Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet. Later this week, I’ll be back on my bullshit with a story straight out of Succession (barring any breaking news). Today, though, I’ve got a feel-gooder for you about a fashion brand that’s actually doing well, backed by an investor we all know (and mostly) love. Don’t get too jealous.

Monday’s crucial updates feature Phoebe, Kanye, and of course, Condé. You know, if you want me to start writing about Hearst again, reply with your thoughts and feelings—I know it’s hard to believe, but this really is my email!

Mentioned in this issue: Trish Wescoat Pound, Andrew Rosen, Ivan Bart (R.I.P.!), Phoebe Philo, more Roger Lynch and Condé Nast, Adidas, Kanye West, Marc Jacobs, Kirna Zabête, trousers, and many, many more…

• R.I.P. to an Industry Legend: Ivan Bart, the man who made IMG Models, has passed away. His death was announced via his personal Instagram account on Sunday, which was soon flooded with emotional tributes. (He was universally beloved.) I have nothing substantive to add at the moment, only to say that it’s worth reading my work wife Chantal Fernandez’s piece on Bart from March 2023, when he stepped down as president of IMG Models after a restructuring at parent company Endeavor. (If you are too shy or don’t like posting on social media, feel free to send me your Ivan stories and I’ll try to publish a few later this week.)

• The Phoebe Discourse: The day has come… After more than two years of waiting and speculation, Phoebephilo.com went live at 8:04 a.m. Pacific Time on October 30, hitting all the key time zones where the London-based, LVMH-backed business is shipping. (U.K., U.S., Europe). My initial reactions:

  Was I right? As I previously reported, there are 150 styles, with many items available for purchase immediately. (There will be two more deliveries from the first “edit”—née, collection—in the coming weeks.) It does look “a little goth,” per speculation. The prices are eye-popping—$1,300 for jeans, $19,000 for a hand-knitted dress covered in iridescent jumbo palettes—but in line with other designer labels of the day. Lots of people were shocked by the cost of the giant Cabas leather tote ($8,000), but I’d just note that the collection’s key bag, The Gig, is $3,500—almost at the lower-end of today’s designer bag prices. (Many everyday handbags cost around $5,000.)

  Is it good? I’ve been texting and DMing with friends in the U.S. and Europe all day, and the general reaction is that it is a continuation of the work Philo was doing at Céline, rather than a deviation, which should be no surprise. Philo designs for herself and her customer, and there’s a practicality to it. (Like I’ve said before, she’s the Coco Chanel of our time.) Some friends were underwhelmed, others were appreciative, others were paralyzed. Several people spent more than an hour browsing, only to find that things were sold out by the time they entered their credit card info. (Things that were bought: the cotton poplin shirt, the fur scarf, sunglasses. A bag.)

  Did I buy anything? Yes, I bought The Gig bag—a sort of expanded, evolved version of the Céline trio—and a cotton poplin shirt. Not that I need to explain myself to you, but I haven’t bought a new, full-priced designer bag since 2016. (The Row’s Sideby.) I’ve wanted to buy a new bag for a couple of years and this was exactly what I needed: not too small, not too big, and no dumb gold-embossed logo on the front.

  How was the experience? Well, it was a little janky, as I expected it would be. So janky that I bought two bags (one black, one oxblood) without knowing it. Will I ever receive them? I made the purchases just a few minutes after the site went live, so I suspect that both bags and the shirt will arrive within the promised two weeks. (Once I decide which color I prefer, I’ll be selling one of the bags, probably to a friend for zero profit.)

  Did anything surprise me? By 10 a.m. PT, pretty much everything was sold out. That’s two hours. I honestly thought things would have sold out more quickly. (Perhaps things sold out more quickly than the website could take, and half of these orders will not be fulfilled?)

  What’s a detail others might have missed? While searching for the FAQs, I found an “impact” section, a no-nonsense explanation of the studio’s approach to building a responsible supply chain. I find 99 percent of “sustainability” talk in fashion absolutely reprehensible, but this was straightforward and again, practical.

  What’s the big idea here? I kind of still can’t believe it took more than two years for this to be released. (That being said, only a genius can make something look so effortless.) This could turn out to be LVMH’s first successful from-scratch fashion launch—that is, if Philo can consistently produce collections. (The next “edit” is slated for early next year.)

• Condé Nast Corner: On Friday, the Condé Nast union, best known for complaining about not being paid extra for working on the Met Gala (okay, fair, maybe), sent an email to Roger Lynch demanding a town-hall meeting where employees can ask questions about the mysterious restructuring that is about to occur. The lack of clarity surrounding Lynch’s re-org created “serious concerns over the decision-making capabilities of Management’s bargaining committee,” especially because the people on the management side, who bargain with the union, are claiming they know nothing about the restructuring.

  Don’t ask me why Management was capitalized, but you can ask me about Condé’s response. As of Monday morning, the union had not heard from management.

