Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet. I am back in New York for two minutes and currently drinking a martini at the bar at Marcel.

I was sad to miss the last half of the men’s shows in Paris. The men’s shows are undeniably more fun. No one at the women’s shows is actually friends—and if they are, they’re not hanging out in the same way. Perhaps it’s because of the male friendship epidemic: Fashion Week offers the structure to allow for socializing. Perhaps it’s all the beer. Anyway, I hope you had a good time and got some work done, too.

Tomorrow on Fashion People, my guest is Marc Beaugé, the editor-in-chief and co-founder of our favorite magazine, L’Etiquette, who was an eyewitness to everything I missed. We’ll discuss the shows (Celine!), the scene, the heat, the lack of air-conditioning, the state of men’s fashion, and plenty more. Listen here and here.

In this issue, you’ll find my take on the week that was, a look at the grey market for Couture tickets, as well as a field report from Manhattan’s Athleisure Row. For the main event, I look at the business of Lemaire, which is in transition with a new C.E.O. and an expected breakup from Uniqlo.

Also mentioned in this issue: Christophe Lemaire, Rick Owens, Clare Waight Keller, Café Integral, Julian Klausner, Tadashi Yanai, Lagreeness, Sarah-Linh Tran, Karolyn Pho, Eckhaus Latta x Mango, Emily Dawn Long, James Scully, Luca de Meo, Amanda Dobbins, Celine, Ron Johnson, Jacquemus, Michael Rider, Studio City, Zak Berady, Meryll Rogge, Brunello Cucinelli, Chitose Abe, Laetitia Mergui, Eli Russell Linnetz, Clarisse Godbillon, Om Malik, Dries Van Noten, Hailey Bieber, J.W. Anderson, and more.

Three Things You Should Know…

Are the men okay?: Last week, in the middle of the Paris shows, I had dinner with a prominent figure in the world of menswear. He said that everyone around him, all the guys who made menswear a scene over the past 20 years, seemed sort of miserable—that it all feels kind of over. Is this all because basic bros are wearing Bode shorts with Salomons while ordering flash brew at Café Integral?

Part of that bad attitude, I assume, resulted from the extreme, had-to-feel-it-to-believe-it heat in Paris. The other part may have been the actual death of wholesale. Womenswear was decimated on that front years ago, but there are still great men’s stores emerging, like Ven Space and Jamestown Hudson. I ran into Jamestown founder James Scully, who said that his women’s business is thriving too, but the overall market is nevertheless shrinking—and that trend has many second- and third-order effects. Among them: Fewer new brands emerge, and fewer of them are good.

Still, there was plenty of interesting stuff happening. On Wednesday, Meryll Rogge launched e-commerce with a diorama-like presentation in the 8th, featuring ephemera from Saint-Martin Bookshop in Brussels; it was a nice way for the Marni creative director to tell her own brand story without staging a full-on presentation. New York’s Emily Dawn Long dragged a bunch of gear across the ocean to the Marais for a pop-up of sorts and naturally sold out. As for the shows: Rick Owens received the requisite raves (and introduced an Adidas collaboration), and Dries Van Noten’s Julian Klausner once again impressed.

Photos: Courtesy of Rick Owens, Dries Van Noten, Sacai

Klausner’s remit is tricky: He has to please the Dries heads while attracting new and younger clients, even as the idea of Dries goes in and out of fashion. It’s not a Dries moment, aesthetically, which means that Klausner has to sort of float until the tide turns in his favor. I always like Sacai, but thought Chitose Abe’s triple-strap Birkenstocks were particularly brilliant: They were subversive, yes, but looked great too.

Photos: Courtesy of ERL

I was sad to miss ERL, whose founder, Eli Russell Linnetz, is getting serious about womenswear. As BoF announced last week, Linnetz has separated his business from Dover Street Market’s brand incubator, a setup that was probably initially liberating but limiting at the end. Now he’s moving production to California, where he lives. “While it’s an insane honor [to work with Dover Street Market], you start losing control, especially as business grows,” he told BoF. “Now that everything is in-house, I see every single thing that happens on a daily basis and maintain a connection with my audience without getting lost in an expansion that was getting out of my hands.”

I’m sure that’s all true, and there’s no denying that Linnetz is a big talent who could land a gig at a major fashion house in Europe. I only worry that he has limited himself with his setup in Venice, where he is based. Dover Street kept him in the mix in Europe, but California is isolating, even if you don’t know it. (Believe me, I do—from experience.) Good thing he has easy access to LAX on the Westside.

