Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Thanks for all the smart responses to my year-ahead note—I’ll make sure to include some in a future issue.

Today is a real something-for-everyone special. I’ve got a (minor) update on my favorite Epstein adjacency, former Victoria’s Secret head Les Wexner; the (arguable) return of the bloggity blog; and a new chapter in the story that unites us all: Phoebe Philo.

Awards season kicks off here in Los Angeles in earnest this Sunday with the Golden Globes. Congrats to trade-pub connoisseur Jay Penske, who owns the Golden Globes through another one of his businesses, Dick Clark Productions, for getting CBS to air the awards show this year for a bargain-basement price. (Legacy publications, many of which have become red-carpet slideshow economies, are grateful.) I’ll be out a bit this weekend, so please say hi if you see me and I don’t see you.

By the way, instead of making a New Year’s resolution (a hopeless act), why don’t you sign your team up for a Puck corporate membership, guaranteed to stick for 12 whole months? Email Fritz@puck.news to learn more.

Mentioned in this issue: Phoebe Philo, Céline, Casey Lewis, blogs, Abercrombie & Fitch, Chip Wilson, Marlien Rentmeester, drops vs. deliveries, Les Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein, Joanna Goddard, and many more…

• The Les Files: There was a ton of anticipation surrounding the documents that were unsealed yesterday from a 2015 civil lawsuit featuring depositions from Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell and Virginia Giuffre, their accuser. But there wasn’t much to write home about, or even just to you, regarding former Victoria’s Secret C.E.O. and infamous Epstein buddy Les Wexner. He only garnered a few innocuous mentions.

  But despite Wexner’s claim that he cut ties with Epstein more than a decade before his death, in 2019, there is a tremendous appetite from Wexner employees and associates alike to better understand the relationship between the retailer and his longtime financial adviser. After all, Wexner was the primary source of Epstein’s wealth, and therefore viewed by many as the convicted sex offender’s number one enabler.

  How much did Wexner know about Epstein’s racket? In 2019, a lawyer representing Epstein victims said he did not believe Wexner knew about the criminal activities. I suspect the absolute truth will go to the grave with Wexner, who is 86, but remains active, quietly working on development deals in the Columbus region and other under-the-radar projects. If it weren’t for Epstein, however, I’m certain Wexner would still be running Victoria’s Secret, which he left in 2020. The association, no matter its essence, has damaged his legacy, potentially more than any other famous person on the docket, perhaps because of Epstein’s use of the Victoria’s Secret brand to lure young women. (I have a book coming out about Victoria’s Secret in October that digs into this: you can preorder it here.)

  There is a chance that more will be revealed in a court somewhere, someday. Last February, the U.S. Virgin Islands was granted permission to subpoena Wexner by mail in a suit against JPMorgan related to Epstein’s human trafficking in the region. (Wexner evaded being served in person seven times over.)

• The return of the blog: The ever-astute Casey Lewis, author of the must-read what-are-the-youngs-up-to newsletter After School, declared blogs “in” on her own 2024 “in and out” list. I’ve been feeling this, too, nudged by the renewed interest in Cup of Jo, Joanna Goddard’s long-running blog. Soon after Goddard launched an accompanying Substack, Big Salad, a few months back, I started hearing speculation that she was on track to make $1 million on that channel alone in its first year. I asked Goddard about this, and she said the $1 million Substack figure isn’t true but neglected to share anything further. However, she did say that the website has more “readers, traffic, and engagement than ever,” 17 years in. (She said she launched the Substack because she liked the community’s vibe, and she also wanted a place to talk about dating that was a little more private. A subscription to Big Salad is $60 a year or $5 a month.)

  Goddard is indeed remarkable: Her ability to blend subjectively useful information (“What Are the Best Cinnamon Rolls?”) with personal anecdotes (“Five Things That Surprised Me About My Divorce”) is unparalleled. A recent link roundup—remember those?—generated 86 comments as of this writing. In another life, Goddard was a writer for Glamour and other magazines, and blogs like hers rendered those legacy titles irrelevant. She’s also not the only blogger whose website survived Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms that made longer-form, container-free content less necessary. This week, I was drawn back into Marlien Rentmeester’s Le Catch, where she generously recommended Line Sheet to her followers. Marlien is another magazine editor (and former colleague of mine) who has built a consistent, loyal following over the years, platform be damned.

  Is there anything to this? Are people regressing to blogs as they regressed to newsletters a few years ago? I asked Lewis why she put blogs on her “in” list. Here’s what she told me: “I love newsletters as much as the next person, but I think many of us (even newsletter writers!) are experiencing newsletter fatigue.”