  The union also provided a list of questions they would like Lynch to answer. Most are pretty straightforward—like, When is this restructuring going to happen?—others revealed some head-scratching things about the way Condé currently works. For instance, according to this email, not every employee was included in Lynch’s original note about the restructuring and the departure of Condé Nast Entertainment lead Agnes Chu. “Many unit members did not receive your email, received a separate email from Agnes, or received no email at all,” they wrote. “Why can’t the company share information like this in an effective, centralized manner?”

  There may be some sort of obscure, internal-facing reason pertaining to employment status or organizational structure, but this is the sort of question that inevitably pits a C.E.O. against his C-suite underlings, who carry out the messaging. But the nature of this letter, fair or not, speaks to the fact that many at Condé Nast feel distant from their leader, and generally unsure about his direction. Alas, Condé Nast is a shrinking company that employs very smart and circumspect people who, in my experience, often do their jobs for love more than money (though there are some obvious exceptions). And while they don’t hallucinate about the future of print or subprime brands, like Glamour, they would like to hear about a corporate vision that doesn’t just rely, once again, on P&L management.

• On the Kanye Exposé: I wasn’t aware that Megan Twohey’s exposé of the troubled, terrifying, terribly profitable relationship between Adidas and Kanye West would drop just a day after I published my story on what “Ye” is up to now as he relaunches Yeezy without the support of a $30 billion global sportswear juggernaut.

  On Friday, a reader sent me a note asking if these new revelations, including reports of anti-semitic behavior going as far back as a decade, would affect his ability to sell products now. After all, Twohey reported an incident 10 years ago when he drew a swastika on a sketch of a shoe. He also told an Adidas manager, who is Jewish, to kiss a picture of Hilter every day. Sick stuff. I should say here that West never responded to Twhoey’s request for comment. (I still can’t believe he had his lawyer reach out to me to deny he’s working with David Tourniaire-Beauciel while all this was going on.)

  I actually think this is far more damaging for Adidas than it is for West. People in power do disgusting things, but to allow this sort of behavior over such a long period of time, and to expose mid-level employees to it, is dangerous. (LVMH has plenty of HR issues, believe me, but there is a reason they never contracted West. And we all know this would never happen at Nike.)

  The fact that Adidas also prevented West from receiving more than 30 days of consecutive mental health treatment per a 2016 addendum to his contract is perhaps the most concerning part of this. (With that clause, they were saying that if he was sick enough to need treatment for more than a month, then he’s not worth fighting for, despite the fact that he was making them more than $1 billion a year in sales.)

  Adidas’ shares were not down on Friday, probably because this is all old news; investors evaluate what is in front of them, and use that information to predict the future. The company did get a new C.E.O., Bjørn Gulden, last year. But about a month ago, Gulden suffered a public embarrassment when he went on a podcast and told the host he didn’t think West “meant what he said” when he spewed racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric during the fall of 2022. Now that we know West’s anti-Semitic behavior goes back much further than most had ever imagined, it makes it even worse. A bad, bad look.

  Unfortunately, I still believe that the majority of the world does not care about West’s alleged anti-Semitism and I still believe there is a subset of fans, people who were deeply affected by West’s music, who will continue to believe that West’s remarks stem from complex mental health problems and are not reflective of his actual being. However, he may have lost the middle schoolers I observed at my local soft-serve dispenser on Friday afternoon, who were sitting at metal picnic tables wearing Nirvana t-shirts and Taylor Swift hoodies and Nikes and Yeezy slides, inhaling crinkle fries and ice cream shakes. They’ll never read that New York Times article, but their parents will…

So: tiny in the grand scheme of things, but huge for a two-year-old label. “I can’t remember seeing anything like this in my 24 years in business,” Beth Buccini, owner of Kirna Zabête, told me. (Kirna Zabête first opened in 1999 in SoHo, but now has locations on Madison Avenue, Palm Beach, East Hampton, Bryn Mawr—we love an affluent suburb on the Main Line—and soon, Nashville.) While Buccini sells a mix of pure designer and more accessible brands, I mostly associate the store with Old Céline and generally, the more expensive side of fashion.

Why has Buccini sold 700 units of TWP’s “Next Ex,” a gently cropped, $335 button up? The answer is a combination of the right product, right time, and right price. “It’s the goldilocks of shirting,” Buccini said. Wealthy consumers are continuing to spend money—we can see that in the positive earnings of unassailable Hermès—but they are paying more attention to what they spend it on. They’re looking for things that convey value, no matter the price or provenance. And Wescoat Pound has a particular talent for nailing this, probably because she’s done it several times before.

