Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Thanks for all the Fashion People love. (You know, our new podcast.) The launch is sponsored by the world’s biggest and most intelligent shopping platform, Lyst, as well as by The Crown, the award-winning series on Netflix.

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Today we’ve got the tale of two galas, some Challengers analysis I’m confident you won’t find anywhere else, the story of an unexpected It bag, and thoughts on why fashion designers make perfect reality television stars. (In short, they are great at faking it!)

Mentioned in this issue: Rebecca Minkoff, RHONY, Luca Guadagnino, Jonathan Anderson, Challengers, Zendaya, Jennifer Lawrence, The Drift, Anna Wintour, the Met Gala, Jenna Lyons, Uniqlo, Lina Khan, Joanna Coles, Lauren Sánchez, GLP-1s, Lily Gladstone, and many more.

• Challengers’ real win: On Monday, I went to see Challengers, the new Luca Guadagnino film starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, with costumes designed by none other than Line Sheet person of interest Jonathan Anderson. There may be no director working today who better understands how to use fashion in his movies than Guadagnino—other than Sofia Coppola, of course, and honestly Emerald Fennell gets it, too. The Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross score is also undeniably great. While I think this movie is going to do very well at the box office—people love Zendaya, sports, and plotlines about terrible people—it’s not perfect. I’ll leave that analysis to my friend Amanda over at The Ringer’s ginormous podcast, The Big Picture. (She is an actual critic, after all.)

  There are going to be too many rundowns of Anderson’s costumes to count. I liked Zendaya’s Juicy Couture-esque, Pepto-pink terry zip-up in the Queens motel scene, her pedal pushers, her giant Loewe Flamenco bag, and Augustinus Bader’s “The Body Cream” placement. The best look of the film, IMO, was Josh O’Connor’s at the New Rochelle “challengers” competition: plaid Nike long shorts and black “Impatto” muscle t-shirt (very Satisfy running). But the real accomplishment was not making these three people look good—that’s easy. Instead, it was the fact that so many big sports brands were heavily represented onscreen—and together.

  Uniqlo and On are the preferred uniform of Faist’s character, which is perhaps no surprise given that Anderson has a long-term deal with the Japanese retailer (JW Anderson x Uniqlo), Loewe has an ongoing collaboration with On, and fashion-linked Swiss tennis king Roger Federer reps Uniqlo and owns a piece of the compatriot brand. And yet, Faist and Zendaya are also wearing Nike when they’re at Stanford, and Zendaya is wearing Adidas when she’s competing on the junior pro circuit. Oftentimes, companies like Nike or Adidas will invoke a trademark infringement claim to prevent a filmmaker from using their logo. The fact that all of these companies allowed their logos to intermingle is a testament to the power of entertainment as a marketing tool, the power of a good filmmaker as a marketing tool, and of course, the power of Zendaya as a marketing tool. And great entertainment lawyers, too, obviously.

• An It bag in the making: If there’s one thing I’ve learned covering the fashion business for so long, it’s that you absolutely, positively, cannot engineer success, no matter how much data and money you have. This is particularly true when it comes to It bags. Loewe’s Flamenco, Proenza Schouler’s PS1, Mansur Gavriel’s bucket bag, The Fendi baguette, the Birkin, these all became wildly popular because they are good, and permeated culture in an organic way. (Yes, I know organic is the most overused and trite word in fashion, but it’s true.)

  Right now, swingy shoulder bags are the thing; anything in the vicinity of the Hermès “Trim,” the Gucci “Jackie” bag, or the Phoebe Philo “Gig.” But those all cost $3,000 or more. That’s why I think Ralph Lauren is having such great success with the Polo I-D bag, which Jennifer Lawrence recently wore on one of her “unstyled” New York City strolls. (To be fair, it was, maybe, the best she’s ever looked.) The classic I-D is under $600, the bigger version is still under $1,000, and there’s a mini version for under $500. Even better, instead of embossing the brand name in gold right onto the leather—increasingly gauche and typical of bags in this price range—they’ve simply etched the polo-guy symbol onto the bag’s elongated clasp. It’s a smart way to capitalize on the vintage-Polo revival happening in Dimes Square without trying too hard. Delphine, my oft-mentioned French-preppy friend who lives on the Lower East Side, started wearing the I-D a few months ago. Yes, she is a Ralph Lauren acolyte, but she is also a snob with many expensive handbags.

