Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet. Congrats to Jody Quon, the new editor of
T magazine! #itoldya
The Couture shows have begun: Schiaparelli and Dior were today; Chanel and Armani will occur tomorrow; Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier are taking place on Wednesday. And then there are the less dramatic storylines interspersed throughout the week. For example, I just had my final blow-out of the summer at David Mallett.
In
today’s issue, we check in on Dior’s Jonathan Anderson, who this afternoon delivered his second Couture collection, and his second full collection in two weeks—and traveled to New York to oversee the wedding looks of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce in the meantime. It’s a lot, especially given that the industry feels like an episode of Black Mirror. I offer a holistic assessment of how Anderson is faring.
Up top, I stopped
by post-Chanel Charvet, previewed the auction of Martin Margiela’s personal belongings, and weighed in on the (welcome) return of Olivier Theyskens. I’ll have more on the shows later this week, including news and notes from last night’s Standing Ground debut (of sorts) at the Irish Embassy: Designer Michael Stewart indicated, with real ambition and clear poise, that he must be auditioning for something.
Today on Fashion
People, my guest is Elana Fishman, style and shopping director at the New York Post, Taylor Swift expert, and my former colleague at Lucky. (R.I.P.) We discuss the wedding dress, as well as the best dressed wedding guests, the looks of Wimbledon—tennis kits and courtside fits—and, obviously, Chanel’s purchase of Charvet. Listen here and
here.
Also mentioned in this issue: Bernard Arnault, Michelle Obama, Naomi Osaka, Hôtel Drouot, Sabrina Carpenter, Andrew Rosen, Hermès, Greta Lee, Romeo Beckham, Theory, Olivier Theyskens, Kate
Middleton, Serena Williams, Richard E. Grant, Matthieu Blazy, Sienna Miller, Celine, Gabrielle Union, Virgil Abloh, Coco Gauff, Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Keith Haring, Zoë Kravitz, and more.
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Four Things You Should
Know…
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- Michelle
Obama’s new stylist!: The former first lady, whose work with longtime stylist Meredith Koop was memorialized in The Look, published last year, is now working with Thomas Christos Kikis, a sweet guy whose clients include Gabrielle Union and Sofia Richie. I can’t tell you whether this is a
permanent thing or not, but I can tell you that Koop has been posting encouraging words on Kikis’s Instagram posts featuring Obama. I know both of these people and they’re nice, so I’m sure it’s a peaceful transition, whatever is happening.
- Charnel check: This past Saturday, I stopped by the Charvet store on Place Vendôme at around 2 p.m. to pick up a friend’s custom order. Ostensibly I was doing a favor and paying my karma forward, but I also used the
occasion to check in on the family-run business following the announcement of its acquisition by Chanel. As you know, I’m always working!Anyway, it was not very busy—possibly because the brand’s upscale worker-bee clientele shops during the week, maybe because it was still muggy out, or because it’s facile to expect that Charvet was suddenly
going to have a queue out the door once Chanel placed its bid. (That said, there was a disproportionate number of people checking out the windows…) Indeed, some things will never change and Charvet is, delightfully, one of them. One less-attractive hallmark of a Parisian summer night: After noticing my bag on the metro, some guy mansplained to me in French that Chanel just bought Charvet. I definitely understood what he was saying!
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
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The duty-free era is over. The EU ended its de minimis exemption July 1, the US did in 2025, and the UK is next. In the
US and EU, every parcel now carries duties - and in the EU, liability sits with you, not your customer. Swap's new report breaks down what changed in each market. Inside:
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• Why de minimis ended and what it means for your margins
• How customs liability is shifting from customer to merchant
• What DDP vs. DDU means for cart abandonment and returns
• How to recalculate landed costs before the EU's November data rules
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- Margiela
magic: Martin Margiela’s personal collection will be up for sale in Paris on Thursday in partnership with Maurice Auction and Kerry Taylor Auctions. The sale will be live—you can watch it online, or in person in the 11th arrondissement at 2 p.m. CET. At my preview appointment, we weren’t permitted to take photos of the show, but I bought the auction manual that lists out all the lots for €30, and I recommend it if you are interested in Margiela and his work.The
designer, who left fashion in the late aughts, was incredibly private; there are few interviews with him, and fewer photos. Yet he was generous in other ways. His decision to give away 200 lots from his life, from the pieces he made in Antwerp in 1984 to his last collection in 2008, can be read, among other things, as a rare act of vulnerability. (Also, it can’t be about the money: A portion of the proceeds will benefit AIDS research.) His famous lab coat is there, graffitied tabis, the psycho
Barbie dolls he dressed. Margiela is credited with the art direction, Bob Verhelst with the scenography.
