Hi, welcome to Line Sheet. R.I.P. to Bennifer 2.0. Congrats to Greta Lee and Calvin Klein.

Today, we lead with Rachel Strugatz’s intel-packed piece on what’s happening at Estée Lauder Companies now that C.E.O. Fabrizio Freda announced he will retire in 2025. For months, former and current employees speculated that Freda was on his way out, even as the company kept insisting that he was sticking around. The truth is that Freda had an incredible run and should be proud. It’s also true that it was time for him to go, and let a new group of executives modernize the company. I can’t wait for you to dig into Rachel’s reporting.

Up top, I’ve got the three fashion industry-adjacent things you need to know during this reasonably dead news week, including some info regarding the Arnault family’s recent tech investments (A.I. matters, people), as well as a Condé Nast job posting worth a gander. As always, if you’re interested in sharing Rachel’s agenda-setting work with your colleagues, quit forwarding this email (very rude) and sign up for a group subscription to Puck instead. [email protected] can sort you out.

Mentioned in this issue: Fabrizio Freda, Estée Lauder Companies, Tracey Travis, Kamala Harris’s tan suit, Chloé, Michelle Obama, Monse, Karla Welch, Glamour, Condé Nast, Samantha Barry, Will Welch, Anna Wintour, Cindi Leive, A.I., the Arnaults, and many more…

• The Kamala lookbook: After Vice President Kamala Harris’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, fashion people were eager to interrogate the meaning of her tan suit, designed by Chemena Kamali for Chloé, the brand of the moment that everyone is wearing-slash-buying. As Vanessa Friedman hypothesized in The New York Times, wearing tan was a nod to Barack Obama’s much-discussed, at once celebrated and maligned, tan suit, worn exactly 10 years ago at a press conference.

  If her communications strategy is any indication, Harris has a sense of humor, and enjoys a gentle troll. However, I’m more interested in her brand choices, and what they mean about her overall approach to dressing. As Vogue’s José Criales-Unzueta pointed out on Instagram recently, she favors European brands, which was unheard of for a female political figure prior to Michelle Obama, who wore a deconstructed navy suit from American label Monse for her speech on Tuesday night. (For what it’s worth, Trump wore Italian-made Brioni’s suits for a long time; not sure if that’s still the case.) Harris is fashion literate—she’s worked with the stylist Karla Welch, and regularly wears Irene Neuwirth jewelry. If you are interested in her style, I suggest reading this 2020 take from The Wall Street Journal’s Rory Satran.

  I’d infer that Harris’s priority is ensuring that her clothes fit properly. Unlike most politicians, male or female, she looks comfortable, which requires a good tailor, and body confidence. The ease of wear actually makes the clothes less noticeable, which is a good thing. We should not be leading with commentary on Harris’s outfits, and her deft approach to dressing is making that easier. As an industry-adjacent friend texted me the other day, “For once, nobody is talking about what a woman is wearing, and that’s great.”

• Glamour… still exists: It was recently brought to my attention that Condé Nast is hiring a “global editorial director” for Glamour, along the lines of Will Welch’s GQ gig. My understanding is that this job sits above Samantha Barry, the current editor-in-chief of the U.S. edition. Perhaps Barry—well-liked in the building, among her staff, and with her many celebrity friends—is being promoted and posting the position is just a formality. But it’s very strange that the company would post a role rather than just promote an existing candidate, regardless of proper H.R. protocols. Also, given the gestalt of modern Condé Nast, it’s also strange that the company would hire a second leader for a brand in significant decline. There were also two separate job listings — one for London and one for New York, indicating that the post could sit in either office.

  There are a number of ways to rationalize this: It widens the candidate pool. And sure, maybe Condé Nast is correctly pivoting to foreign markets and territories to fully monetize the value of its brands. But both Welch and Anna Wintour hold their global titles from their offices within One World Trade. And while most Condé gawkers focus on the brand decline of Vanity Fair from Graydon Carter to Radhika Jones as their preferred metric of choice, Glamour’s descent from Cindi Leive to Barry is far steeper: the print magazine is a memory and Women of the Year, which once filled Carnegie Hall, is unrecognizable.

  In the Bill Wackermann era, Glamour made $300 million-ish a year in the U.S. Maybe the brand brings in 15 percent of that now. In fact, it still amazes me that Glamour—once the company’s margin driver, decimated by social media, publishing’s equivalent to fast fashion—is still ticking. Never has a concept felt more irrelevant. However, I know that people in the building are pulling for Barry to run the whole thing. If that’s Anna and Roger Lynch’s intention, posting the job in this manner is a weird way to show it.

