Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. This week has felt long. Many lunches. Many Zooms. Many calls. Many texts. We are back! Apparently, Pitti already happened? Next up: Emmys red carpet, men’s, and couture… fashion never stops, so I guess neither do I?

Today’s issue is once again bursting with tales of deals, real and imagined, from every corner of the Line Sheet universe. The takeaway: people have money, and people need money. Let the 2024 M&A games begin.

But before we get started, I’m pleased to announce that Puck is partnering with one of my favorite no-B.S. data providers, Launchmetrics, on a special report that digs into who is really driving the fashion conversation online. I’ll be covering the report in the January 25 issue of Line Sheet, and running through the findings live that day at 8 a.m. PT/11 a.m. ET/5 p.m. CET with my pals at Launchmetrics. This event is exclusive to Puck members, because I want you to be smarter than everyone else (not very hard, honestly…). Sign up here.

Mentioned in this issue: Art + Commerce, Susan Plagemann, Launchmetrics, Connor McKnight, Max and Xander Ritz, Sally Singer, Barbara Sturm, Giovanni Testino, CAA, Les Wexner, David Boies, Ari Emanuel, Endeavor, Johnny Depp’s ex-lawyer, Gisele Bündchen, Ivan Bart, Christian Carino, John Mehas, Martin Waters, Dan Constable, Sabato De Sarno, Alastair McKimm, Anthony Seklaoui, Matthew Moneypenny, Jerry Lorenzo, and many, many more…

• Big news in beauty M&A: Beauty deals are always more plentiful than fashion, but this year is going to be nutty. Many founders, still unable to turn a profit, are desperate for an exit, and so it’s time for both the private equity firms and strategic groups to pounce. Earlier this week, The Information reported that Los Angeles-based fresh-face brand Kosas started the process. Now comes the news that Dr. Barbara Sturm sold a majority stake to Puig for an undisclosed sum.

  I heard a few days ago that Sturm was in talks with both Puig and La Prairie owner Beiersdorf, but the conversations had stalled. (Just a fun note: Sturm’s husband is Adam Waldman, the controversial former Johnny Depp lawyer.) An investment deck I viewed from April 2023 indicates that the company generated about €63 million in sales in 2022, with a gross margin of nearly 80 percent. (At that time, the company was projecting sales of about €84 million in 2024.) The pre-money valuation last April was €500 million, although it sounds like Puig got a pretty good deal, but more on that soon. Not sure how recent investors, like Oprah, fared.

  Big picture, it’s wild to think that a beauty brand with so much buzz is generating less than $100 million a year in sales, but there are just so many options on the market now, and getting over that $100 million mark might not be so easy when you want to limit your distribution to so-called good retailers. Other brands I suspect strategic acquirers are following include Augustinus Bader (probably the most outwardly successful of expert brands to launch in recent years), Vintner’s Daughter, Topicals, and Josh Rosebrook, a low-key favorite among Millennial and Gen X women. (Westman Atelier is in that mix, too, but as I wrote a few weeks back, they seem to be holding off.) The companies that are actually profitable will do best, but don’t expect the kind of pie-in-the-sky valuations that we saw a decade ago. For the most part, they didn’t pan out for investors.

• A New York kid gets a break: Who wants to invest in fledgling fashion labels these days? Apparently, New York-based boutique investment firm The Loyalist, which recently took a minority stake in New York-based Connor McKnight. Founded by brothers Max and Xander Ritz in 2016, The Loyalist invests in small consumer brands and also helps them with operations, distribution, and the like. They also back reality-star-influencer Morgan Stewart’s line, Renggli, and F1 star Daniel Ricciardo’s line, Enchanté.

  Aside from having great names, Max and Xander Ritz are pretty famous lacrosse players; they even co-founded LXM Pro, a professional lacrosse showcase that stopped touring in 2014. Anyway, this all delights me, especially if they are spending their money on people like Connor, who is very talented and deserves the support. (It’s next to impossible to build an apparel brand from scratch right now, especially in New York.) More on this dynamic duo—and Connor—soon!

• More on Les: On Tuesday, more transcripts were released from Virginia Giuffre’s 2016 defamation case against Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. These latest documents include Giuffre’s claim that she had sex with Les Wexner on multiple occasions, that she wore lingerie for him, that she didn’t remember whether it was Victoria’s Secret lingerie, etcetera. Wexner has not commented on the contents of the unsealed documents, but I’ll share a couple of observations.

