Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. London is almost always a good idea. I saw friends, new and old. I learned of the disturbing proliferation of “American-style” candy shops brought in to “save the high street.” (Who even eats sugar?) I went to the National Portrait Gallery. There wasn’t enough time, sadly, to visit the Margaret Howell “sale” shop on Margaret Street. I needed another two days to see everyone I was meant to see… three days to see everyone I wanted to see.

I’ll have more intel from my London trip in tomorrow’s email, but today I’m sharing my multitudinous feelings about Monday night’s Gucci show as well as thoughts on a major shakeup at Condé Nast: Chief Revenue Officer Pamela Drucker Mann quit yesterday. (Who will do the work?) For the main event, Rachel “[email protected]” Strugatz has been reporting tirelessly to get you all the behind-the-scenes details on Bella Hadid’s lackluster fragrance launch. I’m not a model person, so I don’t give the Hadids much thought, except for when one of them is dating newbie fashion-connoisseur Bradley Cooper or there is money on the line. Especially when some of that money belongs to John Howard, one of the investors behind Skims, Brady, and a bunch of other celebrity-fronted brands. (He used to be in Rag & Bone and Proenza Schouler, too, a lifetime ago.)

🚨🚨Programming note: The Luca Solca episode of Fashion People is live. A Luca fan described him to me this week as “smelling of cashmere.” I cannot confirm this.

Oh, by the way, Joerg, you freak, the code is LINESHEET. Sign up here for a year of discounted bliss.

Mentioned in this issue: Bella Hadid, Ôrəbella, Robin Burns-McNeill, Bradley Cooper, daisies, Gucci, Demna, Erewhon, Pamela Drucker Mann, Roger Lynch, Anna Wintour, Jonathan Newhouse, Arket, Virginie Viard, Mark Ronson, Kate Moss, margaritas, François-Henri Pinault, Francesca Bellettini, and many more…

I hear that Mann will be staying through the middle of the summer, at least, to help manage the transition, given that she oversees revenue at a $2 billion-ish a year company, and essentially became the business partner of Global Chief Content Officer Anna Wintour. Perhaps Lynch will use Mann’s exit as an opportunity to further reorganize the sales and marketing teams, saving additional cash along the way. (He has proven himself decent at cutting costs, and there are plenty within Pam’s entourage who will likely see their value decline overnight.) With her, though, goes 20 years of institutional knowledge, situational awareness about a unique company, and vital sales relationships.

I first remember clocking Drucker Mann when she was Adam Rappaport’s co-conspirator at Bon Appetit, her first big job—and, at the time, the only Condé brand with momentum. (Drucker Mann had ascended to C.M.O. by the time of Adam’s scandal and the YouTube sitch, and now the brand is just a recipes database.) She was an obvious star, and a stretch C.E.O. candidate in the run-up to Lynch’s appointment in 2019.

The board, perhaps wisely, chose an outsider with previous C.E.O. experience to reshape the business as it continued on its cultural and financial decline. Condé’s Achilles heel in the decade, starting with The September Issue and ending with the pandemic, was its inability to change along with the world around it—or, more aptly, to find a new business model to thrive in that new world. During his tenure, Lynch has consolidated the business and repented for many past business sins, but he has been unable to reshape the culture. Since his arrival, he has cycled through three C.F.O.s and a host of other senior-level executives, losing employee confidence with every rejiggering.

The board, starting and ending with Steven Newhouse, is not going to do what many fashion people covet: Let Jonathan Newhouse have the job (he’s surely moved on), or sell the company to someone willing to throw cash at these still-important, still-iconic brands. (To be fair, the Newhouses have been extremely generous and extremely patient owners…) Some board members have been questioning Lynch’s efficacy for more than a year, I’ve heard from people directly familiar with the conversations, and Drucker Mann’s sudden, if not unsurprising, exit is probably not a ringing endorsement of his leadership. That said, one presumes the last thing this board wants to do is consider a C.E.O. change after the top commercial executive has just departed. (I reached out to comms head Danielle Carrig for comment on this, and have yet to hear back.)

Instead of gently rehashing his first two collections, or using this time to refine his vision, Gucci designer Sabato De Sarno expanded his purview. The mini skirts and Ancorra red remained, but now there are suede jackets and pussy-bow blouses, pastels, etcetera. My visceral reaction: it was cloudy. The individual pieces—the daisy-embroidered denim, the square-toe ballet flats, the A-line skirts and jackets—were on point. The styling—especially the pile-lined athletic socks with the creepers—was right. But it was missing something…

So I asked people what they thought: C.E.O.s, art directors, editors, and actual luxury consumers. Some of them liked it, others were bored. A few could not understand how Kering could continue down this path.

