Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Fashion had a lot going on this week, and since I couldn’t be everywhere at once I chose… Hawaii, where I spoke at Rosewood Kona Village about my career, the future of fashion, the future of journalism, and why we’re all in the service industry. (Thanks to the team at Rosewood for forcing me to relax, one of my least favorite activities.) I’m back in Los Angeles for a bit before I head to New York. (Get excited! Let’s hope it doesn’t snow.)

Lucky for you, I only relaxed a little, managing to gather a dazzling array of quality gems for you from every corner of the fashion world. Don’t worry, you masochists (or sadists?), there’s a Condé update too. By the way, thanks to everyone who tuned in to my chat today with Launchmetrics chief marketing officer Alison Bringé. For your reading pleasure, I’ve got my own take on Launchmetrics’s new report, which reveals the people and brands dominating the online fashion conversation.

Also, a quick promo for those of you in New York: We’re partnering with Netflix to offer Puck subscribers free tickets to a performance of the New York Philharmonic playing selections from the Maestro soundtrack. Bradley Cooper will also be there for a conversation with the film’s conducting consultant, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Sounds like a great opportunity to dress up. Limited tickets (for subscribers only!) available here.

Speaking of which… For those of you who keep creating fake email addresses so you can access one free Puck article, stop doing that. We’ll sign each and every one of you up for Ron DeSantis’s personal Substack. Also, I’m getting stressed thinking about how much time you’re wasting. You can expense $100, I promise, and reading is healthy and you can do more of it. Now, let’s get to it.

Mentioned in this issue: Versace, Pieter Mulier, Joanne Crevoiserat, Nikki Haley’s knitwear, Fashion Week FOMO, Simone Rocha, Tapestry, Susie Lau, Launchmetrics, Jennifer Lopez, Glenn Close, Gwyneth Paltrow, Juliette Binoche, Tory Burch, Opening Ceremony, Pierre-Yves Roussel, Condé Nast schadenfreude, Greta Lee, Loewe, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Shiona Turini, Kourtney Kardashian, Barbara Palvin, Sabato De Sarno, Peter Do, Kaitlin Phillips, Lisa Miller, my husband Dan, and many more.

• Goodbye Mounjaro, hello Zepbound: A friend of mine on the front lines of skinny society says that many of her comrades are switching from Mounjaro to Zepbound, the same weight-loss drug but on-label. Unfortunately for them, it still costs $1,000 a month, so here’s why they’re moving over. Many takers of Mounjaro got hooked up with a one-year discount, which reduced the cost to $500 a month. “Now we’re all on the Zep coupon card,” she told me. “Less than the price of coke and cigs needed in this economy, soo…” (Unclear what kind of coke she meant, uppercase or lowercase.)

  It goes without saying that we don’t know the long-term effects of these drugs, but it also goes without saying that they are saving lives—and my friend, whether she needs to be taking it or not, looks great. But she’s in her late 30s. Another friend emailed me last week, concerned that some of her mid-40s buds had traveled too far on the Ozempic train. Not only do their faces look old, but so do their bodies. “They take on this lifeless gait,” she said. Will we see an uptick in facelifts, butt implants, and boob jobs this year that can be correlated? I will let you know.

• Keep an eye on Versace: Did you notice that Versace—the actual product that you can buy in stores—is looking really good lately? I mindlessly clicked on a Twitter (oops, X) ad the other day—first time I’ve ever done that, I think?—and ended up doing a deep dive on the site. Lots of great shoes and dresses. I’ve also noticed an interest percolating with my fashion-savant friends (mostly Becky and Leandra). Meanwhile, the company—owned by Capri, soon to be owned by Tapestry—has beefed up its corporate leadership team in recent months. I suspect all these little changes are building to a larger change in the creative structure, but we’ll have to wait and see. As I’ve said before, Versace is the most luxurious brand in the forthcoming Tapestry supergroup—if it were owned by LVMH or Kering, it would be huge—and its success or failure will depend on whether the C.E.O. slated to oversee it all, Joanne Crevoiserat, is equipped to make it bigger and better, not bigger and mediocre.
• Couture was so fab this week: It’s hard to judge a fashion week unless you’re there, but this round of couture shows gave me major pangs of FOMO. To paraphrase Susie Lau on Instagram, couture is at its best when it’s a laboratory for ideas. Pieter Mulier’s Alaïa infinity dresses and Simone Rocha’s dripping pearls for Jean Paul Gaultier alone made the trek to Paris look worthwhile. Schiaparelli, Armani, Dior, and Valentino were stunning, too, while also offering a masterclass in front-row recruitment. (I loved Jennifer Lopez in black-and-silver Schiaparelli—a nice foil to her Ralph Lauren getups—as well as the Glenn Close, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Juliette Binoche triumvirate at Armani Privè.) In some ways, couture feels like a bigger opportunity to attract attention than the ready-to-wear shows, if only because the schedule is far less crowded. Nice work, everyone.
• The next phase of the Tory evolution: When a brand changes, its retail needs to change, too. And, I wondered as I tried on a pair of jeans at a Tory Burch at the Americana in Glendale last summer, how her chartreuse-green-velvet retail stores would transform as her clothes evolved. It’s not easy, or cheap, to redo everything: store renovations can cost millions of dollars.

