL expressed that the group “decided not to proceed” because of the “backtracking and flip-flopping… encountered over the course of this deal.”

Sure thing. While I expect Something Navy to sell within the next couple of months, it won’t be to IHL.

Richemont posted pretty good earnings, but most importantly: The sale process for YNAP is underway, and there is “interest.” [Vogue Business]

Loved this dive into Donna Karan’s “taxi” book. [Never Worns]

Robert Geller is Rag & Bone’s new designer. Notable that they went with a big name. He’s good! [Inbox]

Just a year after stepping away, Gregg Renfrew has been reinstalled as the C.E.O. of BeautyCounter. She made a lot of money when they sold a majority stake to The Carlyle Group in 2021 at a $1 billion valuation. [Inbox]

As an Elder Millennial mom, why didn’t anyone alert me to the fact that Emily Oster collaborated on a “capsule collection” with M.M.LaFleur? My brain is melting. [Axios]

Abercrombie! Mike Jeffries! Alleged sex crimes! [BoF]

Alert: Milan private equity firm Style Capital is looking at New Guards Group. [WWD]

Should we pay a visit to South Coast Plaza next time you’re in town? So close to A’maree’s! [CPP Luxury]

Do you all want me to look into this Blonde Salad Christmas cake scam thingy? [The Guardian]

And finally… forget about Marchesa, let’s bring back Phi!