Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Los Angeles is the best (meaning, traffic-free) during national holidays.

Speaking of, I’m taking tomorrow off. Happy Fourth! I’ll be back on Monday with tons of good stuff. Sorry if Givenchy breaks while I’m out. Until then, enjoy the latest news from the Saks-Neimans trenches, and of course, Europe, including intel on the executive shake-up at Richemont. Most crucially, Rachel Strugatz is back with an update on the state of Pat McGrath Labs. McGrath, inarguably fashion’s most famous runway makeup artist, recently worked her magic to create those unforgettable glossed-over faces at the Maison Margiela Artisanal show. When McGrath launched her beauty line in 2015, she became a startup darling, too. She landed a $60 million investment from Eurazeo in 2018 that valued the company at $1 billion. But just three years later, in 2021, Eurazeo quietly exited the business, and, as Rachel reveals, scaling has not been as effortless as it once seemed during those easy money days. Don’t miss this one.

🎧 Programming note: On Friday’s Fashion People, I chat with tech executive-turned-apparel C.E.O. Nicolaj Reffstrup about his new book, The Ganni Playbook, which explains, in frank detail, how he and wife Ditte Reffstrup made Ganni into one of the biggest fashion brands in the world. It’s a fun chat, so subscribe here.

📈 P.S. If you have opinions about how we do things at Puck—and I bet you do—please participate in our new study. We want to hear from you to make your experience even better!

Mentioned in this issue: Richard Baker, Marc Jacobs, the New York Public Library, Steff Yotka, Sofia Coppola, Carhartt pants, Chanel, Marc Jacobs (again), Milk Fed, Julie de Libran, Cartier, Cyrille Vigneron, Johann Rupert, Anton Rupert, Nicolas Bos, Game of Thrones, Pat McGrath, John Galliano, Margiela Artisanal, Westman Atelier, Charlotte Tilbury, and many more.

• Signed, sealed, but not delivered: The marriage between Neiman Marcus Group and Saks Fifth Avenue is close to being consummated. This morning, the Neiman Marcus Group’s board of directors approved a deal with Richard Baker, the chairman of HBC and the owner of Saks Fifth Avenue, to acquire NMG for just under $2.7 billion. The board vote was not unanimous, and I’m told one of the three main investors in NMG voted against it, but in the end, most decided it was a good idea.

  Given the softness in the market and the uncertain future of multibrand retail, the $2.7 billion number is very fair. Whether the deal will be cleared by the Federal Trade Commission is another story: There are many moving parts to this, and now HBC will have to work carefully to ensure it’s approved. Any cultural—or executive—changes won’t happen until that’s all over, from what I can tell. I’ll have more on this next week—including details on Amazon’s minority stake in the newly formed company—but for now: Kudos to Baker for probably, almost, definitely seeing through a consolidation that people have been talking about for nearly 20 years.

• On the Marc Jacobs show: Considering all the resort shows, and couture shows, and other shows over the past few months, I can’t think of one as eye-popping—or shareable or thought-provoking—as the collection that Marc Jacobs debuted at the New York Public Library on Monday night. “Don’t kill me for saying it but: The Marc show was FOMO worthy,” a friend wrote to me yesterday.

  The best fashion shows are instantly memorialized, and on Tuesday morning I saw so many people—some who attended, some who didn’t—posting runway stills out of pure enthusiasm. There are a million reasons why. For one, it was visually striking: three-dimensional garments in bright, intense colors and nostalgic silhouettes. It also worked on an intellectual level, with a cartoonish nod to 20th century Americana—the models were styled like Marilyn Monroe—that provided just a hint of political commentary.

  The collection conjured Jacobs’ ability to move with the times. On an upcoming episode of Fashion People, the writer and youth-culture expert Casey Lewis cites Jacobs’ TikTok strategy as one of fashion’s smartest audience plays. He also leans into, um, user-generated content. The other day, the designer reposted a video of a young girl-slash-TikTok character who stole her mom’s credit card to buy a $600 Marc Jacobs “Tote” bag, akin to when he had Winona Ryder, convicted of shoplifting several Marc Jacobs pieces form Saks Fifth Avenue in 2001, star in an advertising campaign two years later. Jacobs is the king of being in on the joke, and we live in an era when that sort of self-awareness is prized above almost all.