In SoHo, I met Wescoat Pound, who first worked with Rosen in the early days of Theory. In between this and that, she launched a brand called Haute Hippie, which is exactly what you’d imagine. After a successful launch in the mid-aughts, at the peak of people wearing black and brown together, Wescoat Pound faced the typical operational challenges (and the less typical, including employees charging large sums of money onto corporate credit cards, silly stuff like that). In 2015, she sold what was left of Haute Hippie to the holding company Hilco for an undisclosed sum—and has had nothing to do with it since.

Over the years, Rosen and Wescoat kept in contact: he even gave her some money for Haute Hippie in the late aughts. (And she paid him back, which rarely happens.) So when she pitched him TWP, Rosen—who retired from Theory in 2019, but is one of those people who will never really retire—eagerly bet on her once again.

After all, Rosen will never stop chasing success. When he and Elie Tahari started Theory in 1997, he single-handedly created a new market: contemporary. Tibi and Theory, among others, sold sharp fashion, but for less than what traditional designer labels cost. (Theory’s way in was suiting, taking cues from Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and other leading designers of the time.) Before the rise of this sub-category, there were “bridge” lines, or watered-down designer concepts made and priced more cheaply in order to reach a broader range of customers. Theory—now a multi-billion brand, owned by Uniqlo-parent company Fast Retailing—and its contemporary stablemates had an edge over what had been previously offered. It was a super successful concept, and changed the way people shopped for a time.

In the 25 years since, however, the contemporary market has been gouged out in the same way everything in the middle has: people either want very cheap or very expensive, and there are plenty of choices at either end. Wescoat Pound—who launched Haute Hippie during the Great Recession—and Rosen both know that, if you make something good when the choices out there feel tired, you can hit at any price. In some ways, it’s better to start when everything is bad, and the stores need something new.

These days, though, new is not enough. When I first saw TWP, I thought it looked nice. But Wescoat Pound has made something nice that also makes the person wearing it look exponentially better. “It’s styled,” she told me on a Zoom call last week. “There’s a different sensibility.”

Buccini, the Kirna Zabête owner, mentioned the unmatched fit of the pants, a notoriously tricky category in womenswear. The $595 Didi, a pleated style almost cut like a skirt, is a top-seller for the store. “Good design makes a difference,” Buccini said, adding that TWP’s sales are up nearly 600 percent from last year at Kirna Zabête. (It’s very popular in the Madison Ave. location.) At some retailers, it’s now the best-selling brand.

In my estimation, TWP has several years of solid growth ahead of it, mostly because Wescoat Pound is taking the best of the Rosen formula and merging it with the realities of owning a business in 2023. Like the old days, they’re making everything in New York and taking an early hit on margins in order to be able to closely control the quality and turn orders around fast. (As the business scales, the theory is that those margins will widen.) Like the old days, they’re offering something that looks good, made with quality fabrics, and for a better price than practically everyone else.

And then there’s the Goldilocks thing: Wescoat Pound’s obsession with making everything fit just right. The brands that are selling clothes successfully right now are in the business of selling clothes first and accessories second—if they’re selling accessories all. From the fashion establishment, The Row, Prada and Miu Miu, Dries Van Noten, and Brunello Cucinelli are leading. (Even if handbags and shoes make a bigger percentage of their business, it’s all about the clothes.)

From the emerging side, I see a lot of “real” women wearing Maria McManus, High Sport, Toteme, and increasingly, Tory Burch, another “contemporary” brand that has managed in recent years to differentiate itself enough to appeal to both aspiring fast-fashion wearers and high-fashion acolytes. Then there’s Tibi’s Amy Smilovic, who, over the past decade, shrunk her business in order to make clothes she actually liked, and developed a rabid, cult-like following along the way.

The cynics will look at TWP and envision a crash-and-burn in its future. Fashion is fickle, and there will be a correction at some point. Wescoat Pound and Rosen both have something to prove, and they want to make this work. Let’s have fun watching it rise and not always be so cynical.

I had a fun time talking about how Marc Jacobs’s deal with LVMH changed the fashion business forever on this newish podcast. [The Closer]

Guess what? Prenuvo, the MRI of the elite, is stressing people out rather than making them feel better. [The Cut]

Buzzfeed might sell Complex to Ntwrk, the Jimmy Iovine-backed QVC for Gen Z. [Adweek]

The downfall of Topshop! Who will write the definitive account? [Reuters]

The Ron DeSantis-has-lifts-in-his-shoes conspiracy continues. [Twitter]

I’m a big fan of U Beauty; this is a good explanation of why it’s working. [Vogue]

The last time I went to The Row sample sale was two years ago. My four-month-old baby slept on my chest while I bought what was left of what I believe was bankrupt Barneys’ liquidated inventory. Because I couldn’t try anything on, I ended up re-selling most of it for a profit. (Everything was like $200.) Was it worth it? Sure. [Shop Rat]

And finally… A note from a Hollywood-agency adjacent friend: If you’re an Endeavor executive of a certain level and you’re not wearing Berluti white sneakers… do you even exist?