  She continued: “At the same time, we’re seeing so many individual voices thrive away from the confines of traditional publishers. Aside from email, what’s a format where individual voices can thrive without a traditional publisher? Blogs! Some funny trend cycle context is that I’ve been publishing on the internet since I was 12. First on a listserv (in other words, an email newsletter) then on a bad DIY-ed HTML site, then, once Blogger launched, a blog. In the late ’90s, everyone graduated from email newsletters to websites and blogs partly because it was new technology but also because we had email fatigue.”

  Perhaps this is indeed just another trend cycle. The difference now, of course, is that our phones are now computers, and folks don’t really visit URLs with the same voracity with which they used to. (Anyone who publishes a “home page,” hee hee, knows that.) “You’re absolutely right,” Lewis responded. “Substack’s app solves this for publications they host, but I think there needs to be some tech advancements. RSS readers would need to make a comeback. Remember Bloglovin?!” Nostalgia is always “in.”

No, they are selling what the industry’s top critics deemed the future of fashion: four-figure cotton shirts with collars stitched to pop, five-figure knitted dresses covered in radiating sequins, and leather coats so expensive you have to ask about the price. But along with the expected insider praise, pedestrian fans of all ages pushed back, declaring that the world had changed in the five years since Philo resigned from her post as creative director of Céline, the job that made her so famous. Phoebe Philo, the line, was primed to fall short of the lofty expectations of its demanding, emotional audience.

Two months after the initial launch of a brand that took more than two years to materialize, Philo and her team are preparing for the real test: a second collection launch that is slated, according to press materials, for “Spring 2024.” There is also talk of an offline expansion in the form of shop-in-shops at a handful of retailers in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. (A rep for Philo did not respond to a request for comment on the speculation.)

Will people keep buying it? The October lift-off was as stressful on the inside as it was on the outside, according to those who lived it. There are tales of typical launch-day calamity, compounded by the wonkiness, intentional and unintentional, of the site. Looking back, Philo’s reintroduction into fashion society was messy and unsettling. Some of it was chaotic good: the grainy imagery, the deliciously vile typeface of the logo, the second “delivery,” with its studded gold bikini bottoms and a dirt magnet of a white handbag. The collection, in many ways, felt dangerous after years of designers playing it safe in the long shadow Philo cast during her time at Céline.

But there was plenty of chaotic evil in there, too, and not just the laborious return process that requires the unsatisfied customer to email a photo of themselves wearing the garment or accessory back to the company, which then reviews it and approves a return. The reality is that the customer is providing Phoebe Philo with invaluable information on how the garments fit real people. A circuitous data grab. The bigger problem seems to be that, after the initial thrill, those who have kept their purchases are hardly effusive. “The surprise is, everyone I knew who bought it isn’t obsessed and loving it and either returned it or sold it,” one retail executive told me.

We were going back and forth, attempting a back-of-the-envelope estimate of how much product the company sold in that first “delivery.” It’s hard to pin down because the minimum manufacturing run for a style is typically 100 units—except when the units are priced so high. Check back with me in a year. The company was only required to file its 2022 financial statements on the British business registrar at the end of last month.

That report does tell an interesting story, though. By the end of 2022, the Phoebe Philo company had 49 employees, with £18 million in net assets, down from nearly £26 million in March 2022. (And £14 million cash on hand, compared with £25 million earlier in the year.) The dip is understandable: The number of people on the payroll more than tripled in less than a year, and they were prepping for a launch that was meant to happen much earlier than it did. As for how much Philo was paying herself? “An amount of ​​£259,677 was paid to Phoebe Philo Studio Limited in respect of consulting fees,” reads a note at the bottom of the report. That’s nothing compared to her counterparts at minority investor LVMH, and nothing compared to what she was making while employed full-time at the group. This is a startup, after all, and her main compensation is her equity.

Phoebe Philo will likely lose money for the next several years. We know that this is how the fashion business works, even for well-funded companies with the right distribution, manufacturing, and operational know-how. My honest feeling is that, once the product is sitting in a store, and customers can go in, try things on several times over, and perhaps buy a few things on sale after Christmas, there will be less resentment over the pricing, and more excitement over the purchases they’re making. Philo knows what her woman wants because she is her woman. It’s just a matter of delivering it in the right package.

How brands are battling bots. [BoF]

Bernard Arnault was awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, France’s “highest civilian decoration.” [WWD]

Abercrombie & Fitch was the retail stock winner in a year of real losers. [BoF]

Chip Wilson, the Lululemon founder who got in trouble more than a decade ago for saying “some women’s bodies just don’t actually work” in the brand’s leggings, is back with more offensive community-building tips. “You’ve got to be clear that you don’t want certain customers coming in,” he says. This guy! (He is still the company’s largest shareholder, by the way.) [Forbes via The Cut]

Thanks to the Line Sheet reader who tipped me off about Shiseido’s American subsidiary acquiring Dr. Dennis Gross. [Retail Dive]