Interestingly, there was an entire room devoted to his work at Hermès—which, like his namesake line, is so prevalent in our current wardrobes. (The Row in its current iteration could not exist without the former.) Anyway, if you have time and are in Paris, book a slot and go see it, or witness the auction online. I may have a scene report.
- The Theyskens riddle: Why didn’t Olivier Theyskens make it into the pantheon of luxury? That’s all I could think about on Sunday night as he showed his first collection for Boloria, a new line backed by the same people who owned Tomorrowland, an electronic music festival. (They’re all Belgians.) The collection is quite good; the fabrications looked beautiful, the drape of the dresses was gorgeous. I loved the way that stylist Olivier
Rizzo flicked the collars up on one side to get people to pay attention. In a barren wholesale market, I presume Boloria will get a decent pickup. And if the line can deliver on time, at the right price, it may become a fixture at independent stores.
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- So why
hasn’t Theyskens landed a big job, or even been in the conversation when one is available? He’s only 49 years old, which is still young in designer terms. It sounds like a matter of bad timing and some bad choices. He won critical acclaim during creative directorships at Rochas and Nina Ricci, but those are both faulty businesses. “I also think he came in at a time when the industry at large didn’t have the same capacity it does today to activate his talent,” one executive told me. “He would be
at a big house today if the timing were different.”Of course, Andrew Rosen put him in charge of Theory for a few seasons about 15 years ago. (Those suits are still coveted on the secondhand market.) Perhaps it’s not too late for Theyskens to have real commercial success; he certainly has the capacity.
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The meta-narrative around Jonathan Anderson’s Dior has been that of a work in progress. It’s
going to take months, if not years, to get the house in order.
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Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson has the hardest job in fashion, but it seemed even
more difficult this week: On Wednesday, he presented a men’s collection, then promptly flew to New York to prepare Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce in custom his-and-hers Dior for their Friday night nuptials at MSG. Then he flew back to Paris on the Saturday red eye to present Christian Dior Couture at 2:30 p.m. on Monday. I’m exhausted just thinking about it, but that’s what the money is for, I guess.
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
|
The duty-free era is over. The EU ended its de minimis exemption July 1, the US did in 2025, and the UK is next. In the
US and EU, every parcel now carries duties - and in the EU, liability sits with you, not your customer. Swap's new report breaks down what changed in each market. Inside:
|
• Why de minimis ended and what it means for your margins
• How customs liability is shifting from customer to merchant
• What DDP vs. DDU means for cart abandonment and returns
• How to recalculate landed costs before the EU's November data rules
|
|
|
|
Transatlantic schedule aside, Anderson’s second Couture show was his best for the house so far. It was
his vision—not in service to the brand or the client, per se, but true to what I’d imagined Dior would look like when he took over in 2025: strange in some places, strangely beautiful in others, candy-coated where it needed to be. Anderson has incredible taste in art, and his admiration for Lynda Benglis, the American sculptor who’s been living between Santa Fe and India for the past several decades, was his elegant touchstone.
Anderson said he wanted more
movement in the clothes. Shown in the garden of the Rodin Museum, the clothes did move—with frayed edges sort of floating midair. They were also exquisite and cool, made for the woman who might outbid Anderson in a Hôtel Drouot auction rather than one who has never heard of the auction venue. The pretty parts—the shimmer, the pleating, the florals—were almost crude in an ’80s sort of way. The most-important looks referenced Benglis’s work directly (the fans!), but there were also the
shearling sweaters that mimicked chenille, and the Juicy Couture–esque knit suit lined in peach, which was the same color as the linings used by Dior himself.
In all, the collection represented Anderson’s ambition to make Dior feel entirely new while honoring its general dustiness—a house that works for Greta Lee and Sabrina Carpenter. It’s possible to achieve, but it requires a tremendous amount of
calibration. There may be easier paths to a revitalized Dior. He may be overthinking it. But Anderson doesn’t take shortcuts.