  One is that former Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz—whom Giuffre once accused of having sex with her while she was underage, then sued for defamation before subsequently dropping the case—testified in court that Giuffre’s lawyers, including David Boies, told him that they had done an “extensive investigation” of the allegations against Wexner and found that they were not true. The other is that, in 2019, Brad Edwards, another Giuffre attorney, said in a statement that he believed Wexner was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know about Epstein’s “sexual proclivities.” In the past, Wexner’s reps have said he never met Giuffre.

  Of course, all that context is bound to get lost in the headlines, and it underscores the corrosive nature of Wexner’s association with Epstein. But whatever happened to Giuffre 20 years ago deeply traumatized her—she actually had to stop this deposition in 2016 to vomit.

• And yet more…: This week I heard a rumor that Wexner, along with former Victoria’s Secret president John Mehas, was trying to secure financing to take Victoria’s Secret private. The company, which won’t announce its full-year and fourth-quarter results until early March, continues to struggle, and I’m convinced a take-private will occur by the end of this year. (This week, the company eliminated a small department run by Jamie McFate, who has worked at Victoria’s Secret for 30 years, mostly as a direct adviser to Wexner, then to current C.E.O. Martin Waters. A VS rep did not request for comment.)

  Turns out the Mehas-Wexner rumor, despite traveling pretty far up the Victoria’s Secret executive ranks, is pure fantasy, according to people close to both men. Mehas has moved on: He sold his house in Columbus, and has a nice job selling Nantucket reds as C.E.O. of Vineyard Vines. And Wexner, for his part, doesn’t look back. I’ve spent the last several years documenting his career, and if it doesn’t make good business sense, he’s not going to pursue it. Even at his most delusional—he made some very bad decisions during his final decade running the company—he knows that his association with Victoria’s Secret would doom any effort to turn it around. Would’ve been a great ending for our book, though…

The speculation in Paris, according to people close to Art Partner co-founder Giovanni Testino, was that he has been angling to do a deal with Pinault for some time, and has been priming the agency for more than two years in anticipation of a sale. (Testino did not respond to a request for comment, nor did a rep for Pinault.) The problem with this theory, however, is that CAA higher-ups say it’s all nonsense—that there have been no discussions, and that they have no idea where the rumor is coming from. Indeed, the company recently endured two significant transactions: the acquisition of ICM and, of course, the deal with Pinault.

While it’s easy to reduce this to a game of telephone gone awry, there is a widespread consensus across the industry that Testino—brother of the famed, now infamous, photographer Mario Testino—is ready to sell, following in the footsteps of many of his peers. But many people associated with Art Partner bemoan the very notion of selling to an agency since it would shift the company’s center of gravity from Paris to Los Angeles.

These people are acutely aware of how Art + Commerce—an agency rival founded by Anne Kennedy, Jimmy Moffat, and Leslie Sweeney in the early 1980s—began losing altitude after it was acquired, in 2007, by IMG. Art + Commerce was slowly absorbed into what is now called WME Fashion, itself a subdivision of Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor frankenco, which also includes IMG Models, fashion events like NYFW, and The Wall Group, which represents fashion stylists and glam teams. Art + Commerce, which operates largely out of New York, inevitably ceded ground to Art Partner in Europe, where Testino’s top team is based. (Yes, yes, Art + Commerce also has a presence in Europe. But we all know the score.)

Singer, the former Vogue writer and editor, is well-loved by most of her former staffers and can certainly get people to pick up the phone. But she is not an agent—those who run talent agencies are usually agents first, like former Art + Commerce managing director Philippe Brutus. Also, when you work at a magazine, especially Vogue, there is a push-pull and plenty of negotiation with brands and designers, but in the end, the editor has the leverage. When you are representing talent, you are the one doing cartwheels. But that doesn’t seem to bother Plagemann, once one of Condé Nast’s biggest earners, who has swiftly vacuumed up what feels like half of her former hormigas since joining WME in 2022. “When it comes to Sally, it was less about her credentials and more about it being someone Susan is comfortable with,” one WME Fashion insider said.

Some wonder if Plagemann, who is also operating in a new context, is more focused on branding WME Fashion than getting the deals done for the talent that the company currently represents, or bringing on new talent, in an era when the fees are declining across the board. Photographers who used to get paid $100,000 per diems are now getting $15,000. Model representation—the bread and butter of WME Fashion through storied agency IMG Models—is no longer as lucrative, and the group has lost some big names. (Gisele Bündchen famously left IMG after 22 years in 2021 when her agent, Anne Nelson, moved to CAA. Nelson is now at UTA, as is Bündchen.) Emanuel is said to be frustrated by Plagemann’s approach, according to multiple people. (WME declined to comment. Also: WME represents Puck.)