• Richemont’s very own Game of Thrones?: No one was surprised to hear the news that Cartier has a new C.E.O., effective September 1. My understanding, from the reporting that I did at the end of last year, was that beloved brand C.E.O. Cyrille Vigneron’s contract was near its end, and that he would probably exit… but maybe not. That’s kind of exactly what happened. He stepped down, but will continue to chair the brand’s foundation. His replacement is current Vacheron Constantin C.E.O. Louis Ferla, who’s been with the group since 2001.

  Sounds pretty drama-free, yes? And yet, I woke up on Tuesday morning to a slew of panicked texts about it all. “I hear it’s become a Game of Thrones in Geneva,” one insider wrote. Another person, even more closely connected to the company, put it a little differently: Regardless of whether Vigneron was clashing (pun intended) with Richemont founder and chairman Johann Rupert, as rumored, he has made it clear to everyone close to him that his contract was up, and that he might not stay.

  What everyone can agree upon: Rupert, who is 74 and still heavily involved in daily operational management, doesn’t have a clear successor in place. His son, Anton Rupert, is in his late 30s, has never held a C.E.O. role within the group, and reminds at least one executive of Roman Roy. (Hey, look, Roman was my favorite.) For some reason, this situation feels like it needs to be more urgently addressed than LVMH (where there are plenty of kids) or Kering (François-Henri Pinault is still quite young). And yet, it’s unclear whether any of the top executives—mostly French, male executives, including Group C.E.O. Nicolas Bos, et al.—are being groomed for something bigger. Everyone is on edge. What’s going to happen? “It’ll probably, ultimately, get sold,” the closely connected person said. That’s sacrilegious talk within the Canton of Geneva, but last week’s Arnault-owning-Richemont-shares leak will certainly stoke that fire. More likely, Cartier will be spun off into its own company, and the rest will be sold off in pieces, private equity style.

• Hey Chanel, might we suggest…: Dear Bruno Pavlovsky (or Leena Nair?), Fashion People guest (and Ssense content lead) Steff Yotka has a great idea for you. Forget about all the designers toiling away, dreaming of taking over your atelier. Instead, consider the alternative: How about Sofia Coppola as the next creative director of Chanel?

  This, I declare, is Steff’s most brilliant idea to date. As she articulated so clearly on the pod, Coppola is arguably the ideal person for this job. A Chanel ambassador for years—decades?—she even interned there, like many privileged aesthetes, when she was a teenager. Perhaps most important, Coppola is the ultimate influencer for a certain set of consumers (wealthy women over the age of 30), and anything she recommends (from Carhartt pants to shiny-buff nails) is immediately adopted. Her teenage daughter, Romy, is already wearing Chanel on the red carpet, and can appeal to that next-gen customer.

  But most importantly, Coppola is a world-builder: She can direct the commercials, bring the right people into the campaigns, and develop the brand in a way that feels true to its history. And like another celebrity creative directing a big luxury line, Pharrell Williams, she has industry experience. Her line, Milk Fed, was instantly popular when it launched in the 1990s. Her recent collaboration with the Scottish cashmere mill Barrie—also owned by the Wertheimer family—was organized, in part, by Nathalie Franson Pavlovsky, a former Chanel employee and wife of the aforementioned Bruno. (And yes, Nathalie made an appearance in last week’s item regarding Alexandre Vauthier.)

  The problem with this dream scenario is that the life of a film director is very different from the life of a fashion creative director. Coppola spends years on one movie, while a collection needs to be completed within months. That’s why I propose a slight amendment to Steff’s brilliant suggestion: Bring in Coppola’s close friend Marc Jacobs as the co-designer, and, as Steff mentioned, Julie de Libran (who worked for Jacobs designing his pre-collections at Louis Vuitton, and is a friend to both) as their girl on the ground in Paris. I love this solution and sincerely hope the powers that be at Chanel consider our proposal.