• The Arnaults are A.I.-curious: CNBC’s Robert Frank, who’s been writing about rich people longer than I’ve been alive (j.k., but for a long time) recently looked into the Arnaults’ investments in A.I. The family’s tech-focused, early stage venture capital firm, Aglaé Ventures, has invested more than $300 million into A.I. startups, according to data sourced from the family office database Fintrx. The portfolio includes H, the “full artificial intelligence” firm founded by some ex-Googlers and backed by Eric Schmidt, but also Lamini, Proxima, and Borderless AI. (Fun fact: the Arnaults were early stage investors in Netflix, Spotify, and Airbnb.)

  Yes, the richest families have their money managed by the smartest investors, wealth managers, and institutions on earth, and the power of their capital affords them privileged access to great deals. (The Newhouses, after all, just enjoyed a $1.4 billion windfall from an early investment in Reddit. And don’t cry for former Condé Nast C.E.O. Bob Sauerberg—after the family fired him from the company, they offered him the company’s lead board seat, and he’s now sitting on tens of millions in newly acquired wealth.) So, yes, the rich know how to get richer, and these investments, for the most part, have little to do with Arnault’s core business… which is sort of the point, and at least for now. A.I. is changing how everything works, including fashion, and that’s a fact, not a theory.

That’s a lot of executive turnover for a company whose board has long insisted, as recently as June, that Freda wasn’t going anywhere. A person close to the situation told me that Fabrizio “made the decision to announce his retirement and then informed the board.” But reading between the lines of the curiously-worded announcement from Lauder, it sure sounds like Freda capitulated to the board, and not the other way around.

The timing of Freda’s exit came as a genuine shock inside the company. “It was much earlier than the company seemed to indicate just a few months ago, and that was a surprise,” a person with ties to senior leadership told me. “No one knew it was coming,” said the source close to the family. According to an Estée insider, the timeline might have been different had the company not been forced to lower its forecasts. “They had no choice but to do it before the earnings in order to keep confidence that they were making changes,” this person said, referring to Monday’s dismal quarterly call, when Lauder reported that net sales had dipped 2 percent from the previous year; that skin care and makeup revenues declined by 3 percent and 1 percent, respectively; and warned that China and travel retail continue to pose serious challenges to its business.

Of course, there was never any doubt that Freda would be leaving, at some point soon. This was the last official year of Freda’s current incentive package with the company, where he needed to remain C.E.O. until June 30, the end of Lauder’s fiscal 2024, to make his numbers. “At any other company, Fabrizio would have been gone by now,” a Lauder executive told me back in July. Four weeks later, he was on his way.

Current senior employees are also saying that succession planning in the near term could be centered around a dual-C.E.O. strategy, starring Jane Lauder and Stéphane De La Faverie, an executive group president, which presents an interesting opportunity for the executives to prove themselves. “The thought is to have a person representing the family and a person who is thought to have more of Fabrizio’s thinking,” said a person with ties to the company, who called a dual-C.E.O. path a compromise­­––and a test. Already, Jane and de La Faverie are working together closely. Tracey Travis’s internal memo from July, detailing the “Profit Recovery and Growth Plan,” said that the initiative would be led by Jane and de la Faverie.

Whoever claims the title, Estée Lauder Companies has a serious retail problem in North America and China, which partly explains why Loomis and Jueptner—the heads of those regions, respectively—are stepping away. (It’s also the true, as a person familiar with their rumored departures noted, that the two are “very long tenured execs all within retirement age.”) Loomis, who had been with the company for nearly three decades, may not be replaced, as ELC considers restructuring how the North America group and other regions ladder up to a broader global strategy. Currently, a central division runs the brands’ North American businesses rather than the brands, themselves, which has created headaches across the org, even if it isn’t an abnormal structure. More details are expected to take shape through the end of the year.

I’ve also heard there are internal discussions to elevate Tara Simon, the beloved global brand president of ELC’s two West Coast brands (Too Faced and Smashbox), as well as Michelle Freyre, the global brand president of Clinique and Origins. Even if there’s no centralized head of North America, Lauder does need somebody in charge of the commercial relationships in the region, and no one is perhaps better for such a role than Simon, who has worked at both Sephora and Ulta Beauty. Another insider suggested that de la Faverie would make a good chief growth officer, if he doesn’t score the co-C.E.O. gig, and I tend to agree.

Anyway, I tried the mask at the suggestion of Hillary Kerr, whose (also-thick) hair has a very different texture from mine, and yet I was blown away. My hair never, ever feels soft and now it does. Even more proof: Rachel is also a paying customer, and recently bought the “AIR” thickening spray as well. Congrats to Roszak for making a product that actually works.

Until tomorrow,
Lauren