  Delphine and J.Law are not alone. I asked Edited, a data tracking firm, how the Polo I-D has been selling. According to their analysis, sell-through rates at RalphLauren.com in the U.S. and U.K. were up 53 percent in Q1 compared with the same period a year earlier.

• Inside The Drift’s spring gala: Fashion people might not eat, but apparently literary people do. Guests at the culture magazine’s annual fundraiser—individual tickets cost $400, Rachel Kushner made a speech—complained that there wasn’t enough food. “Okay, there were passed plates, but I only saw two dessert plates,” one paying attendee grumbled as her stomach also grumbled. “Last year there was at least like, a buffet trough.” Number one party rule: Always make sure there’s more than enough food and alcohol. As for the outfits, not much to report there, I hear, but I’m sure B.J. Novak was dressed nicely at the afterparty.
• What’s happening with that other gala?: Every year, I hear from publicists and designers alike that Anna Wintour is being incorrigible about choosing celebrity dates for designers to bring to the Met Gala. She says no to everyone the designers propose. (Her idea of who they should bring and their idea of who they should bring are often at odds.) Then, when the occasional approved celebrity declines, the designer is even more devastated because he has to go back to the drawing board. Many people are telling me this is the hardest year yet to get someone to pass muster.

  Is it? All I know is that there were a couple years when the list was not great—too many TikTok stars, not enough boring-but-universally known celebrities—and the whole reason Wintour is Wintour comes down to the industry’s collective desire for her to tell them what to do. Two things can be true: Wintour might not be making the most inspired celeb-designer pairings, and people enjoy groveling.

As it turns out, they were not hunting an endangered species. Jenna Lyons, for instance—the uber-talented, uber-famous former J.Crew designer—has said that she joined the cast in order to promote her false eyelash line, LoveSeen. (And though she has since answered the higher calling of private equity, she is still coming back for another round of Housewives.) Jessel Taank, the sweet publicist, hawked ŌUSHQ, a Middle Eastern fashion retailer. Sai De Silva, the fashion blogger, used to live in the same building as me—let’s just say that it was not a luxury high-rise—and may have had her own motives. The fashion people who declined the Real Housewives producers all tended to be actually rich or self-secure, and didn’t need the cable validation. I’m told that jewelry designer Jennifer Fisher, who sold a stake in her business to Centric Brands earlier this year, decided against it.

This week, reputable outlets reported that handbag designer Rebecca Minkoff would be joining the RHONY ensemble in some capacity. Casting Minkoff would make sense. Like Lyons, she was associated with the Girls-era New York fashion scene. And unlike Lyons, who has a reputation within the industry as possessing real design chops, Minkoff was always perceived as a savvy marketer. Her label once touted gross sales north of $100 million—driven by aggressive wholesale distribution, and a whole lot of talking the talk. She sold the company in 2022 for less than $20 million and an annual salary.

Minkoff, of course, is also a Scientologist—a fact that everyone in the industry talks about incessantly, although mostly behind her back. Over the last several years, she and her co-founder brother, Uri, a rumored graduate of the Hubbard College of Administration, realized that their royal road to a semblance of relevance was shilling innovation: doomed wearable tech; magic mirrors; or a self-help book about “unlocking creativity, courage, and success.” All the while, I heard about audit-style conversations with employees.

One of the more fashion-world theories coalesced around the idea that a 1995 medical scandal involving her father, Dr. David Minkoff, indebted the church to the family and that they somehow helped Rebecca get her business off the ground. Who knows? (She did not respond to a query about this.) But by 2012, seven years after launch, Minkoff sold a minority stake to San Francisco-based private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners, which also acquired a position in Alexis Bittar. Neither investment was particularly successful (Bittar has since bought his name back), and TSG exited the fashion and accessories category almost as quickly as it entered. Nevertheless, the investment helped professionalize the Minkoff business—I stopped hearing about those audit-style conversations—and positioned her to sell a few years ago to Los Angeles-based Sunrise Brands, a hodgepodge of downtrodden contemporary labels including Joie and Equipment. The assets garnered somewhere between $13 million and $19 million, according to a WWD report.