It’s hard to know whether or not Plagemann is making Endeavor more money year over year. I hear that Golden Globe bookings for The Wall Group, for instance, were up from 2022. The firm still represents some of the biggest models in the world, including Paloma Elsesser, scouted years ago by the late Ivan Bart, who left IMG Models in March 2023 and died in October. But again, fees are not what they used to be in any of these areas, which means that you need volume, and lots of it, in order to keep up.

Linking Art Partner with CAA Fashion could potentially create some exciting “synergies,” or, in non-marketing terms, make it easier to hook acting talent up with campaigns, or directing talent with brands and art directors. It would also more directly pit CAA against WME in the fashion category. (When it comes to CAA and WME, “Both sides are examining one another’s strategy, but neither is really hitting the nail on the head,” one boutique agency owner said.) UTA, the other big agency, does not have a fashion division but does play in that space, working with brands and talents alike through its licensing division. (Dan Constable, the UTA agent who connects the agency’s celebrity clients with fashion brands, became a far-better-known quantity during the strike.)

The ick factor with all this consolidation is that it may make things easier, but it doesn’t necessarily make things better. For instance, say a young fashion designer gets a big new job and wants to hire a certain art director for advertising campaigns. The agency that reps the art director will likely push the designer and brand to also hire a photographer on their roster, and may promise some sort of deal for doing so. Packaging may have come to an end in Hollywood (supposedly), but it is very much alive in fashion. “No one is willing to push for the most creative people at the moment,” said one talent, repped at one time or another by both Art + Commerce and Art Partner. “It’s all about sticking to the formula, with a limited budget.”

The appeal for big talent agencies must ultimately be control of the image-making process, because most of these specialized agencies don’t hit the $50 million-a-year in revenue mark, let alone nine figures. The downside for talent, and the industry overall, is homogenization. These used to be mom-and-pop shops working with other mom-and-pop shops. Also, alas, there’s little evidence that the superagency model works: Remember Matthew Moneypenny’s Great Bowery experiment, when the agent raised hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up a gaggle of creative agencies, including Streeters and Camilla Lowther Management? Great Bowery still exists in some form, but it did not come to dominate the industry in the way Moneypenny hoped. After all, the key to success in talent representation is having good clients, and taking care of those clients. In some ways, it is easier to do that when you’re smaller.

Rothy’s co-founders are stepping down; Jenny Ming, ex-Old Navy president and former C.E.O. of Forever 21 precursor Charlotte Russe (known colloquially as Charlotte Hooch), is the new boss. Jenny is awesome! She got mad at me once because of a headline and I don’t think we’ve ever spoken again, but I still love her and think she’s a great executive. [WWD]

“Britain’s Warren Buffett” has sold his stake in Estée Lauder. [Yahoo!]

Pieter Mulier did a very chic thing and personally emailed every person invited to his next Paris runway show. [Style Not Com]

Got an insane number of DMs (more than 70) re: an Instagram Story I posted about these Blake Lively and Taylor Swift looks. Do we need to do a deep dive? [Just Jared]

Every week, I ask myself, Should I get Botox? And every week, I am convinced that the answer is yes, until I am convinced the answer is no. [New York Times]

Fear of God’s Jerry Lorenzo just bought a $20 million house in Beverly Hills. I approve! [Robb Report]

Max Mara, a great brand and business that doesn’t always get the credit it’s due for being great, is staging its next resort show in Venice, Italy. [Inbox]

Rent the Runway laid off 10 percent of its corporate staff. Its president and C.O.O. Anushka Salinas resigned. (She’ll get a $950,000 payout.) Jenn Hyman, the C.E.O. and co-founder, is absorbing some of her responsibilities. Also, they’re hiring a C.M.O., if you are looking for a job. The stock is currently trading at $0.73 per share, down from its stock market debut in 2021 at $23 per share. [Marketwatch]

One of my marketing and P.R. faves, Caroline Deroche Pasquier, is moving over to Versace to run global communications. [WWD]

Kering Ventures has invested in Mogu, a maker of mycelium, better known as “mushroom leather.” [Fashion United]

By the way, our friends at Launchmetrics just sold a majority stake to Lectra, a French software company best known for its software that helps designers make three-dimensional CAD (computer-aided design) files, an integral part of the apparel design process. [Textile World]

And finally… this talk of Charlotte Hooch and Forever 21 got me thinking, whatever happened to Fashion Nova? Did Shein take them out too? Let’s investigate.