  Last week, I got a sneak peek at what the new Tory Burch store look could be, via a temporary spot on Melrose—around the corner from The Row and up the street from Dries Van Noten—that the brand is occupying while their Beverly Hills location gets a proper reno. It opened this week and was designed in collaboration with Opening Ceremony’s Humberto Leon, who extracted the Walter Schels cat portrait from Burch’s latest collection and wallpapered the store with it. The entire floor is carpeted with a shag rug made to look like a cat scratching post. It’s a little weird and funny, like Tory Burch herself, and ideal for displaying clothes and accessories. (The new collection also includes a surrealist “broken” heel and a deep v-knit with scrunched-up sleeves that is bound to be a sweater of the season.)

  More than anything, it made me miss Opening Ceremony, especially the original location on Howard Street, where I have no doubt Leon and partner Carol Lim would have been loving up on The New Tory. (The store closed at the top of 2020, pre-pandemic.) At the same time, it’s nice to see everyone moving forward. Leon and Lim’s connection to Burch and the company’s C.E.O., Pierre-Yves Roussel, who recruited them to design Kenzo back when he was running the LVMH Fashion Group, goes back 15 years at this point, but this store feels anything but old.

• On Nikki Haley’s PTA sweaters: I can’t stop thinking about my friend (and fellow Vivian Gornick obsessive) Mattie Kahn’s Vogue.com piece about Republican presidential long shot Nikki Haley’s quaint knitwear, the kind you’d find in the Sundance Catalog or the sales section at Macy’s.

  I dislike the politician fashion literary genre because, honestly, it’s dumb to ask whether it’s okay for Barack Obama to wear a tan suit. Of course, there are times when it’s warranted. Michelle Obama’s clothes begged for examination and criticism on a regular basis because they were coded. (Anybody with real style embeds secrets in their appearance.) On the other hand, Kamala Harris’s wardrobe mostly does not mean anything, despite the fact that she usually looks good and is circumspect enough to hire a talented stylist. (I’d argue the lack of depth in her wardrobe helps to explain why she won’t ever be president. But, yes, there are many other reasons, too.)

  Haley’s sweaters, however, are saying things. The orange-sherbet one, the intarsia-ed American flag one from Ralph Lauren: They are such a pure expression of how women dress every day in the Rust Belt, which is where I grew up. Those are the same people who believe every Hillary Clinton conspiracy and secretly voted for Trump in 2016 even though they would never admit it to their liberal relatives who don’t live there anymore. I’m still not sure Haley would win the general election if she were in the running—people really hate women, no matter what the early polling suggests—but she’s connecting on a level that someone like me, an arms-length follower of politics, can see. That’s the power of clothes.

• Your near-daily dose of Condé Nast schadenfreude: If you’re reading this, you probably also followed the Tuesday walkout of the Condé union closely on social media, saw the step-and-repeat (better than the Emmys, non?), and heard about Anne Hathaway skipping the Vanity Fair shoot. (Now that SAG-AFTRA is involved, “What if all the celebrities boycott the Vanity Fair Oscars party?” an ex-executive cackled. Let’s not punch down here, people!)

  Anyway, in an effort to cover all sides, I wanted to clue you in on what’s happening not with management, nor with the union organizers, but with the union members who are honestly pretty fed up with their union—they didn’t agree with the walkout—and want to leave but feel that there is no way to do so. (Many say they were baited into joining initially.) When I asked one person what this all meant, they said that some of the more skeptical members “realized quickly that the folks running [the union strategy] are young and have no clue what they’re doing. [The members] don’t agree with the tactics and it’s hurting their careers.”

  I’m not sure about that last bit—if you’re choosing to build your career at Condé Nast in its current iteration, and you are talented and employable, that’s very much your choice—and I am sure mostly everyone involved, both the union and management, is trying to do the right thing. (Well, maybe not Stan.) But I will say that the thing about these unions at Hearst and Condé Nast is that most of the people joining them still come from great privilege. And so while they are fighting for what they are entitled to, they also have a sense of entitlement.

  Most importantly, though, as I’ve said before, unions don’t work in declining businesses. So yeah, of course there are people who want out, but Condé Nast’s unit economics—which long relied on a young and underpaid workforce—simply doesn’t make sense anymore. And paying those young people more is going to bury them further underwater. Once again, let’s just send good energy to the 90 people on the layoff list and currently working in purgatory. This is cruel.