Minkoff is matter-of-fact about Scientology, and discusses it like other high-profile and presumably coached practitioners. (Never get defensive, act like it’s no big deal, etcetera.) “I think there’s a lot of confusion when people hear the word ‘religion’—immediately you hear that I pray to L. Ron Hubbard,” she told Jessica Testa in a 2021 interview for The New York Times, mentioning that people were confused because she also identifies as Jewish. (She was known for a time in Brooklyn for her Shabbat dinners.) “I study it, I take classes and that’s the extent of it, and it’s helped me stay centered. I don’t have all the answers. When I needed someone, it was a place for me to go get some answers.”

Minkoff’s status as a Scientologist is unlikely to be a part of her Real Housewives of New York storyline: Not only would it be a complete reversal of strategy for the intensely guarded church, but a massive risk for Bravo. (Unless, of course, she has defected, and then that becomes the center of the show.) The knowledge of it, though, is enough to pique viewer interest.

But even without Scientology, Minkoff’s experience in the fashion business, even at times when there was no there there, makes her the ideal cast member. At the moment, she remains chief creative officer of the Rebecca Minkoff label—and much like Lyons’ editor-in-chief (at large) role at The Coveteur, it’s a perfect kind of job for a housewife, real or otherwise.

You’ve asked for my opinion on Joanna Coles’ takeover of The Daily Beast, first reported by my partner Dylan Byers. (People really liked working for her at Marie Claire, and many of those people are Line Sheet readers.) Dylan did a good job of mapping out the situation. They probably should have started something from scratch, but Coles and Ben Sherwood are not of a generation that tends to start things from scratch. (Although, sure, Sherwood just sold a youth sports app to TeamSnap.) The only thing I’d add is that Coles has always occupied a grey area between the worlds of so-called hard-hitting newspaper journalism and increasingly soft women’s magazines. It’s a tricky line to toe; I empathize. The Lauren Sánchez stunt is an example of how difficult it is to get right. To me, Marie Claire’s 2010 Justine Musk as-told-to is the purest representation of what Coles wants to achieve as an editor. But I’m not sure that sort of empowerment journalism is effective in the current era, and it certainly isn’t supported by present business models. We’ll see what she whips up. [Puck]

In the latest GLP-1 plus GIP news: Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, the newest of the F.D.A.-approved weight-loss drugs (and basically the same thing as Mounjaro), might be approved soon to treat sleep apnea, which could widen the base of people who would qualify for an insurance-covered prescription. [Axios]

Other fun Salone happenings: T’s absolutely fabulous 20th anniversary party at Villa Necchi Campiglio, Thom Browne’s home collection launch featuring Frette linens, and Hermès’ Brera showroom. [T, GQ, and Vogue]

Lily Gladstone has never looked better. (She’s wearing Loewe.) [Deadline]

A fun Jessica Testa joint, featuring the EIC to watch, Willa Bennett. (And some quotes from me!) [New York Times]

The CFDAs are happening under the whale again this year, thanks to lead sponsor Amazon Fashion. [WWD]

If you want to understand the Drake situation, this is a good listen. [Jam Session]

Uh oh. [Phoebe Philo]

The Carlyle Group sold Beautycounter back to its founder, Gregg Renfrew. [AdAge]

Donna Langley is receiving Kering’s Women in Motion Award at Cannes, where three Saint Laurent-produced films will be screened. [Variety]

The International Woolmark Prize, the most storied of all the young designer awards, will be given out every other year. The winner will receive 300,000 Australian dollars (about $193,000 at current exchange), a 50 percent increase from previous seasons. [WWD]

Tory Burch, Jonathan Anderson, and Tapestry C.E.O. Joanne Crevoiserat are on this year’s Time 100 list. [Time]

Until Monday,
Lauren