Photos: Courtesy of Celine

As I documented earlier in the week, both Louis Vuitton and Dior delivered strong collections (read my thoughts here and here), and Auralee and Lemaire practiced fan service. But the show of Paris was undoubtedly Celine, where Michael Rider doubled down on his real clothes-in-real-time philosophy. Rider is in total command of his full powers. The collaboration with Reebok (currently owned by Authentic Brands Group, remember) was a flex: It was Celine’s first proper collaboration ever (with a licensing firm, of all places) and it nailed how people (men, women, whoever) want to look these days. I loved the slim—if not skinny—trousers and oversize muscle tees. Rider is the platonic ideal of a creative director for our time: He has style, he has grace, he is a real professional; it’s not all about him, but it’s still about him. And he’s going to make LVMH a lot of money.

Can you buy your way into Couture?: It’s not easy to get invited to any fashion show, but Couture is the holy grail for clients. You have to spend a lot of money to make it in, and you also have to all but guarantee that you will place an order. Being rich doesn't necessarily guarantee admission. And yet every season there are go-betweens who claim they can secure a ticket… for a price, of course.

One such person is Zak Berady, who has around 8,000 followers on Instagram and claims he offers exclusive services for V.I.P.s, C.E.O.s, and high-net-worth individuals. I viewed a price sheet that Berady has offered to potential clients, where he lists every single Couture show, and what it will cost to be seated at the show and at the dinner. The prices range from €5,000 to €15,000, plus the cost of purchasing a look to wear.

I messaged Berady, and he told me that he can “manage to deliver official invitations for new V.I.C.s, with low spending. Everything is official.” Whether he can actually deliver, I don’t know. Another way clients get in is through personal shoppers, especially at department stores, where there is less vetting.
A report from death-of-Athleisure Row: The minute I returned to America, I felt the urge to buy new leggings. Mine are sort of worn out and saggy, and I spend enough time at Lagreeness these days to justify replenishment. So on Saturday afternoon, I headed over to lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and walked through Lululemon, Vuori, and Athleta. Out of the three, I’m most confident in Lululemon’s quality, but the colors and fabrications were such a turnoff that I left without trying anything on. Vuori’s colors and materials looked better, but I just can’t bear to wear “Vuori” on my thigh in the Upper Marais. (It’s hard enough in Studio City.) Also, I’m not convinced Vuori is in it for performance: While the set I bought last summer is cute, it feels a bit flimsy.

The best prospect was Athleta, where the materials felt solid and the colors were decent. A salesperson recommended the Elation, which is soft but has decent compression and a high waist. Unfortunately, the fit just didn’t do it for me. I looked… matronly. So on Sunday, I walked over to Alo on Spring Street, something of a last resort. The challenge with Alo is that the brand now carries a connotation that you want to look like Hailey Bieber by wearing its clothes. I’m a 43-year-old mother, and I have no ambitions to look like Hailey Bieber. I honestly don’t think I would if I were 18 years old, either, and back in Pittsburgh. But I do want to look good. In the end, I found a pair of leggings that were promising, but the queue to try them on was so long that I gave up and went to get a pedicure. Moral of the story: 250 years into the American experiment and we still can’t get leggings right.

And now on to the main event…

The Fresh Prince of Lemaire

It’s been a decade since Christophe Lemaire linked up with Uniqlo for a partnership that’s both steadfast and mutually beneficial. But while insiders now expect a conclusion of the collaboration, Lemaire’s namesake line is on the shortlist of independent luxury brands that every strategic buyer has been quietly watching.

Lauren Sherman

Last week’s Lemaire show in Paris, staged in an unfinished concert hall in the Opéra Bastille, was typical for designers Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran. With Lemaire, the shtick is that there is no shtick, just solutions for dressing for real life. Every season, the clothes are adjusted but never totally erased. You could call it iterative fashion.

Behind the scenes, though, Lemaire has become a very different business. The company is transformed, projected to hit €160 million in annual sales in 2026, up from €10 million pre-pandemic, according to a source familiar with the figures. This trajectory was enabled through increased distribution in Asia, where the brand’s distinctive croissant bag is a certified hit and Lemaire and Tran have opened stand-alone stores in Tokyo and Seoul.

That expansion was also partly expedited by Fast Retailing, the group that owns Uniqlo, where Lemaire himself began working in 2016 as the artistic director of its Paris R&D lab—a locus essentially built for him. With his appointment, Lemaire and Tran began designing a seasonal capsule collection called Uniqlo U. The project, which took material and silhouette inspiration from his namesake collection, was viewed as a skunk works for the broader Uniqlo offering. If something worked within U, it would often be reproduced for the main line. In the early days, Uniqlo U was a hit, and the partnership was so fruitful that the family office of Fast Retailing founder and C.E.O. Tadashi Yanai took a minority stake in Lemaire two years later.