But a top Gucci client, one who mourned the departure of Alessandro Michele, loved it. “Gucci was perfection!” she wrote me, unprompted, listing everything she admired: the chiffon, the flat shoes, the “fab bags.” In some ways, hers is the only opinion that matters. If Gucci’s sales numbers improve, De Sarno’s vision of young women wearing short hemlines will be enough. Gucci’s recent down quarter was widely blamed on him, even if his designs were mostly not the thing in stores. There was a similarly lengthy drag after Michele started, but there was also plenty of industry fervor for what he was doing. Michele’s Gucci was divisive, to be sure—people hated it, especially at the beginning and the end—but there was also no denying it was something.

Anyway, both Michele and De Sarno have been criticized for making clothes that look too High Street, but Michele was able to quickly shake that. The difficulty with De Sarno’s Gucci, at least for people who think about these things, is that it’s not well-defined. It’s nice, it’s cute, but what is it really about, other than plucking ideas from others? I stand by my original opinion that De Sarno understands how people want to dress today. The bored-influencer row at the Tate Modern, in their chain-link slingbacks, low-slung, true-blue denim, and spongy embossed sweatshirts, were stylish. And despite the criticism of De Sarno, the truth is that High Street is taking cues from him. Earlier in the day, I made a point of stopping by Arket, which I usually describe to people as the Uniqlo of the H&M Group. The resolutely monochrome women’s department was accented by mini dresses and loose denim meant to be worn with heels—all his influence.

François-Henri Pinault and his deputy Francesca Bellettini, who were both there last night, would probably attest that the only real choice here is to stay the course. The company should have made De Sarno “smaller” in the beginning, as one person suggested to me the other day, to help manage expectations. But customer attrition comes with changing designers, and mistakes will continue to happen, even if there is less room for them. This is the new normal in the luxury market.

After all, perfume is marketed as a quotidian fantasy, and Hadid’s shtick is very mood-and-aura-adjacent. And while conventional wisdom suggests that the beauty market is oversaturated with celebrities—Rihanna, Bieber, Kylie, etcetera—these sorts of fragrances have been fairly ballasty businesses since the dawn of time, circa Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, all the way through to Billie Eilish’s Eilish. Ôrəbella is whimsical, reasonably priced, and even though the alcohol-free formula can stain clothes (all of the oil), it is differentiated from a formulaic perspective. It also feels really on brand for its founder. It’s reminiscent of Britney, J.Lo, and Paris’s fragrances from the early aughts, at a time when aughts nostalgia is bubbling. Hadid’s decision to go with fragrance—and not skin care or makeup—was perhaps the most retro move of all.

For the launch of Ôrəbella, Hadid did all the expected things—a celebratory lunch; a big party; a pop-up with fans lined up outside; a visit to Ulta Beauty with almond mom Yolanda Hadid, who supported her daughter by buying the perfumes at an actual cash register. Behind the scenes, she also had some major partners: John Howard and Allen Shapiro. Howard, of course, is the prolific and very private backer of Rag & Bone, Ryan Reynolds’ Aviation gin, Good American, and Skims, while Shapiro is the former C.E.O. of Dick Clark Productions. The two teamed up in 2020 to create Celebrands, a fund that raised around $90 million at the time to invest in celebrity brands. So far, Celebrands’ other projects include Halsey’s makeup line, About-Face, and its diffusion line, af94. (A spokesperson for Celebrands didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Hadid is also working with industry legend Robin Burns-McNeill, just as I heard rumored a few months ago. Burns-McNeill, who was president of Calvin Klein’s cosmetics division in the ’80s, transformed a dying portfolio into a multibillion-dollar fragrance juggernaut and is widely credited with the success of Obsession and Eternity, two of the most iconic scents to ever exist. In 2006, she co-founded Batallure Beauty, an incubator that created beauty lines for LoveShackFancy, Kendra Scott, and Christian Louboutin. (Burns-McNeill didn’t respond for comment.)

Followers don’t necessarily dictate conversion, and I subscribe to the theory that a celebrity has to find content-market fit before delving into product. Hailey Bieber, the preeminent example, used her YouTube series to inform the brand we now know as Rhode. Reaction and data from videos led to a pivot from kitchen-related items, her original plan, to skincare, and now makeup. Success in this market isn’t necessarily about the star power, it’s about capitalizing on the right moment. With Hadid, although it seems like she’s passionate about these scented oils, the scrutiny will be at a higher level because she doesn’t yet have authority in beauty, besides being really beautiful.

In early May, Coty disclosed that Kylie Jenner’s Cosmic scent, which is surely targeted to Gen Z, ranked as a top two fragrance launch in the U.S. year to date. There is so much momentum in fragrance, from dupes and body splashes to the expensive niche stuff, that even if the demand didn’t exist previously, Hadid may still be able to capitalize on the trend alone.

Until then,
Lauren