Pat McGrath Labs was an immediate sensation and sold out in minutes via limited-edition drops. Plus, of course, there was McGrath herself, who has a preternatural knack for creating viral moments at runway shows—from the gold lips she painted onto Prada’s models in 2016, to the fantastically spooky, porcelain doll look she conceived for John Galliano’s Margiela couture show this past January. In 2018, Eurazeo Brands, a U.S. division of the publicly traded, Paris-based private equity shop Eurazeo, made a $60 million investment in the company at an eye-popping $1 billion valuation.

At the time, this all seemed perfectly logical. Charlotte Tilbury was acquired by Puig in 2020 for over $1 billion. Westman Atelier, albeit smaller, has a healthy Sephora business and is widely considered to be a 2025 acquisition target. And yet, McGrath’s more commercial ventures haven’t matched her runway supernovas. Several company insiders and industry experts who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity pointed to lagging innovation and an “inability to commercialize viral moments.” McGrath, after all, makes highly editorial makeup that’s harder to practically commercialize and scale. Her eyeshadow palettes, although beloved by connoisseurs, cost more than double what competitors charge. “When they initially came out, they had a level of formula innovation unlike anything else on the market that made them worth the cost,” a longtime beauty executive said of the line’s “Mothership” palettes. Eventually, other brands caught up.

The brand performed well in the U.S. when it launched in Sephora in 2017, and quickly expanded its door count. Alas, sales began declining a few years later, according to a former executive. “The problem happened right before Covid. The brand really slowed down because of their innovation pipeline––they just kept doing the same palettes over and over,” this person said. In 2019, the line was sold in 175 U.S. doors with plans to expand to 250, this former executive told me. Today that number is less than 175, and I was told by a source familiar with Sephora’s sales that the brand hovers around the 40th-best-selling makeup brand. (Sephora declined to give an updated door count. A spokesperson for the brand told me that Pat McGrath Labs has “seen consistently strong demand across our product categories and sales channels, and expect this to continue in the months and years ahead.”)

There have been at least two rounds of layoffs in the last six months, including as recently as last week. A different former senior employee estimated that at least 20 percent of staff has been let go since 2023, perhaps a post-Covid correction. According to the spokesperson for Pat McGrath Labs, the brand is looking to the future, “as with any growth company,” and “continues to build and develop its infrastructure and operational excellence as the business continues to grow.”

As for McGrath’s new investors, documents from 2021 show that Sienna Capital, the investment arm of the Desmarais Family Residuary Trust, owned 15 percent of Pat McGrath Cosmetics LLC. Worth $4.5 billion, the Desmarais family is one of the richest in Canada. Charles and Maria Desmarais are co-founders of Athena Club, a women’s self-care line.

One of the former Pat McGrath Labs employees told me that by 2022, the company “wasn’t even close to profitability.” That year, global managing director Thierry Maman urged the team to grow top-line sales. During that time, the brand expanded distribution globally and, in 2023, entered Ulta Beauty, which currently sells the brand in 200 doors, a spokesperson for the retailer said.

Indeed, she has done less to put herself front and center, on social media or otherwise, than some of her peers. “She would not go on camera, she would not do in-store events,” one of the former employees told me—exaggerating only slightly. “At least now she’s a little more out there than she was before.”

To wit: McGrath’s recent viral Margiela moment would have been the perfect launchpad for a commercially minded beauty brand. The live masterclass McGrath hosted on TikTok and Instagram in February would have been infinitely more valuable if it were tied to a product release. McGrath, who remains unparalleled for her ability to create magic on the runway, was always more of an artist than a business person. And if her investors want that big exit, Maman and his team are going to have to figure out a way to operate around that reality.

Until next week,
Lauren