Now, though, I’ve learned that Fast Retailing’s ownership position in the business has been reduced, and there are plans for Lemaire and Tran to exit Uniqlo U, with their Fall/Winter 2026 collection being the last. There has been talk of continuing Uniqlo U without the designers, but Yanai nixed the idea, I’m told. Of course, there is a chance that things could change in the coming months: Yanai likes to hold on to talent, and Lemaire and Tran are core components of the Uniqlo architecture. A rep for Lemaire had no comment. A rep for Uniqlo did not comment.

If the separation from Uniqlo does take place, it will come as Lemaire is operationalizing the effects of its rapid growth. Laetitia Mergui, an Asia expert who oversaw the expansion in the region, stepped down as C.E.O. earlier this year. After an extensive search, she has effectively been replaced by Clarisse Godbillon, a longtime Lemaire employee who spent a couple of years in between as the C.O.O. of Jacquemus. Godbillon, who joins September 1, will be named managing director, responsible for “implementation of Lemaire’s vision across all activities while maintaining the brand's consistency, high standards, and long-term growth,” a rep confirmed to me. “She has an in-depth understanding of every aspect of the company’s operations and identity. Her mission will be to lead the brand’s development and oversee its strategic and operational management, working closely with Christophe and Sarah-Linh.”

At this stage of growth, there is a tension between maintaining the designers’ integrity with each collection and the ambition to scale. And the arrangement also reflects a new reality for Lemaire, himself. Even before Tran entered the picture, the 61-year-old Lemaire always maintained side hustles in order to fund his nearly four-decade-old business—first at Lacoste from 2000 to 2010, then at Hermès from 2010 to 2014. Fast Retailing is known for paying its ancillary talent well into the seven figures, but Lemaire and Tran may not need that additional income now that the business is faring so well. On the other hand, now they’re going all in and betting on themselves.

Fear of Godbillon

Godbillon, who understands the duo and their objectives, will be pivotal in managing their options from here. Private equity firms and strategics would likely covet Lemaire, largely because its credibility near the top of the market affords the business a lot of opportunity to monetize other revenue lines without losing its identity. It’s nearly impossible to build a convincing handbag program on top of a decent-size clothing business, fueled by real people who often wear the brand in majority. (I even went through a phase, pre-pandemic, where my wardrobe was made up of Lemaire and Uniqlo U almost exclusively.) In an era marked by financial pressures toward scale and mass, Lemaire and Tran actually have an opportunity to grow sustainably, and with precision.

Meanwhile, Yanai’s obsession with recruiting top talent hasn’t waned. There is Uniqlo’s perennial collaboration with J.W. Anderson, as well as the partnership with Clare Waight Keller. Her arrival as creative director of all of Uniqlo, as well as the designer of Uniqlo C in 2025, foreshadowed that Lemaire’s days at the company might be near an end.

Yanai may not be a great marketer, but his desire to forge relationships with fashion’s biggest stars—particularly the ones who really do understand product—has proved fruitful. After all, product is the most effective form of marketing in the social media age. In the end, the Lemaire and Fast Retailing marriage may not be forever. But it was good while it lasted.

What I’m Reading…

A Los Angeles fashion report from unpaid Line Sheet correspondent Amanda Dobbins (subscribe to her Substack): “I was wearing my Eckhaus Latta x Mango last night and ran into [frequent Fashion People guest] Karolyn Pho, who was also wearing hers. She immediately clocked mine and then said she’d seen more women wearing it than any collab in recent memory. I wish I had bought more, because now it’s mostly sold out.” [Buy What You Can Here]

The technology journalist Om Malik died last week. He was a friend of my husband’s and occasional reader of my work—because he liked clothes a lot. Here is an incredible interview he did with Brunello Cucinelli, conducted in 2015. It tells you everything you need to know about Cucinelli, the modern fashion system, and entrepreneurship. R.I.P., Om! You look great. [Om.co]

Jacquemus! In Corsica! Sad2Miss. [YouTube]

Toteme’s white tote is more expensive than Phoebe Philo’s, which means I should definitely buy the PP one. [Private Label]

I’ve been thinking about former Target, Apple, and JCPenney executive Ron Johnson in the context of Luca de Meo’s turnaround journey at Kering. Turns out, Johnson just wrote a book that is summarized here so that you don’t have to read it. [WWD]

What is a worse name? LuxExperience or Exemplar Luxury Group? Y’all need to call Mattie and Sierra next time. [Yahoo Finance]

Until tomorrow,
Lauren

P.S.: We use affiliate links because we are a business. We may make a couple bucks off them.

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