Why has it felt like Hollywood magic? Lee seems like the kind of person who might carry a Loewe bag in real life. And Anderson, through Loewe, only seems to be willing to work with actors like Lee, for whom his admiration is believable. If Loewe suddenly hired a Kardashian, I’d feel uneasy about it, and so would other consumers. Watch, now that will happen… but let’s hope it doesn’t.

If 2023 taught us anything about the fashion industry, it is that being bigger isn’t always better. And that’s what I see in Launchmetrics’ 2024 Voices of Fashion report, on which I advised. I’ve been using Launchmetrics’ data—which offers a 360-degree view of the online conversation around fashion brands and fashion people—in my reporting for years. I trust it because they don’t just scrape the web; they weigh both the qualitative and quantitative, and attempt to offer an honest, accurate picture of what consumers are thinking by evaluating social media posts, replies, press mentions, and pretty much every other piece of so-called content you could find in the virtual world. If I want to prove a point about brand sentiment, I go to Launchmetrics to cross-check. (Surprise, I’m not always right, and the narrative sometimes changes because of what they unearth.)

What I learned this go-round: It’s never been harder to get attention, no matter the size of a brand’s paid marketing budget, share of voice, or name recognition. Today, the most likable brands aren’t necessarily the biggest in the world (although that helps), or the most outrageous (although that helps, too). What they have in common is an understanding that, as our culture continues to fragment into oblivion, you can’t be everything to every person. It’s why brands like Alaïa and Mugler, featured heavily here, have a fighting chance against better-funded competitors. You should download the whole thing, but for those of you who aren’t numbers people, here are the core narratives emerging from the data.

Not unlike Taylor Swift, the performer’s popularity has historically been less about what she is wearing and more about what she’s doing. However, in the past few years, as Beyoncé began working more closely with the stylist Shiona Turini, the greatness of the fashion started to match the greatness of the performance. This past summer’s Renaissance Tour, during which every single outfit was documented by multiple media outlets, garnered 10,000 placements altogether that equated to $54 million in Media Impact Value. (Launchmetrics devised the MIV metric—based on the number of posts, tags, likes, comments, etcetera—some 15 years ago to measure the success of a campaign, event, or another piece of brand marketing.) The big brand winner of the tour was Balmain, taking a $14.6 million slice of that overall MIV.

Beyoncé had months of shows to make those outfits stick, but on the other hand, nobody was sending fashion credit alerts on Swift’s stage looks. (Anyway, Swift is more interested in cultivating her black car-to-dinner style at present.) But even bona fide fashion stars don’t always pop on stage if the right place, right time, right person equation doesn’t balance out. Especially if you only get one chance to impress. For instance, the launch of Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty sports-themed collection at the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show only garnered $4 million in MIV, while the news that she was joining Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton as a brand ambassador pulled in $23 million in MIV. In this case, the LV show was bigger than the Super Bowl.

For instance, the engagement on model Barbara Palvin’s wedding posts—she wore a Vivienne Westwood gown—were 54 percent higher than those on her fashion week posts. (Overall, wedding mentions are 81 percent more effective than other posts, according to Launchmetrics. Makes sense, since lots of these people only get married a few times in their lives…) For Vivienne Westwood, Palvin’s post was the social media peak of the year.

That’s why creative director appointments can be so powerful. The Pharrell Williams announcement, for instance, garnered $616,000 worth of MIV on Louis Vuitton’s account alone, and $38 million in total. The second-biggest announcement was Sabato De Sarno at Gucci, followed by Peter Do at Helmut Lang, Future for Lanvin, and Julien Dossena’s guest appearance at Jean Paul Gaultier—which I heard was a huge success for Dossena overall, driving sales to Rabanne, his full-time gig.

Great news for luxury brands: the Chinese consumer is back, at least according to LVMH’s most recent results. [Reuters]

I refuse to engage in the mob-wives-fashion-on-TikTok discourse except for Rachel Tashjian’s interview with The Sopranos’ costume designer. [Washington Post]

For anyone who read Lisa Miller’s piece in New York mag about the cheerleader who went on weight-loss drugs, and thought, whoa, this package of related stories is for you. [Teen Vogue]

I’m into the new Chloé logo. [Instagram]

Chanel is opening a beauty store on the Upper West Side. [I Love the Upper West Side]

Did Kaitlin Phillips get this Perfectly Imperfect profile placed, too? Should I hire her? [New York Times]

Dan, my husband, has a bunch of crazy proprietary data about TikTok Shop. [The New Consumer]

And finally… Remember when people thought marketing was bad?