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Dior is a complex, multibillion-dollar business that grew too big too fast during an era when the industry
disavowed its own horizons. The days of shilling anything to the luxury consumer are over. LVMH and Kering, the biggest culprits in selling boring stuff because they could, have seen their stock prices droop accordingly. LVMH, Dior’s parent, is down 23 percent in 2026, and the public market does not care that it takes a few seasons—and sometimes years—for a designer to figure things out.
Every indication I have from LVMH executives is that Anderson remains their chosen one, and
that they will do everything in their power to ensure that his Dior succeeds. The Arnault family’s postshow fawning over Anderson was notable and seemingly deliberate: The three younger sons took their photos with him; Hélène dressed in one of his more challenging creations. To me, this is a decade-long project that will require an overhaul of far more than the runway collections: the stores, the merchandising, and, of course, the marketing, which is already
transforming.
Were it not for the extraordinary contemporaneous turnaround at Chanel, Anderson’s uphill battle at Dior would likely be viewed differently in the press and social media. But the comparison isn’t quite fair. When Matthieu Blazy took over, Chanel was already, always, One Chanel: a strategy that imbued the luxury fashion with a relatively remarkable visionary discipline across its many, many channels. Transitioning a house as disparate as Dior into One Dior is
going to require a tremendous amount of reorganization.
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As I’ve argued before, the real competition is between Louis Vuitton and Chanel, which is almost certain to
surpass the former in revenue next year. (A Keith Haring collaboration isn’t going to have the same R.O.I. at Louis Vuitton as Blazy’s squared-toe shoes will for Chanel.) LVMH should adopt the shrink-to-grow mentality at all of its fashion brands and let other parts of the business pick up the slack. That’s not easy, given that fashion is the biggest and most profitable division of the public company, but there needs to be some acknowledgment that perhaps bigger is not
better. Should Dior really be a $15 billion brand? Same goes for Gucci, by the way.
At this point in the game, Anderson has decided to listen to himself and make clothes that feel singular. As I’m writing this, we still don’t know what Taylor Swift’s wedding dress looks like, although I’m betting it’s connected, someway or somehow, to today’s finale look—one of the prettier things Anderson has designed in his career. The fact that she chose Anderson is enough of an indication that he can
get where he needs to go.
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What I’m Reading… and
Looking At...
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The Virgil Abloh estate is auctioning four of the late artist and designer’s signed
“Off-Wisconsin” screenprints, the basis for the Off-White c/o University of Wisconsin–Madison tees, which were sold at the bookstore of his alma mater. (The tees, released in 2015, were designed in collaboration with the Wisconsin Alumni Association.) You can see these pieces at the Breuer starting today, and online bidding starts Tuesday, July 7. These prints have
never been publicly exhibited, so it may be worth heading over there if you are an Abloh fan and in New York this week. The proceeds will benefit a scholarship fund for students attending the school. [Sotheby’s]
Jessica Taft Langdon, a great shoe designer, wrote an in-depth review of the Celine men’s offering from
last week’s show. It’s educational, entertaining, etcetera. [ Shoe Gaze]
On the subject of Celine, love this under-30-second brand campaign. [ YouTube]
I’ve always thought the only way to curb the proliferation of fast fashion was government
regulation, and the French Senate agrees! [ Reuters]
Bernard Arnault is being ordered to pay €22 million in back taxes. Seems fine—less than a year of investment in Phoebe Philo!
[ Fortune]
On the B.A. front, he has sponsored the creation of École Polytechnique’s Institute of Mathematics and Fundamental Sciences. He donated €50 million to create a new building. Of course, Polytechnique is his alma mater.
[ Polytechnique]
Wimbledon’s best kits: Naomi Osaka in Hana Yagi, Coco Gauff in Miu Miu, Serena Williams in Mesh Nike. [ Russh]
Wimbledon’s
best fits: Richard E. Grant, Romeo Beckham, Sienna Miller, Edie Campbell, Kate Middleton, Nicky Hilton Rothschild. [ W Mag, Elle, and Vogue]
Best dressed wedding guests at the Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce wedding: Zoë Kravitz. The end! [ Harper’s Bazaar]
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Until tomorrow,
Lauren
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make a couple bucks off them.
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